We may never know where the virus came from. But evidence still suggests nature.

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Labs like the one in Wuhan are essential to preparing for future pandemics

From the moment the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China, scientists and the broader public have sought answers to some fundamental questions: Where did this virus come from? How did the pandemic start? From the early days, experts have considered two possibilities. Either the virus somehow escaped from a laboratory, perhaps the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or, like countless viruses throughout history, it arrived through zoonotic spillover, jumping from animals to humans.

More than a year later, we still don’t know exactly what happened. Though governments and news organizations have focused more attention recently on the notion that the virus leaked from a lab, it’s unclear that we’ll ever identify a theory that satisfies everyone as to how SARS-CoV-2 emerged. Ironically, given the recent prominence of the lab escape theory, the questions the world wants answered about the virus — and the astonishingly fast development of the vaccines that can quash the pandemic — depend entirely on research conducted in labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology and across the world over the past several decades. This fundamental research underpins our ability to prepare for and respond to pandemics. We need to know what’s out there and what kind of viral threats we face. The only way to do that is to go where the viruses are, with our colleagues who are already there.

More than a year later, we still don’t know exactly what happened. Though governments and news organizations have focused more attention recently on the notion that the virus leaked from a lab, it’s unclear that we’ll ever identify a theory that satisfies everyone as to how SARS-CoV-2 emerged. Ironically, given the recent prominence of the lab escape theory, the questions the world wants answered about the virus — and the astonishingly fast development of the vaccines that can quash the pandemic — depend entirely on research conducted in labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology and across the world over the past several decades. This fundamental research underpins our ability to prepare for and respond to pandemics. We need to know what’s out there and what kind of viral threats we face. The only way to do that is to go where the viruses are, with our colleagues who are already there. Continue reading.

As Job Growth Doubles, Republicans Insist Biden ‘Failed’

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House Republicans spent Friday morning attacking President Joe Biden over the latest jobs numbers, suggesting the figures, which were slightly lower than predicted, constituted a failure.

The U.S. economy in fact added 559,000 jobs in May — more than double the number added the month before. The improving employment data comes as new unemployment claims have dropped to new pandemic lows in recent weeks, in the wake of Biden’s American Rescue Plan and a successful COVID-19 vaccination drive.

Though the new job totals were slightly below the economists’ predictions of around 650,000 new jobs, the unemployment rate dropped to 5.8 percent — better than those same economists’ 5.9 percent expectation. Continue reading.

Manchin to vote against election overhaul bill

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Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he will vote against a sweeping bill to overhaul elections, dubbed the For the People Act, putting the fate of the legislation in jeopardy in the evenly split Senate.

In an op-ed published early Sunday morning in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin, one of the Senate Democratic Conference’s most conservative members, zeroed in on the partisan nature of the legislation, which has not attracted any Republican support.

“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening blinds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act,” Manchin wrote. Continue reading.

In the Know: June 7, 2021

DFL In the Know Graphic


Attorney General Keith Ellison
At Issue: June 6 — One-on-one with AG Ellison; Minnesota government shutdown looming, KSTP

Governor Tim Walz
Minnesota leaders racing to avoid expensive shutdown, Star Tribune
Special session set for next week, KTOE
Gov. Tim Walz stops at Mayo Field to highlight COVID-19 vaccine incentives, Rochester Post Bulletin

Minnesota Legislature
Soil health proposals garner mixed support in Legislature, Brainerd Dispatch

Continue reading “In the Know: June 7, 2021”

Why America failed to control the pandemic

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In “The Plague Year,” Lawrence Wright explores the missed opportunities and biggest mistakes.

It’s hard to read Lawrence Wright’s “The Plague Year,” his nonfiction account of how American scientists, doctors, politicians and citizens struggled to confront the coronavirus pandemic, and not think of his April 2020 novel, “The End of October,” which covers, well, much the same thing. In that fictional tale of a deadly virus spreading throughout the globe, the White House oscillates between confusion and indifference, conspiracy theories abound, health officials battle for influence, and economies melt down while self-styled patriots resist lockdowns. Oh, and a hapless president refuses to take responsibility and outsources management of the emergency to the former talk radio host turned vice president — like that would ever happen.

But as I worked my way through “The Plague Year,” an older book of Wright’s came to mind more often: “The Looming Tower,” a masterful journey down the roads that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. There, too, a gathering menace was ignored, experts were sidelined, and action was deferred until an unfathomable calamity was upon us. “The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was that no one took it seriously,” Wright wrote in that 2006 book. “It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” It was a peril that seemed unthinkable, “up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageantry of history.”

“The Plague Year” does not reach the heights of “The Looming Tower” — few books do — but a global pandemic is an even deadlier threat in that savage pageantry of history, one for which the United States could have been far better prepared. Wright’s new book is most effective at detailing the missed opportunities to keep things from going so wrong. “Tens of thousands of people were bound to perish,” he writes. “But perhaps not hundreds of thousands.” This is the story of how we got that extra zero. Continue reading.

White House Disavows Knowledge of Gag Order on Times Leaders in Leak Inquiry

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The Justice Department also said it was changing its policy to bar seizing reporters’ phone and email records in hunts for their sources.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said on Saturday that no one at the White House had been aware that the Justice Department was seeking to seize the email data of four New York Times reporters and had obtained a gag order in March barring a handful of newspaper executives who knew about the fight from discussing it.

The disavowal came one day after a court lifted the gag order, which permitted a Times lawyer to disclose the department’s effort to obtain email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system. It had begun in the last days of the Trump administration and continued until Wednesday, when the Biden Justice Department asked a judge to quash the matter without having obtained the data about who had been in contact with the reporters.

“As appropriate given the independence of the Justice Department in specific criminal cases, no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night,” Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. Continue reading.

Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims

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Emails show the increasingly urgent efforts by President Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results.

WASHINGTON — In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.

In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate. Continue reading.

Veterans group official resigns over censored Memorial Day speech that highlighted Black history

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The head of an American Legion post in Ohio stepped down after he cut a veteran’s microphone during a speech Monday referencing how Black people organized the earliest Memorial Day commemoration on record, according to the veterans group.

Jim Garrison resigned after he was asked by Legion officials, the American Legion Department of Ohio said in a statement Friday. The veterans group said Garrison and Cindy Suchan, chair of the Memorial Day parade committee and president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, decided to “censor” retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter in a “premeditated” move. Kemter shared his Memorial Day speech in advance with Suchan, who asked him to remove a part of his speech, and he didn’t, according to the department.

“They knew exactly when to turn the volume down and when to turn it back up,” the statement said. Continue reading.

Republicans want to change state election laws. Here’s how they’re doing it.

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Comparing the proposed law in Texas to the one that passed in Georgia reveals five key areas targeted since former President Trump’s defeat.

Passing new election laws has been one of the top priorities for Republican state legislators in 2021 — and they are working from similar playbooks to tighten or restrict the old policies even in states with very different election systems.

The latest flashpoint in the GOP drive to change voting rules came in Texas, where Democrats temporarily blocked a sweeping new bill this week that touched many of the same voting policies that drew wide notice in Georgia earlier this year. Republicans across the country have proposed significant changes to their states’ election rules after former President Donald Trump promoted conspiracy theories and spread false claims that he’d been robbed of victory there and elsewhere by massive fraud.

Together, Texas and Georgia show which areas Republicans are focused on after Trump’s 2020 loss. Texas’ mail voting policies were already very tight, but both states sought to make their absentee policies stricter. Both states specifically targeted new voting policies piloted by big, blue counties in 2020. And Republicans in both states sought to impose new limits on election officials — and expose them to new criminal penalties for wrongdoing. Continue reading.

Barack Obama Warns Of Republicans ‘Rigging The Game’

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GOP voter restriction laws are the “kind of dangerous behavior that we’re going to have to push back on,” said the former president.

Barack Obama on Friday called out GOP voter suppression laws, suggesting companies have “a big responsibility” to at least speak out against them as some did when new restrictions were introduced in Georgia in March.

During a virtual Economic Club of Chicago event, the former president said Republican-sponsored bills being introduced nationwide — and GOP support of ex-president Donald Trump’s election lies — were the “kind of dangerous behavior that we’re going to have to push back on.”

It transcends policy, he said. Continue reading.