Day: May 15, 2020

The US House of Representatives on Friday passed a historic resolution to temporarily allow remote voting during the coronavirus pandemic.

The resolution, introduced by House Rules Committee Chair Jim McGovern (D-MA), allows for voting by proxy on the House floor, as well as for remote committee hearings and bill markups. The resolution also provides for future remote voting during the pandemic using technology, “after a system is developed and certified.”

It’s the first time in centuries that the House has changed the part of its rules stipulating that “every Member shall be present within the Hall of the House …

Along with everything else, the coronavirus has upended pop culture: Movie theaters are closed, concerts and other live events are canceled or postponed, TV production is all but shut down. But the powers of the internet and digital media prevail! Whether old or new, there are still plenty of movies and TV shows and TikToks to watch, games to play, songs to listen to, and books to read.

Here at Vox Culture, we’ve been working hard to recommend all kinds of entertainment that might help you during your time spent at home. And in the process, we’ve been consuming …

A basic tenet of immunology is that we are all safer if we are all safe. That should be a basic tenet for politics as well. And yet, our empathy too often runs up against border walls and dies out.

Migrants are decidedly not to blame for the pandemic. To blame are international travel, the interconnectedness of global capital, grossly ill-equipped national health systems, and leisure tourism. As the United States continues its immigration detention and deportation programs, we can now add anti-immigration policies to that list.

Foisting culpability for disease and contagion on migrants and asylum seekers remains a …

How long will public health and the US economy be widely threatened by Covid-19? We don’t know. Without a vaccine, experts say, it’s likely to be years.

The future is murky for a lot of reasons. Namely: So much depends on human actions, both individual and collective, that are simply hard to predict and model long-term.

But scientists hope to soon answer one basic question about the virus and how it interacts with the human body, to predict when the pandemic will end: How long does immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, last after an infection?

If …

North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr will step down from his role as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee effective Friday, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

His resignation came after the FBI served a search warrant at Burr’s Washington, DC, home Wednesday night in a probe of whether several stock trades he made after being briefed on the early outbreak of the coronavirus broke the law. Federal agents seized a cellphone belonging to Burr after serving the warrant, a law enforcement official told the LA Times.

It’s a significant escalation in the investigation of the Senate Intelligence Committee …

No, Jeff Bezos is not about to become a trillionaire.

A new swell of outrage headed toward the world’s richest man on Thursday when a few news outlets re-aggregated a months-old, flimsy projection from a “small business advice platform.” By midday, leading progressives like Elizabeth Warren were tweeting that Bezos “is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire in the middle of a pandemic.”

The dust-up — as untethered from reality as it may be — was a reminder of just how angry many on the left are are about the tech elite’s wealth, and how much Bezos has …