“July was the world's hottest month ever recorded on Earth — which NOAA calls an ‘unenviable distinction.’” Read more at Axios
“Since July 1, there's been a 700% increase in the week-over-week average of COVID-19 infections in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The information was presented Friday at CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting during a discussion of COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for immunocompromised patients.
‘There's no doubt we're seeing a surge in cases now,’ said Dr. William Moss, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The United States was at a low point in new cases in late June, with an average of about 10,000 a day. Today the average is closer to 125,000 a day, he said
‘That’s when people in this country became really optimistic. The combination of the delta variant, susceptibility due to relatively low vaccination coverage, some relaxing of our public health measures, these all came together and we're seeing this wave,’ Moss said.” Read more at USA Today
“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is vowing to begin dispensing Regeneron monoclonal antibodies — the treatment given to former president Donald Trump when he had the coronavirus — through mobile clinics amid a record-breaking stretch of new cases and hospitalizations that have ravaged the state.
DeSantis, a Republican, said at a news conference in Jacksonville on Thursday that while coronavirus vaccines have been effective at preventing illness and death, more was needed to help curb the spread of the virus in a state that has become the US hotbed of the latest surge of infections. The governor championed Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody cocktail for those who have already gotten sick, saying it is ‘the most effective treatment that we’ve yet encountered for people who are actually infected with COVID-19.’
DeSantis’s promotion of Regeneron, which imitates the body’s natural defenses, is the governor’s latest response to a pandemic in which he has rejected mask mandates and restrictions.
The Republican is in a back-and-forth with school districts that are pushing for mask mandates for children returning to school. That debate is expected to intensify after four educators in Broward County died of the virus within 24 hours, CBS Miami reported.” Read more at Boston Globe
“TORONTO (AP) — The Canadian government will soon require all air travelers and passengers on interprovincial trains to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said Friday that includes all commercial air travelers, passengers on trains between provinces and cruise ship passengers.” Read more at Boston Globe
“The U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Friday ordered staff to destroy classified and other sensitive materials as the office prepares to reduce its number of diplomats amid growing territorial gains by the Taliban, a State Department spokesperson confirmed to The Hill. “ Read more at The Hill
“NEW YORK — The leader of the New York state Assembly announced Friday that lawmakers will suspend their impeachment investigation into Gov. Andrew Cuomo following his resignation earlier this week over sexual harassment allegations.
Carl Heastie, speaker of the Assembly, said the inquiry is moot since its main objective was to determine whether Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, should remain in office. Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, also said he believed lawmakers did not have the constitutional authority to impeach a governor who was no longer in power.
Cuomo, whose resignation will take effect later this month, said Tuesday that he would step down after a report from the New York state attorney general found that he had sexually harassed 11 women. The Assembly had been investigating the same allegations, among others, and began to move quickly toward impeachment once the report was released.” Read more at Boston Globe
“A federal judge in D.C. denied landlords' request to pause the Biden administration's new eviction moratorium, but indicated that the policy is illegal.” Read more at Axios
“Centrist House Democrats threaten to block the budget resolution vote. A group of nine lawmakers say the House shouldn’t vote on the $3.5 trillion budget framework approved by the Senate this week until the bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill is passed. That position puts them at odds with progressives in their party and with the timeline mapped out by Mrs. Pelosi, who has said she wouldn’t bring the infrastructure bill to the floor until the Senate has passed the budget package.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“In the 1960s, the drug was given to women duringchildbirth to dampen their consciousness. In the 1990s, an illicit version made headlines as a ‘date rape’ drug, linked to dozens of deaths and sexual assaults.
And for the last two decades, a pharmaceutical-grade slurry of gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, has been tightly regulated as a treatment for narcolepsy, a disorder known for its sudden sleep attacks.
Now, the Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug for a new use: treating ‘idiopathic hypersomnia,’ a mysterious condition in which people sleep nine or more hours a day, yet never feel rested. Branded as Xywav, the medication is thought to work by giving some patients restorative sleep at night, allowing their brains to be more alert when they wake up. It is the first approved treatment for the illness.
But some experts say the publicly available evidence to support the new approval is weak. And they worry about the dangers of the medication, which acts so swiftly that its label advises users to take it while in bed. Xywav and an older, high-salt version called Xyrem have a host of serious side effects, including breathing problems, anxiety, depression, sleepwalking, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts.” Read more at New York Times
“Nanci Griffith, a Grammy-winning self-described ‘folkabilly’ singer who was the first artist to record ‘From a Distance,’ died Friday in Nashville.
She was 68. Her cause of death was undisclosed, according to a statement from former label Rounder Records.
Griffith received considerable acclaim for her 1993 covers collection, ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’ which featured guest appearances from friends including John Prine, Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan, providing harmonica on his own ‘Boots of Spanish Leather.’ The following year, it won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album – over one of Dylan’s releases.
Though Griffith never had a commercial hit single of her own, several of her compositions – first recorded by her— became hits for other country artists. That included Kathy Mattea’s first Top 10 hit, ‘Love at the Five and Dime,’ and Suzy Bogguss’ ‘Outbound Plane.’
Her 1993 album ‘Other Voices/Other Rooms’ won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.” Read more at USA Today
Hanging up the mic … Tony Bennett. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
“Some might say that 95 is a decent age to call it a day. But Tony Bennett, who is retiring from live performance after more than eight decades in the business, is only doing so on strict doctors’ orders.
According to the singer’s son and manager, Danny, last week’s sold-out shows alongside Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in New York will be his last. ‘There won’t be any additional concerts,’ Danny Bennett told Variety. ‘This was a hard decision for us to make, as he is a capable performer. This is however doctors’ orders. His continued health is the most important part of this, and when Tony’s wife, Susan, heard the doctors she said, ‘Absolutely not.’
Earlier this year it was revealed that Bennett had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016; he has continued to perform live in the five years since. The singer was expected to appear at a handful more US dates later this year but these shows have now been cancelled.
‘It’s not the singing aspect but rather the traveling,’ said Danny Bennett. ‘He gets tired. We don’t want him to fall on stage, for instance. We’re not worried about him being able to sing. We are worried, from a physical standpoint … about human nature. Tony’s 95.’
This doesn’t mean the end of Bennett’s working life, and there are already releases in the pipeline. An album with Lady Gaga, Love For Sale, is due in October and will comprise of covers of Cole Porter songs. The two won a Grammy for the 2014 collaboration Cheek to Cheek.” Read more at The Guardian
Leon Litwack in 2002. He sought to teach students, he said in a 2001 interview, to ‘feel the past in ways that may be genuinely disturbing.’ Credit...Noah Berger
“Leon Litwack, a leather-jacket-wearing, blues-loving historian whose pioneering books on slavery and its aftermath demonstrated how Black people thought about and shaped their own liberation, even as they were constrained by racism in American society, died on Aug. 5 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 91.
His wife, Rhoda Litwack, said the cause was bladder cancer.
Professor Litwack, a son of left-wing immigrants from Russia, brought an ethos of patriotic dissent to both his teaching and his scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, insisting that the historian’s job is to give voice to the marginalized and to make the well-off uncomfortable. He sought to teach students, he said in a 2001 interview, to ‘feel the past in ways that may be genuinely disturbing.’
Beginning in the early 1960s, a time when many historians still treated enslaved and freed Black people as passive actors in their own narratives, he cut a different path, immersing himself in the archives to discover Black voices and their stories and show how they thought about, and struggled against, oppression.
One notable fruit of that effort was ‘Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery’ (1979), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Just as important, he showed how oppression against Black people was not unique to the South. In his book “North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860” (1961), Professor Litwack illustrated how racism had structured institutions and relations in which Black and white people were supposedly equal, at least in popular memory.
‘He understood how deeply racism and white supremacy cut through the country, and he did it before a lot of other historians did,’ said Jason Sokol, a historian at the University of New Hampshire who studied with him at Berkeley.
As a teacher Professor Litwack advised scores of doctoral students and taught an estimated 40,000 undergraduates in his huge survey courses, where he often showed up in a leather jacket and a Grateful Dead tie. He loved blues and rock, and used film and music clips to illuminate American history since the Civil War; in one course he included the ‘The Complete Recordings’ of Robert Johnson as a required text.
‘There’s a stereotype that famous academics don’t teach the intro course,’ James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association and a former student of Professor Litwack’s, said in an interview. ‘Leon thought the opposite. For Leon, teaching that intro course was an obligation, but also an opportunity to have an impact on students no matter what their major was.’” Read more at New York Times
Una Stubbs filming “Sherlock" in London in 2015. She and the show’s creators imagined her character, Sherlock Holmes’s landlady, as a comedic parental figure with a checkered past.Credit...Simon James/GC Images, via Getty Images
“Una Stubbs, the veteran British actress best known to American audiences for her role as Mrs. Hudson, the landlady to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes on the popular BBC series ‘Sherlock,’ died on Thursday at her home in Edinburgh. She was 84.
Her death was confirmed by her agent, Rebecca Blond.
Ms. Stubbs was a recognizable face in Britain, where she had appeared in comedic and dramatic roles onstage, onscreen and on television for more than half a century, including on the long-running soap opera ‘EastEnders’ and the sitcom ‘Till Death Us Do Part,’ the inspiration for the long-running American hit ‘All in the Family.’
American television viewers knew her best as the motherly landlady to the master detective Sherlock Holmes. on ‘Sherlock.’ That show, which aired from 2010 to 2017, was an international hit, and Ms. Stubbs turned Mrs. Hudson into a fan favorite by making her a cheerful foil for the show’s darker themes.
Mrs. Hudson was a bit of a phantom in Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous stories about Holmes, on which the show was based. So Ms. Stubbs and the show’s creators built her into a comedic parental figure with a checkered past.” Read more at New York Times