New York’s Attorney General filed a lawsuit yesterday seeking to dissolve the National Rifle Association. AG Letitia James alleges that the NRA has engaged in years of corruption.
In the absence of a federal testing strategy, seven governors have formed a purchasing agreement in attempts to get faster COVID antigen tests. In California, problems with the state’s data system may be creating inaccurate coronavirus data.
And in headlines: Minneapolis won’t vote to dismantle the police department, an exiled Saudi intelligence officer says MBS tried to kill him, and Nintendo reports a huge earnings boost.
Three L.A. comedians are quarantined in a podcast studio during a global pandemic. There is literally nothing to be done EXCEPT make content. These are "The Corona Diaries" and this is Episode #66. Our guest today is comedian Katrina Davis! Follow Katrina on all forms of social media @KatrinaSivad. Music at the end is "Mas Que Nada" by Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66.
At the end of June, the Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to "defund" the city's police. Now crime is on the rise.
John Hinderaker, president of the Minnesota policy organization Center of the American Experiment, joins the show to explain what the future may hold for the Minneapolis Police Department and what his organization is doing to support local law enforcement.
We also cover these stories:
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, moves to shut down the National Rifle Association.
The votes of more than 84,000 New York City residents weren't counted during the summer’s Democratic primary.
A Secret Service report reveals that many shootings are carried out with illegal guns.
In a HUGE breaking news story, the New York Attorney General has sought to dissolve the NRA over rampant corruption! The complaint is nearly a couple hundred pages, but our esteemed Andrew has already read it and has the breakdown for us in a truly rapid response Friday! Questions he answers include: what are the alleged facts? Can NY actually do this? Could LaPierre simply re-form the NRA somewhere else? And more!
On the Gist, New York’s elections are not unlike Georgia’s.
In the interview, our resident vexillologist Ted Kaye is back to talk about the latest in flag news. He fills Mike in on what’s happening in Mississippi as they try to swiftly get a new flag design added to the ballot in November, and the recent proliferation of the ‘thin blue line’ American flag. Kaye’s book is Good Flag, Bad Flag.
States are scrambling to replace older poll workers with younger ones. The two major political parties will hold their conventions mostly online. And in one big battleground state, the pandemic is shifting the political geography.
Tuesday’s primaries lead to Missouri victories for Medicaid expansion and Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush, the Biden campaign announces the biggest advertising buy in history across 15 states, and the Trump campaign makes debate demands while lowering expectations for Joe Biden. Then Manny Garcia and Cliff Walker, the leaders of the Texas Democratic Party, talk to Dan about what it will take to turn the state blue in 2020. And Ben Rhodes talks to Tommy about his new Crooked Media podcast, Missing America.
Chicago was once a coronavirus hotspot. So why are covid-19 positivity rates down in the city, but rising with alarming frequency in the suburbs and surrounding counties? Reset talks with a reporter, and two county health officials to find out where, and why rates of infection are up.
If the world does not curb its greenhouse gas emissions, by the end of this century, the number of people dying annually because of extreme heat will be greater than the current global death toll from infectious diseases - that’s all infectiousness diseases, from malaria to diarrhoeal diseases to HIV. This is the grim assessment of climate researchers and economists of the Climate Impact Lab in the largest global study to date of health and financial impacts of temperature-related deaths. Roland Pease talks to Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley.
UK ecologists have new insights about how diseases jump the species barrier from wildlife to humans. With a global survey of land use and biodiversity, they’ve discovered that when natural habitats are converted to farmland or urbanised, the animal species that survive the change in greatest number are those species which carry viruses and bacteria with the potential to spread to us. This is particularly the case, says Rory Gibb of the University College London, with disease-carrying rodent species, bats and birds.
Do past infections by mild cold coronaviruses prepare the immune systems of some people for infection by SARS-CoV-2? Could immune memory T cells made in response to these cold viruses lessen the severity of Covid-19? Alessandro Sette and Daniela Weiskopf of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology lead the team which published the latest contributions to these questions.
Anglerfish are perhaps the weirdest inhabitants of the deep sea. Their sex lives are particularly strange because finding partners in the dark expanse of the ocean abyss is hard. Females are much bigger than males. When a male finds a female, he latches on her body with his teeth and over a couple of weeks, their flesh fuses so he is permanently attached. Her blood supplies him with all the food and oxygen he needs and he becomes an ever present supply of sperm whenever she produces eggs. But this fusion should be impossible. The female’s immune system should be rejecting her partner like a mismatched organ transplant. German scientists have now discovered that these fish do this by giving up the production of antibodies and immune T cells – essential for fighting infections in all other animals including us. It was a shocking discovery for Prof Thomas Boehm at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg.
(Image: Relatives of heatstroke victims, their heads covered with wet towels, wait outside a hospital during a heatwave in Karachi. .Credit: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP via Getty Images)
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker
