WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Friday (June 11) it had told Johnson & Johnson that millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccine produced at a troubled plant can't be used because of possible contamination issues. In a statement, the FDA said "several" batches of vaccine manufactured at the Emergent BioSolutions facility in the city of Baltimore are not suitable for use. Each batch is known to correspond to several million doses. Neither the agency nor J&J revealed the precise number of doses, but the New York Times placed the number at 60 million, quoting…

McKay Coppins reports that nobody wants to write anti-Biden books, because nobody wants to buy them. He’s too boring. Excerpt: For now, the most successful conservative authors are training their f ire on more abstract targets, such as “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” A quick review of recent best sellers suggests that ignoring Biden can work just fine. According to BookScan, which tracks most hardcover sales, Andy Ngo’s book on antifa, Unmasked, has sold more than 77,000 copies (an unqualified success in political nonfiction), as has Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies, which bills itself as a “manual for Christian dissidents.” The talk-radio host…

The last century has seen the emergence of several humanitarian norms and laws that were arduous, even frustrating, to implement and often ignored by governments, but which were the result of important lessons learned from the destruction that the world wars brought to civilian populations. Historical attempts to limit organized brutality had existed before the world wars, as the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 – which brought the system of modern states into existence – epitomizes. Though these efforts should not be trivialized, the world wars catalyzed efforts to devise legal mechanisms to protect civilians and combatants on a global…

Pearson sent us this report recently–Exploring the Learning Curve. The big idea here is the changing skill needs for students globally. It is based on this idea of an index–a Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Education Attainment. The report explains: “The Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment compares the performance of 39 countries and one region (Hong Kong) on two categories of education: Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment. The Index provides a snapshot of the relative performance of countries based on their education outputs.” In short, it is formatted around 6 lessons and 8 skills. The lessons…

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.   What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented. The sense of Islam as a threatening Other - with Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational - develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has a lot to…