‘They Don’t Care About Safety’: Amazon Workers Struggle With Pandemic Demand
The Corona Connection ; Everything You Know About Mass Incarceration Is Wrong ; and More Picks
The Corona Connection (Chris)
The author writes, “The loss of habitat has brought wild animals into closer contact with humans and domesticated animals, research has found, enabling diseases such as the coronavirus to jump the animal-human barrier and spread through human-to-human contact.”
US Sanctions Impair Iran’s Ability to fight COVID-19 (Mili)
From the Tehran Times: “Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Tuesday urged countries across the world to join a global campaign to disregard the U.S. sanctions against Iran. Zarif said the ‘unlawful U.S. sanctions’ have ‘drained Iran’s economic resources’ and thereby [are] ‘impairing ability to fight COVID-19.’”
The Trump Admin Drove Him Back to China, Where He Invented a Fast COVID-19 Test (Gerry)
The authors write, “A federal crackdown on professors’ undisclosed outside activities is achieving what China has long struggled to do: spur Chinese scientists to return home. In this crisis, it’s costing the U.S. intellectual firepower.”
Everything You Know About Mass Incarceration Is Wrong (Chris)
From Jacobin: “The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history — destroying untold millions of lives and families in just a few decades. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created in the first place, and how we can finally dismantle it.”
Is Coffee Good for You? (Reader Jessica)
The author writes, “In moderation, coffee seems to be good for most people — that’s 3 to 5 cups daily, or up to 400 milligrams of caffeine. ‘The evidence is pretty consistent that coffee is associated with a lower risk of mortality,’ said Erikka Loftfield, a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute who has studied the beverage. For years, coffee was believed to be a possible carcinogen, but the 2015 Dietary Guidelines helped to change perception. For the first time, moderate coffee drinking was included as part of a healthy diet.”
