Health

The US is no Longer the World’s Science Leader: Trump Fiddled While South Korea, Germany, China Swung into Actions

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Historically, in hyper-crises, local and global systems can change fundamentally. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit first China and then the rest of the globe, the question of whether the American imperial era might be faltering was already on the table, amid that country’s endless wars and with the world’s most capricious […]

Donald Trump

How the Tiny ‘Reopen’ protest movement was Astroturfed and boosted by Fake Grassroots Tactics

The Conversation

By Marc Ambinder | – Many Americans have been under strict stay-at-home orders, or at least advisories, for more than a month. People are frustrated and depressed, but have complied with what they’ve been asked to endure because they trust that state and local public health officials are telling the truth about the coronavirus pandemic. […]

Epidemics

Iran fails to contain COVID-19 as internal political clashes prevent a timely and unified response

Global Voices

By Ezzatullah Mehrdad | – ( Globalvoices.org) – Since the outbreak of COVID-19 started in Iran in February 2020, internal political clashes have prevented the authorities from adequately responding to the pandemic. As a result, Iran has become one of the worst affected countries: as of April 24, more than 88,000 Iranians have been infected […]

China

Trump trots out Blaming China for his own Pitiful Covid-19 Failures

Reese Erlich

The Republican Party is trying to shift blame for President Donald Trump’s disastrous coronavirus policies onto China. Chinese communists, Republican leaders claim, hid the pandemic from the public, allowing it to spread worldwide. Trump has even given credence to the conspiracy theory that China intentionally developed the virus in order to kill Americans. Scapegoating China […]

Donald Trump

Some Medieval Towns handled Plagues Better than Trump’s Unequal, Rundown America

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – King Soloman in Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us that “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” President Harry S. Truman stated that, “The only thing […]

Corruption

Trump, Inc.: How Jared Kushner is Tackling White House Coronavirus Response — Without Any Evident Experience

ProPublica

by Andrea Bernstein, WNYC | – This story was co-published with WNYC. (ProPublica) – On April 2, Jared Kushner uncharacteristically took to the podium to speak at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing. He’d been given the task, he said, of assisting Vice President Mike Pence’s Coronavirus Task Force with supply chain issues. “The president,” […]

Donald Trump

The Scum of all Fears: America declines the Trump Administration’s Invitation to Die

David Faris

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – President Trump, facing the prospect of possibly the worst electoral environment ever to face an incumbent president, is borrowing a page from the last Republican administration, the one that ended with a sitting president so universally reviled that he decided to skip his own party’s nominating convention. America’s 45th […]

Epidemics

The Curse of Casteism in a Plague Year: Rightwing Indian Gov’t AWOL as Lockdown devastates Poor, Dalits

contributors

By Sanjana Krishnan and Rahul Jambhulkar | – As we rose to another day of peaceful quarantine in the West, we received a message from India. It was an urgent plea to help 80 families of Dalit (ex-untouchable) daily wage earners in an urban slum in Nagpur city in Central India. The families had run […]

Donald Trump

Amid Trump’s Immigration ban, Muslim-Americans step up on Covid-19 to donate Masks, PPE, to Hospitals and to help Unemployed, Homeless

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Muslim-Americans have stepped up to help in the fight against the novel coronavirus in ways that may not be apparent from watching cable television. They are disproportionately a first- and second-generation American community who have faced discrimination at Trump’s hands, and are among the targets of his two-month ban on […]