Recess Is Over | Locked For The Tok | Malaysian Mutation
August 18, 2020
The Good News
- What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought? (NYT, $). Some of the world’s big cities may be the first to find out.
- A silver lining out of Beirut: Egypt disposing of dangerous materials at ports, minister says
“Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.”
The House Returns, Posthaste
(Stefani Reynolds via Getty Images)
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) has called House members back into session to vote on legislation intended to prohibit the US Postal Service from introducing any changes to the service or operations it provided at the beginning of this year.
In a letter released Sunday, Pelosi criticized President Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, for plans she said would “degrade postal service, delay the mail, and – according to the Postal Service itself – threaten to deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion.” Pelosi joined other Democrats in calling on DeJoy and another senior USPS official to testify at an “urgent” hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on August 24. “Lives, livelihoods and the life of our American Democracy are under threat from the president,” the speaker said.
On Monday, mail-in voters from six states filed suit in a Manhattan federal court against President Trump and DeJoy. The suit asks the court to order the administration to take “all steps necessary and sufficient to ensure that the U.S.P.S. is adequately funded” and ensure “absentee and other mail ballots are treated equal to in-person ballots” and fund “sufficient staffing and overtime to handle a record level of mail voting.” A coalition of state attorneys general are also exploring legal action against the cutbacks and changes made by DeJoy at the Postal Service.
Without evidence, Trump has repeatedly castigated mail-in ballots as being rife with fraud; he’s also said that if universal voting by mail was allowed, Republicans would never be elected. Trump admitted recently he opposes critical additional funding for the USPS because it could be used to facilitate mail-in voting.
DeJoy is a past Republican party fundraiser and a Trump mega-donor. He was announced as the new postmaster by the USPS Board of Governors last May despite concerns about conflicts of interest, which include his multimillion-dollar equity stakes in Postal Service rivals like UPS and J.B. Hunt. He is also the first individual in decades to be selected as postmaster without prior Postal Service experience. Once in office, DeJoy banned overtime and extra trips to deliver mail, had more than 600 high-speed sorting machines dismantled and removed from postal facilities, and had mail collection boxes removed from streets in many cities. He also reassigned or displaced 23 senior USPS officials, including the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations.
A Malaysian Mutation
- Southeast Asia is facing an uptick in cases with a mutated strain of COVID-19 — called D614G. The strain has popped up in other parts of the world and has become the predominant variant in Europe and the US; it has also been detected in recent outbreaks in China.
- The mutated strain was found most recently in a Malaysian cluster of 45 cases that can be traced back to someone who returned from India and breached his 14-day home quarantine. The man, who had tested negative upon arriving in Malaysia, has since been sentenced to five months in prison and fined for the quarantine breach.
- The Philippines has the region’s largest outbreak of coronavirus, with cases surging 76 percent since the end of July to almost 165,000 cases as of Monday. Scientists there are studying D614G to see if the mutation makes the virus more infectious. The country’s undersecretary of health said the mutation supposedly has “a higher possibility of transmission or infectiousness,” but more solid evidence is needed to say for sure.
- A Malaysian health official warned the strain could mean existing studies on vaccines may be incomplete or ineffective against the mutation, although other health experts doubt it would have a major impact on the efficacy of vaccines currently being developed. (Boston Globe)
Locked For the Tok
- A 22-year-old university student and social media influencer in Egypt was arrested in May after publishing videos on TikTok and Instagram where she lip-synced to famous songs and danced in fashionable clothes. The prosecutor found her videos indecent, and last month she received a two-year prison sentence and a fine of $20,000 for violating Egyptian family values.
- Mawada al-Adham has more than three million followers on TikTok, and 1.6 million on Instagram. She is one of five young women, known as the “TikTok girls,” who were given the same prison sentence and fine. Amnesty International said prosecutors used 17 photos of Mawada against her as evidence of “indecency.” Mawada said the images had been leaked from her phone after it was stolen last year.
- Mawada’s older sister said her younger sibling was not a criminal, and that “she only wanted to be famous and popular.” Human rights groups see the girls’ arrests as a further attempt by Egyptian authorities to restrict freedom of expression, a sign of what Amnesty called “new repressive tactics to control cyberspace.” Campaigners say there are tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt, including liberals, Islamists, journalists, and human rights lawyers, while President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi insists there are no prisoners of conscience in his country.
- The executive director of a Cairo-based human rights organization says the case shows clear signs of gender discrimination. “Women are only allowed to express themselves on social media according to the state’s dictations,” he said. “The girls are accused of breaching Egyptian family values, but no one has ever defined these values.” (BBC)
Additional World News
- The US keeps breaking all the wrong world records: ‘Highest temperature on Earth’ as Death Valley, US hits 54.4C (BBC)
- Science has a new tool in the fight against climate change: good data (Wired)
- Short-lived celebration: Trump’s UAE-Israel deal was followed by a defeat on Iran at the United Nations (WaPo, $)
- Iran reportedly paid bounties to Afghan group for attacks on Americans (Guardian)
- ‘I’m not a saint’: Lukashenko offers to hand over power after referendum (Reuters). Eastern Europe prepares for a seismic shift in power.
- Juan Carlos, Spain’s Former King, Is in the UAE (NYT, $). The monarch has fled his home country amid an investigation of his offshore bank accounts.
- Former CIA officer arrested and charged with spying for China (Reuters)
- UK Backs Down in A-Level Testing Debacle Tied to Coronavirus (NYT, $)
- Underreported gender violence: Women Are Being Killed With Impunity in Mexico (Vice)
- Human rights groups want to end the use of forced Uighur labor in supply chains of major clothing brands (Vox)
- Black Lives Matter and the Global Fight Against Racism (Foreign Affairs). America’s racial reckoning goes beyond its own borders.
COVID-19
- What we’ve learned in treating the virus: How COVID-19 patients benefit from prone position, dexamethasone and remdesivir (Vox)
- Will the Pandemic Change People Like the Great Depression Did? (Atlantic, $). It feels like life may never be the same.
- CDC Study Finds Hispanics Hit Disproportionately Hard By Workplace Outbreaks (NPR)
- I downloaded America’s first coronavirus exposure app. You should too. (WaPo, $).
- Southern safe haven: Is There Coronavirus in Antarctica, and How Has It Affected the Continent? (Nautilus)
- UNC-Chapel Hill reverses plans for in-person classes after 130 students test positive for COVID-19 (CNN). Who could’ve seen this coming?
Blue Lives, Red Tape
(Tim Drivias via Getty Images)
- Of the hundreds of films about the New York City police department (NYPD), Serpico, a 1973 neo-noir biographical crime film about an honest cop who goes undercover and eventually dies in order to expose corruption in the police force, stands alone at the top. Penetrating the protective fortress around the NYPD would take an act of Congress, and even then it might not work.
- The NYPD is the most powerful department in the nation’s largest city. With a $6 billion budget, 36,000 officers, a formidable union, and a direct line to the mayor, the NYPD has long wielded its clout to fend off scrutiny. On paper, the NYPD has more oversight than any police department in the country. It has an inspector general devoted to the police, court-mandated body cameras (with a federal monitor), and the largest civilian oversight agency of the police in the country: New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), with more than 200 staffers.
- The CCRB is charged with investigating civilians’ complaints of police misconduct, and the NYPD is legally obligated to cooperate with its investigations. Regardless, the NYPD withholds significant evidence and undermines investigations of alleged abuse. It refuses to turn over to investigators a wide variety of paper records, and redacts the names of potential witnesses from others. Crucial documents like warrants, arrest records, listings of who was in station house cells — key for finding witnesses — and even officer injury reports are either withheld or heavily redacted.
- The NYPD often fails to produce body-worn camera footage, and officers are even allowed to refuse an interview. The more egregious the case — where a civilian has died or been seriously injured — the more difficult it is for the CCRB to obtain any cooperation. The police do their own investigations on those cases. The CCRB is only able to substantiate a small fraction of the cases it receives.
- Out of 3,000 allegations of misuse of force looked into in 2018, only 73 could be substantiated. The CCRB has subpoena power and could sue the NYPD, but it’s never been done. The agency is effectively under the control of the mayor, who historically has chosen the CCRB’s leaders. As a former agency chair said: “If the mayor isn’t going to back it, it’s a completely meaningless entity.” (ProPublica)
Big Money Bets On Biden
- Wall Street may finally be getting tired of Trump. Of nearly the $800 million donated to politicians by securities firms, banks, real estate companies, and their employees by June 30, more than half went to Democrats. This hasn’t happened in over a decade.
- While Wall Street went big for Barack Obama in 2008, it switched back to the GOP following the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill and has been reliably Republican ever since. And even though the stock market has hit record marks, a lot of people who work in finance appear to have soured on the president’s management style.
- “People are just exhausted. It’s hard to make medium-to-long-term capital allocation decisions because you never know what his White House is going to do,” said the chairman of an independent advisory firm. Trump still has friends in finance, like private equity’s billionaire CEO of Blackstone Group. But even Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer is giving a lot less to the party this year.
- One hedge fund founder says he’s wary of Democrats and has no particular affection for Biden. But the former vice president is a known commodity on Wall Street and is widely seen as a more centrist, acceptable alternative to more liberal Democrats who ran for president. Biden has also been a top recipient of financial industry money for decades as a senator from Delaware, home to financial and credit card companies.
- “He’s not somebody that the industry is particularly afraid of,” said the research director at the Center for Responsive Politics. “So I think that we would see them kind of hopeful that he would be a more moderating influence, whereas Trump can be quite unpredictable.” (NPR)
Additional USA News
- All the Republicans Who Have Decided Not to Support Trump (NYT, $). Former GOP stars turn their back on what their party has become.
- Bill Clinton and Democrats’ convention lineup of nostalgia (Vox)
- Computer campaign: Democrats’ Virtual Campaign Gamble Is Getting Its First Big Test In Wisconsin (Vice)
- Trump finalizes drilling plan for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (WaPo, $)
- U.S. policy of expelling migrant children without an asylum interview challenged in class-action lawsuit (CBS)
- A Private Security Company Is Detaining Migrant Children at Hotels (NYT, $). And it’s not in Trump Tower…
- The Militias Against Masks (New Yorker, $)
- Searching for answers: As the pandemic endures, mayors across the country call for guaranteed income (NBC)
- ‘The Devastation Is Widespread.’ Iowans Continue To Struggle Following Deadly Derecho (NPR)
- Trump, Democrat Stimulus Stalemate Leaves Economy Limping (Bloomberg)
Searching For Flying Saucers
- Bob Lazar became notorious in the 1980s when he claimed he had been hired to reverse-engineer one of nine flying saucers with purported extraterrestrial origins at a secret site called “S-4,” a subsidiary installation located several miles south of the US Air Force facility known as Area 51.
- Ridiculed for decades as an unhinged conspiracy theorist, Lazar explained himself in a thought-provoking 2018 Netflix documentary called “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers.” Whatever one thinks about Lazar’s contentions, it’s worth noting that the Pentagon has just established a new high-level body — The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force — to investigate reports of multiple incidents of UFOs intruding into military airspace.
- The new high-level attention was heralded by Lue Elizondo, who was involved in a previous Pentagon UFO research program known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Intelligence Program (AATIP), that was wound down in 2012. Elizondo resigned in 2017 in part over frustration that senior Pentagon officials were not taking a series of unexplained encounters seriously enough, including those experienced by pilots flying off the aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt in 2004 and 2015, who reported unknown aircraft maneuvering in ways that appeared to defy aerodynamics.
- “This is precisely the intended result of what we were trying to achieve under AATIP,” Elizondo said following the announcement. Elizondo believes the combination of a steady stream of new unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) reports in recent months and the pressure from Congress has compelled military leadership to be more aggressive about an issue that historically has carried a significant stigma but is now far more mainstream.
- “They can’t ignore it anymore,” he said. “They are looking like they are hiding something from the American people. Not taking this more seriously is now a liability.” (Politico)
Additional Reads
- Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs (Guardian)
- Masking our insecurities: Coronavirus masks have an unintended effect on socially anxious people (Inverse)
- The troubling ways heatwaves warp our minds (BBC). How will this affect humans as we continue to deal with climate change?
- What pro wrestling can teach us about the quest for truth (Aeon)
- Berlin brothels reopen after lockdown, but no sex allowed (France24). Doesn’t that defeat the point?
- North Korea Makes A Push To Reach Foreign Audiences On YouTube And Twitter (NPR)
- The world’s last Blockbuster is now open for slumber parties (Verge)
- How Life Could Continue to Evolve (Nautilus)