| Saturday, August 15, 2020 | |
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| | | | | 1. Story of the Week: Israel’s Diplomatic Coup It was arguably the Middle East’s most shocking diplomatic turnaround since the 1970s, when Egypt’s president made peace overtures. The United Arab Emirates surprised many in agreeing to normalize relations with Israel Thursday, with both sides crediting the help of U.S. President Donald Trump. Perhaps the most shocked were Palestinians, for whom the Jewish state’s diplomatic isolation has been a reliable weapon. But now a wealthy Gulf state has granted peace in exchange for the mere postponement of Israel’s planned annexation of West Bank land. And with Ramallah recalling its ambassador from the UAE, the Palestinians are themselves becoming more disconnected from the world. Sources: NYT, Jerusalem Post, Al Jazeera |
| 2. Coming Up: The Biden-Harris Pandemic Convention The battle has begun, with the president speciously questioning the citizenship of Sen. Kamala Harris, the first woman of color on a major party ticket. But the Democratic Party must officially name its champion, 77-year-old former Vice President Joe Biden, for the 2020 presidential contest to begin. It will also anoint Harris, 55, of California, as its vice presidential contender. Instead of flirting with contagion at its original Milwaukee meeting site, Democrats will meet digitally, the candidates giving acceptance speeches from a convention center in Biden’s home state of Delaware. No cheering throngs, but a stark reminder of a deadly pandemic. Sources: CBS, Slate, Fox News |
| 3. Trump’s Postal Service Won’t Deliver the Votes On Friday, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Postal Service has warned 46 states that voters could be disenfranchised by slow delivery service and state ballot deadlines. The service says it is asking officials and voters “to realistically consider how the mail works” and adjust ballot handling. Some states have already made changes, such as asking for ballots to be mailed earlier or delaying counting. The battleground state of Pennsylvania, for instance, is seeking court permission to extend the ballot deadline for three days. But changing some systems so soon before the first ballots arrive may be difficult, if not impossible. Sources: Washington Post, Yahoo |
| 4. Sales Figures Reflect Successful Stimulus Consider yourself stimulated. For the third straight month, U.S. consumers boosted spending to near-record levels. Retail sales rose 1.2 percent from June to July, the Commerce Department reported, indicating a sustained recovery in the face of an unabated pandemic and other troubling indicators. That was just another reason for U.S. investors to stay the course, however irrationally, with indexes hovering Friday near record highs. Meanwhile analysts disagreed on whether a Democratic sweep in November would cheer investors with the prospect of more stimulus spending, or cause Wall Street’s bubble to pop. Sources: NYT, USA Today, MarketWatch, Bloomberg |
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| | | | | | | 1. A Techie’s Battle for Voting Rights There are many weapons at the barricades of racial justice. For Steve Tingley-Hock of Ohio and his fellow database nerds, the weapon is structured query language. Tingley-Hock is helping form a techie front against aggressive red-state purges of voter rolls, which are seen as a way to limit minority voting. They’ve scrutinized a quarter-million voters on Ohio’s deletion database and proved 40,000 haven’t died or moved, as assumed. Now Tingley-Hock and others are scrutinizing rolls in 13 states, some of which charge $36,000 for a voter list, and already seem to have made election officials more accountable. Sources: Wired |
| 2. When a Cosmic Life Source Fell on Costa Rica When Aguas Zarcas fell in fiery steaks through the night sky of Costa Rica in April 2019, local residents knew it was special. Scientists agreed: They found that the shattered meteorite was left over from the swirling matter that had created the solar system. And its carbonaceous chondrites carried amino acids, the building blocks of life. It's similar to what came from an exploding rock over Australia a half-century ago that even last year was revealing new secrets suggesting the tantalizing conclusion that the stuff of life is “out there” — and we may not be alone. Sources: Science |
| 3. Why Young Leopards Are Staying at Home Like human youth, 3-year-old male leopards normally leave the area where they were born and migrate to new territories. This is important for population and genetic distribution, but that migratory pattern is changing, OZY reports. A study of leopards in South Africa shows that 22 percent of mating-age males are mating close to their birthplaces, something experts blame on a loss of habitat and the encroachment of poachers. Leopards are already disappearing, as in India where they’ve declined by 75 percent, and wildlife biologists worry that the damage caused by inbreeding could speed that decline. Sources: OZY |
| 4. How to Purchase TikTok Stardom Journalist Joseph Cox posted an unremarkable video on TikTok of his colleagues gaming and quickly racked up 25,000 views and 1,000 likes. Was it the magic of the site’s algorithms? Nope. It cost Cox about $50 in services he found online, and the world’s fastest-growing platform didn’t detect the deception. In a time when the Chinese-owned social media app is facing national bans for its data handling, the experience might seem trivial, but it suggests content creators’ followings may not be what they seem. In Cox’s case, some of the phony followers he purchased also “liked” known stars, suggesting their rise may have cost them. Sources: Vice |
| 5. Will Baseball End Its Statistical Segregation? Tomorrow, Major League Baseball will mark the centennial of the Negro Leagues, which for much of the 1900s were the only place Black players could compete professionally. But those athletes being honored, who were often more talented than white professionals, are still not officially “major league” players. Now league officials tell the Ringer that they may correct the choice, which dates back to a 1968 definition made by five white men on the Special Baseball Records Committee. While the designation may seem a purely semantic one, it would allow statistics for Black stars to stand alongside those of their white counterparts — something Black and white athletes avoided in real life. Sources: The Ringer |
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