Day: April 14, 2020

If any country should’ve been able to handle a coronavirus outbreak, you’d think it would have been France. One of Europe’s most powerful countries, France has a world-renowned health care system, immense wealth, ample social welfare, a centralized government, and a strong presidency.

Yet the country currently has the fourth-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases and third-most deaths in the world. The country’s health care system is consistently ranked among the best in the world, yet France has experienced shortages of hospital beds, masks, and other critical products. As the number of confirmed cases and deaths continues to …

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, thinks the coronavirus pandemic should teach Americans to be “a little bit grateful” for powerful tech companies — and angry at their government.

One of the country’s richest people, Schmidt made his most extensive comments about the pandemic to date on Tuesday, criticizing Washington’s response to the crisis as so ham-handed that it “cost us lives.” To the contrary, Schmidt argued, private companies like Amazon have stepped up as leaders, which Schmidt suggested should soften our criticism of tech giants more broadly.

“Think about what your life would be like in America without …

Amazon fired three of its employees over the last few days who criticized the company’s handling of warehouse worker safety during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

The company terminated the jobs of Bashir Mohamed, a warehouse worker at an Amazon facility in Minnesota, as well as corporate employees Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, last week. Mohamed told BuzzFeed News he believes he was fired for his activist role; Cunningham and Costa told the Washington Post they believe they were targeted for similar reasons.

In statements to Recode, Amazon said it supports employees’ right to criticize their employer but that Mohamed …

Bill Gates saw this coming.

“I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic, in my lifetime, as well over 50 percent,” he told Ezra Klein in 2015. “Something like the Spanish flu in the modern day — health systems are far better, so you think, okay, that wouldn’t be very bad. What we showed [when infectious disease researchers working with the Gates Foundation modeled the scenario] was that the force of the infection, because of modern transport … within days, it’s basically in all urban centers of the entire globe.”

The world’s second–richest man (he recently lost …

On the one month anniversary of President Donald Trump proclaiming “I don’t take responsibility at all” for problems with the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the president on Monday melted down on national TV in one of his more memorable scenes during the daily White House coronavirus press briefing. He went on to claim his “authority is total” as president.

The impetus for Trump’s spiral is a New York Times report published on Saturday under the headline, “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus.” The piece details how Trump “was warned …

Liberal challenger Jill Karofsky has won a 10-year term to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating Trump-backed conservative incumbent Dan Kelly, according to our partners at DecisionDesk. As of Monday evening, Karofsky had raked in roughly 53 percent of the vote to Kelly’s 47 percent, when the race was called.

The competition for the state’s Supreme Court seat was among the most closely watched of the races that took place during a tumultuous Wisconsin primary last week. The court will still have a conservative majority, but it’s now narrowed to a 4-3 split.

This race was significant both because of …