While mask-wearing has becoming a political football during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s beginning to shift in important ways: The state of Alabama mandated face coverings for anyone leaving the house, and Walmart said all shoppers must mask up for safety reasons. Recent research has further supported the importance of masks in fighting COVID-19’s spread. Meanwhile, pandemic expert Dr. Anthony Fauci responded to several recent attacks on his credibility from White House aides, suggesting that everyone focus on the health crisis, which has killed more than 134,000 Americans and shows no sign of slowing.
As polls show President Donald Trump losing ground to Democratic challenger Joe Biden, he’s responded with a move straight from the reality TV playbook: ditching his campaign manager. Brad Parscale, who took the blame for June’s half-capacity Tulsa rally, managed digital advertising for Trump’s 2016 run before taking the helm in 2018. He’ll stay with the president’s reelection team as a senior adviser. Meanwhile, Trump and Biden laid out competing climate policies this week as Trump vowed to roll back environmental rules to boost infrastructure projects and Biden outlined a $2 trillion plan to create millions of clean-energy jobs.
The U.S. economy is skidding, and yet Wall Street has a healthy glow. So it makes sense that stock indexes in China, which has fended off the coronavirus and is restarting its economy, posted drops of up to 6 percent today. Despite healthy GDP growth of 3.2 percent, stocks saw the biggest decline in five months, with investors spooked by monetary policy tightening, analysts said. It probably doesn’t help that Washington is mulling travel bans for millions of Communist Party members, or that Taiwan’s conducting live-fire military drills, but in today’s upside-down financial world, who’s to say?
Could it be that social media changed an opinion? Using the Farsi equivalent of the hashtag #do_not_execute, Iranians, including celebrities, flooded Twitter with 4.5 million retweets, along with posts on Instagram and Telegram, asking authorities to spare the lives of protesters Amirhossein Moradi, 25, Mohammad Rajabi, 25, and Saeed Tamjidi, 27. On Wednesday, judicial authorities ordered a retrial for the men, condemned Tuesday for “emnity against God.” It’s a small victory, though, as the same day, two Kurdish men were executed, and a journalist faces the death penalty.
The Supreme Court says liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is back home and “doing well” after being hospitalized for a possible infection. New police body cam footage has emerged from the killing of George Floyd. And a statue of a Black Lives Matter protester that was erected Wednesday, replacing one of slave trader Edward Colston, has been removed by city officials in Bristol, England.
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Westerners may think developing nations are a mess, wondering how they could possibly handle the coronavirus. As it turns out, some countries — like Kenya — are keeping schools closed until January, showing restraint that could be an example for wealthier nations like the U.S., OZY argues. Florida is reopening theme parks just as its daily cases are hitting an average of 10,000, while Bangalore, with proportionally lower cases, is locking down again. From Stockholm to Singapore, there are dozens of examples of less fortunate nations illustrating that in a crisis, cooler heads aren’t always the richest.
If you don’t know who Max Schrems is, listen up: The privacy activist challenged Facebook’s global data transfers … and won. Today the European Union’s top court ruled that the social network and countless companies are illegally transferring data across international borders, voiding that legalese users automatically click “yes” to so they can link to their BFFs without delay. Though details aren’t yet available, one thing is clear. Schrems, who got the European Court of Justice to invalidate Europe’s previous data law in 2015, just disrupted how thousands of companies do business.
Scientists have always differentiated extreme events from general warming trends. Not now. Not in Siberia, one of the Earth’s coldest places, where temperatures have soared 14 degrees F above normal for six months, hitting 100 degrees this weekend where it normally doesn’t exceed 68. On Wednesday, scientists from six nations said it was “effectively impossible” that the recent weather, which has thawed permafrost and stoked wildfires, wasn’t related to climate change. They calculated that greenhouse gases released by human activity made Siberia’s heat 600 times more likely — and the rest of the planet should expect more of the same.
The mask has fallen. Performer Nick Cannon, fired Tuesday by ViacomCBS for anti-Semitic comments made during an episode of his podcast Cannon’s Class, is now trying to retain the rights to his show, Wild ‘N Out. Cannon apologized to “my Jewish sisters and brothers” after losing his job, but also demanded “full ownership” of the Wild ‘N Out brand, saying he’d reached out to ViacomCBS leadership (a claim the company disputes) and that “they wanted to put the young negro in his place.” Nevertheless, following his apology, Fox said Cannon would remain with The Masked Singer.
They’ve put a stop to lots of pastimes, but in Germany, they went too far. As restrictions are lifted, the nation remains outraged by a naked swimming ban, as, for nudist council member Thomas Held, “there are so many more important things.” For journalist Rick Noack, it marks a return to daily preoccupations following the federal republic flattening the curve. For Held, baring one’s assets in the face of governmental stricture is “about freedom,” while experts say such frivolous disputes are comforting, familiar territory amid unfathomable global crises.
El gobernador McKee presenta una enmienda presupuestaria de $1,3 millones para apoyar a las empresas afectadas por el puente de Washington PROVIDENCE,...
30,000 in RI Applied for 2,500 Charter School Seats Tens of thousands of students are seeking to attend Rhode Island’s public charter schools. There...
