“The Taliban has taken control of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, as the group's rapid siege moves closer to the capital city of Kabul. One expert predicted the fall of Kandahar would be viewed as a ‘death knell’ for the country’s government and military. The US Embassy in Kabul is once again urging American citizens to leave Afghanistan immediately amid the Taliban's recent gains. The US is also sending some 3,000 troops to Afghanistan to assist with the departure of embassy staff and to support the evacuation of other personnel, including Afghan allies who applied for Special Immigrant Visas. The embassies of Germany, France and the United Kingdom have also urged their citizens to leave Afghanistan.” Read more at CNN
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized booster shots for certain people with weakened immune systems, likely the launch of broader efforts to better protect against evasive variants like Delta.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“As schools start back up and child coronavirus cases rise, many parents and pediatricians are getting impatient for the FDA to give the green light to vaccinate children under 12. The FDA is watching pediatric trials of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines closely, but some say they feel the agency is dragging its feet. Meanwhile, the latest surge in hard-hit states like Florida and Tennessee is getting so bad, local leaders are warning citizens to think twice before calling an ambulance. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has similarly asked hospitals to forego elective surgeries to deal with the influx of coronavirus patients.” Read more at CNN
“WASHINGTON—Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday rejected an emergency request by a group of Indiana University students who were seeking to block the school from enforcing a Covid-19 vaccine requirement for the coming semester.
The school is requiring students to be vaccinated unless they are exempt for religious or medical reasons, and in those circumstances, individuals must wear masks and be tested for the virus regularly.
The emergency appeal marked the first time a Covid-19 vaccine mandate reached the Supreme Court.
Lower courts declined to block the policy, saying the students were unlikely to prevail on claims that the mandate violated the Constitution.
The students filed an emergency request for an injunction last week with Justice Barrett, who oversees such fast-track petitions from Indiana. On Thursday, she denied the request without comment—and without referring the matter to the full high court for consideration.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Arizona’s three public universities announced Wednesday that they would be instituting face-mask requirements in certain settings, possibly defying legislation that prohibits universities and community colleges from mandating several public-health measures to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
Arizona State University was the first institution to push back, announcing it would be requiring face coverings in all classrooms and labs and in ‘close-quarter environments where physical distancing may not be possible.’ Northern Arizona University followed soon after, requiring masks in all classrooms, labs, and indoor and outdoor settings where social distancing is not possible. Then the University of Arizona announced a mask requirement, with President Robert C. Robbins stating that masks would be required in all indoor settings where social distancing is not possible.
On Thursday, Maricopa County Community College District also joined in, announcing face masks would be required indoors across its 10 member campuses. Last semester, the system enrolled more than 86,000 students around the Phoenix metropolitan area.” Read more at Chronicle of Higher Education
“New applications for jobless benefits declined for the third straight week, showing the labor market continues to heal despite worries about the Delta variant.
First-time applications for benefits, a proxy for layoffs, fell to a seasonally adjusted 375,000 in the week ended Aug. 7, from a revised 387,000 in the prior week, the Labor Department said Thursday. In recent weeks, jobless claims have been hovering just above the lowest level touched since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“WASHINGTON—A divided Supreme Court on Thursday lifted part of New York’s eviction moratorium, saying the state had gone too far in protecting tenants at the expense of landlords.
The high court, in an unsigned written order, blocked a state measure that made it easy for tenants to invoke eviction protections by self-certifying that they were facing financial hardships during the Covid-19 pandemic. Landlords generally couldn’t challenge such certifications.
Before the justices’ intervention, the measure was to expire at the end of August.
The Supreme Court’s order said the New York approach, by denying landlords a hearing to contest the certifications, ‘violates the Court’s longstanding teaching that ordinarily no man can be a judge in his own case consistent with the Due Process Clause’ of the Constitution.
The court said its order did nothing to disturb other New York provisions that allow tenants to invoke eviction protections in court proceedings, so long as they can demonstrate pandemic-related hardships.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“A Carnival Cruise Line ship that left from Galveston, Tex., has 27 coronavirus-positive people on board, according to the Belize Tourism Board. The outbreak is among the highest number of publicly reported cases on a ship sailing from the United States since cruises restarted this summer.” Read more at Washington Post
“The coronavirus has exacted "an especially devastating impact on the millions of Americans with diabetes," Reuters reports from rural Ohio.
The CDC has cited research showing that upward of 40% of people "who died with COVID-19 also had diabetes."
Diabetes deaths last year rose 17% to more than 100,000.” Read more at Axios
Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
“Almost all of the last decade's U.S. population growth was in big metro areas, we learned this afternoon in a 2020 census data dump.
For the first time, all 10 of the largest U.S. cities have more than 1 million people, Axios' Stef Kight writes.
Rural shrinkage: More than half of all counties saw population declines from 2010, with smaller counties more likely to lose.
What went up:
Diversity:
There's a 61% chance that two Americans chosen at random are from different races or ethnicities.
The South and the Southwest saw some of the most explosive population growth.
Florida's The Villages, a 55+ master-planned community, was the fastest-growing metro area.
What went down:
America's white population declined for the first time since the census' inception. 57.8% of people were white — two points lower than estimates.
The Midwest and the Northeast saw some of the biggest losses.
Overall population growth was the slowest since the 1930s.
Election experts say the data is better news than Democrats expected — gains in cities, losses in rural areas and a bigger-than-expected drop in the white population.
“Nicholas Jones, the Census Bureau’s population division director, said the data shows an increasingly multicultural country. The number of people who identify as multiracial nearly tripled over the past decade, from 9 million people to 33.8 million.” [Vox] [ [The Washington Post / Tara Bahrampour and Ted Mellnik]
“Hispanics were the biggest driver of population growth, and now make up 18.7 percent of the population. Population growth as a whole was relatively low, and pretty much limited to cities — more than half of all counties saw population decline from 2010 to 2020.” [Vox] [ [CNN / Janie Boschma, Meghna Maharishi, Christopher Hickey, and David Wright]
“Texas and Florida, which lean Republican, will both get additional seats in Congress. The state legislatures can draw maps that advantage the GOP. Meanwhile, West Virginia will lose a seat — all of their representatives are Republicans — and Democrats control the redistricting process in New York, which will also lose a seat, and can target a Republican.” [Vox] [ [The New York Times / Nick Corasaniti]
“Much of the nation’s fastest-growing cities are in states controlled by Republicans. The top-growing area was Florida’s The Villages, where retirees live, and four of the top 10 growing cities are in Texas.” [Vox] [ [The Associated Press / David A. Lieb and Nicholas Riccardi]
“WASHINGTON — Former president Donald Trump’s last attorney general has told US senators his boss was ‘persistent’ in trying to pressure the Justice Department to discredit the results of the 2020 election.
In closed-door testimony Saturday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeffrey Rosen said he had to ‘persuade the president not to pursue a different path’ at a high-stakes January meeting in which Trump considered ousting Rosen as the nation’s most powerful law enforcement officer.
According to a person familiar with the testimony, Rosen’s opening statement also characterized as ‘inexplicable’ the actions of his Justice Department colleague, Jeffrey Clark, who was willing to push Trump’s false claims of election fraud and whom Trump considered installing as acting attorney general to replace Rosen.
The testimony — portions of which were previously reported by The New York Times — is part of a trough of information that congressional investigators are assembling about Trump’s frantic efforts to reverse his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden and use the Justice Department to stay in office.
Trump’s actions are also being investigated by the House select committee on the Jan. 6 breach of the US Capitol. The Justice Department’s inspector general is separately examining whether any current or former agency officials acted improperly to invalidate election results — an effort that could result in recommended disciplinary actions or, if the office finds potential crimes were committed, referrals to the department for prosecution.” Read more at Boston Globe
“A bizarre security breach of a rural Colorado county’s voting system has in a matter of days escalated into a criminal probe of the clerk’s office, a ban on the county’s existing election equipment, and heightened partisan divides over election-fraud claims.
Footage that showed passwords related to the county’s voting systems was surreptitiously recorded during a May security update and published last week on a far-right blog, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) said Thursday. Griswold determined Mesa County cannot use its existing equipment for its November election.
Griswold alleged Mesa County Clerk Tina M. Peters (R) allowed the breach. A spokesperson for Mesa County confirmed a criminal probe headed by the 21st Judicial District Attorney’s Office was underway but said it was still in the early stages.” Read more at Washington Post
“(New York Times) — President Biden on Thursday implored Congress to include strict controls on prescription drug prices in the mammoth social policy bill that Democrats plan to draft this fall, hitting on an issue that his predecessor campaigned on but failed to deliver.
Biden said he wants at least three measures included in the $3.5 trillion social policy bill that Democrats hope to pass using budget rules that would protect it from a Republican filibuster. He wants Medicare to be granted the power to negotiate lower drug prices, pharmaceutical companies to face penalties if they raise prices faster than inflation, and a new cap on how much Medicare recipients have to spend on medications.” Read more at Boston Globe
“The US has encountered an ‘unprecedented’ number of migrants illegally crossing the border, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says. In July, US Customs and Border Protection apprehended about 212,600 people, an unusual uptick from the prior month, given that apprehensions usually dip during the hot summer. That figure marks the highest monthly number of migrants detained at the US-Mexico border in two decades. The Biden administration has taken a series of actions to crack down on the flow of migrants, including increasing personnel around the border, bolstering medical staff, resuming a fast-track deportation procedure for migrant families and setting up flights for migrants to other parts of the border for processing or to the interior of Mexico to dissuade them from trying to cross again.” Read more at CNN
“Britney Spears' father Jamie Spears says he intends to step down as conservator of the singer's estate. The elder Spears has been serving as co-conservator of his daughter's estimated $60 million fortune for more than a decade. Recently, Britney Spears has gotten more vocal in her opposition to the conservatorship, calling it ‘cruelty’ and ‘abuse’ and saying she even wants to press charges against her father. If he does step down, it would be a massive development in one of the defining pop culture battles of the internet era. Spears' conservatorship, which has been in place since 2008 following a string of personal hardships, has raised conversations about autonomy, public perception, mental health, the agency of women in entertainment and the dangers of rapid, ubiquitous stardom.” Read more at CNN
“When Alphonso David became president of the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q.+ advocacy organization in 2019, his long experience as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s chief legal counsel and secretary on civil rights was seen as a huge advantage.
In his nine years working for the governor, Mr. David had helped to propel many of Mr. Cuomo’s triumphs in L.G.B.T.Q. rights, from marriage equality to a ban on conversion therapy, which was a large part of why the leadership of the organization, the Human Rights Campaign, said they had hired him.
But now the close ties between Mr. David and Mr. Cuomo are roiling the organization, with some calling for his dismissal. Mr. David’s name is mentioned some two dozen times in the New York attorney general’s report, which accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment. He is one of several former members of the governor’s staff who the report said were enlisted to discredit one of the accusers.” Read more at New York Times
“Two high school basketball coaches in Georgia have been charged with murder in connection with the death of a teenager who collapsed after running drills during a practice held in nearly 100-degree heat and later died.
On Wednesday morning, days before the second anniversary of the death of the teenager, 16-year-old Imani Bell, lawyers for the Bell family announced the charges in a news conference in Atlanta.” Read more at New York Times
“LONDON — Six people, including a suspected gunman, are dead and an investigation is underway following what police called a ‘serious firearms incident’ in the city of Plymouth in England – the mass shooting is Britain’s worst in more than a decade.” Read more at Washington Post
“ROME — Stifling heat kept its grip on much of Southern Europe on Thursday, driving people indoors at midday, spoiling crops, triggering drinking water restrictions, turning public libraries into cooling ‘climate shelters,’ and complicating the already difficult challenge firefighters faced battling wildfires.
In many places, forecasters said worse was expected to come.
In Italy, 15 cities received warnings from the health ministry about high temperatures and humidity with peaks predicted for Friday. The cities included Rome, Florence, and Palermo, but also Bolzano, which is usually a refreshing hot-weather escape in the Alps,
The local National Health Service offices in Rome and Bologna telephoned older residents who live alone to see if they needed groceries or medicines delivered so they wouldn't venture out in the searing heat.” Read more at Boston Globe
“The Italian island of Sicily may have set a modern record for the hottest day ever recorded in Europe, with a monitoring station near the ancient city of Syracuse in the southeast recording a scorching 48.8 degrees Celsius, or 119.84 Fahrenheit.
The temperature, recorded Wednesday by the Sicilian Meteorological Information Service for Agriculture, still needs to be verified by the World Meteorological Organization. If confirmed, it would top the previous record of 48 degrees set in Athens in July 1977, experts said.” Read more at New York Times
“Hospital medics in Iran are triaging patients on the floors of emergency rooms and in cars parked on the roadside. Lines stretch for blocks outside pharmacies. Taxis double as hearses, transporting corpses from hospitals to cemeteries. In at least one city, laborers are digging mass graves.
Iran is under assault from the most cataclysmic wave yet of the coronavirus, according to interviews with physicians and health workers, social media postings from angry citizens, and even some unusually frank reporting in state media. The aggressive delta variant has led to record numbers of deaths and infections, and appears to be overwhelming the health system of a country that has been reeling from COVID-19 since the scourge began.” Read more at Boston Globe
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