Join us here tonight for our live-streaming of the second round of the second set of Democratic debates. We’ll get started at 8 PM ET. Try not to break your television when the moderators make a mess of things the way they did Tuesday night. |
Today’s comic by Matt Bors is The man who loved his private insurance:
• Second deadliest ebola outbreak threatens to spread from Congo to Rwanda: The World Health Organization reported the second death from the year-long Ebola outbreak in the city of Goma, where more than a million people live on the Congo-Rwanda border. As of three days ago, there have been 2,577 confirmed cases of Ebola during the current outbreak, including 1790 deaths. The toll could be much higher as many who might be ill don’t seek help and so are not tallied. A 5-year-old who died was one of three confirmed cases of the diseas in Uganda in the same family in June. But Uganda moved quickly to stop the spread of the disease, and the nation was declared Ebola-free last week. All the other deaths so far have been in the Congo. On July 21, the WHO declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern.” That’s the organization’s highest alarm, only issued five times in its history. “The risk of national Ebola spread is high,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general tweeted Wednesday. “The population in Goma is highly mobile, so this is an event we have anticipated. This is why we have been doing intensive preparedness work in Goma so that any new case is identified and responded to immediately.” Laurie Garrett looks at why the World Bank won’t fund a fight against Ebola that could save multitudes.
• The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has not produced the benefits advocates claimed for it: According to the Economic Policy Institute, advocates in and out of the Trump regime said the TCJA would encourage Americans to save more, which would lower interest rates and incentivize investors. “Instead after a few quarters of upward growth consistent with the pre-TCJA trend, the year-over-year change in nonresidential fixed investment seems to be falling off a cliff. Year-over-year growth in real, nonresidential fixed investment was 2.7 percent in 2019Q2—a far cry from not just the 6.9 percent growth in 2018Q3, but also the pre-TCJA growth of 5.4% in 2017Q4.
• Nicole Javorksky at Mother Jones takes a look at how age affects Democratic presidential candidates’ policy ideas in a race where there is 40 years between the oldest and youngest candidates.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Iran plans a third breach of 2015 nuclear accord in response to Trump regime’s withdrawal from it and the economic war it has imposed on the Islamic republic: Foreign minister Javad Zarif also says Iran is ready for talks with Saudi Arabia and tells Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to come to Tehran to talk, as he had indicated in a tweet that he would. In announced-in-advance stages, Iran has been exceeding the accord’s limits placed on its nuclear activities to pressure European signatories not to comply with the U.S. reimposition of old sanctions and imposition of new ones to get Iran to sign a stricter agreement on nukes and take several other actions the U.S. and some of its allies object to. This includes support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen, where the Saudis have intervened in the civil war with a vengeance, using U.S. weapons.
• Extent of summer sea ice currently at lowest level since measurements began 40 years ago: So far, 2012 marked the record low for sea ice at the end of the summer in September when freezing gets seriously underway. But if the trend continues for the next seven or so weeks, this year’s melt will set the record for something some climate deniers asserted as recently as 10 years ago wasn’t happening. You can find an interactive map showing results back to 1979 here.
• ADP reports a gain of 156,000 private sector jobs in the July: ADP monthly job reports only occasionally mesh with the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS will release its estimated number of new, non-farm private and public sector jobs on Friday. The consensus of analysts surveyed ahead of time expect the BLS will report gains of 171,000 jobs for July. But over the past dozen years, that consensus has been wrong far more times than it has been right.
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today’s Kagro in the Morning show:
There was a debate last night. Joan McCarter & Armando can confirm the same. Together, we decide we don't much like the debt ceiling deal. The exciting conclusion of the Mid-East nuclear tech corruption story, featuring Jared Kushner & 666 5th Ave!