Day: May 20, 2020

A friend of mine, another journalist, texts me every few days with the latest coronavirus case and death counts from Singapore. On Monday: “Singapore is now at 28k cases and 22 deaths.” I checked the Johns Hopkins dashboard on Wednesday morning to confirm: 29,364 confirmed Covid-19 cases and still just 22 deaths.

All of us are amateur epidemiologists now, and my friend’s fascination with Singapore is all about the country’s remarkably low case fatality rate. Based on those numbers, just 0.07 percent of people in Singapore who contracted the coronavirus have died from it. Compare that to the …

In winning the Oregon GOP primary for the US Senate Tuesday, Jo Rae Perkins became the seventh Republican congressional candidate who openly supports QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that maintains the president is secretly fighting “deep state” operatives and Democratic pedophiles.

Perkins won a four-way race for the party’s Senate nomination, earning just short of 50 percent of the vote. Former naval officer Paul Romero finished second with 30 percent. Perkins will face off with incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in the general election on November 3, which Merkley is expected to win.

Nevertheless, her victory — which came …

The anti-lockdown protests that have garnered so much attention in the United States in recent weeks may seem like a uniquely American phenomenon. Wired’s Emma Grey Ellis called them an “American mess,” describing them as “a modern permutation of an identity crisis with roots very deep in America’s individualist history.”

The protests have been compared to other American political movements, from Trump rallies to the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, which took its own name from the 1773 Boston Tea Party, a seminal event in US history that helped spark the American Revolution and came to symbolize …

President Trump sent two tweets Wednesday morning threatening financial retaliation against states that are trying to make it easier to cast a ballot during the coronavirus pandemic, saying he will “hold up” funds for two swing states encouraging people to vote absentee:

In a back room at his home in Santa Cruz, California, George Leonard is amassing a stockpile of plastic bags.

Most of the time he eschews the things. As chief scientist at Ocean Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit based in Washington, DC, Leonard spends his time advocating against single-use plastics that can clog up waterways, suffocate wildlife, and take centuries to decompose in landfills.

But that was in the Before Times. Since the Covid-19 pandemic upended life across the globe, ravaging economies and bringing entire health care systems to their knees, everyone is being forced to compromise. Retailers are banning …