Researchers from the University of Michigan used their own automated censorship tracking system to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They discovered that citizens in what are considered the world's freest countries aren't safe from internet censorship. From a press release: [Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool, and her team] found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the world's freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August 2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan. While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for that has been put in place here.

"When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic," she said. "The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope." It's already happening abroad, the researchers found. "What we see from our study is that no country is completely free," said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. "We're seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something that's obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and it's a very opaque process. That's why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time." The study is titled "Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory."

Frequent-flying "super emitters" who represent just 1% of the world's population caused half of aviation's carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study. From a report: Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated. The analysis draws together data to give the clearest global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. Only 11% of the world's population took a flight in 2018 and 4% flew abroad. US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia, the study reports. The researchers said the study showed that an elite group enjoying frequent flights had a big impact on the climate crisis that affected everyone. They said the 50% drop in passenger numbers in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic should be an opportunity to make the aviation industry fairer and more sustainable. This could be done by putting green conditions on the huge bailouts governments were giving the industry, as had happened in France.

Sales of Sony and Microsoft's new gaming consoles fell short of their predecessors during their first week in Japan, suggesting persistent supply bottlenecks will hamper the debut of two of this holiday season's most hotly anticipated gadgets. From a report: Sony sold 118,085 PlayStation 5 consoles from its debut on Nov. 12 to Nov. 15, roughly a third of the PS4's performance over launch weekend, Famitsu estimated. Microsoft tallied 20,534 units of its Xbox Series X and S during the six days from its start on Nov. 10, also shy of the 23,562 that the Xbox One managed during its first few days, the research house said. The estimates provided a first glimpse at sales of the new Xbox and PlayStation, two devices that should dominate wishlists this Christmas. Japan was among the first markets globally to get the consoles and is considered a key battleground between two companies vying to establish a lead in next-generation gaming and drive longer-term growth. Factory and logistical disruptions during the pandemic have hurt manufacturers' ability to keep up. The outcome is likely more reflective of the available supply than demand for the consoles, as both companies saw their machines sell out on day one, said Serkan Toto, an industry consultant in Tokyo.

Four astronauts aboard their SpaceX Dragon capsule "Resilience" have arrived at the International Space Station, circling 262 miles above the Earth, where they will stay until spring. From a report: The capsule lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center Sunday evening atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, chasing the ISS for 27 hours before matching its altitude and speed for an orbital dock. The flight marks only the second crewed flight for Crew Dragon, which became the first commercial vehicle to put humans in orbit when astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched in May. "SpaceX, this is Resilience. Excellent job, right down the center," commander Hopkins radioed to mission control after the docking. "SpaceX and NASA, congratulations." The flight marks another milestone for SpaceX flying its first fully operational mission. After the May launch, designated "Demo-2" with Hurley and Behnken, NASA certified the capsule for operational use in its Commercial Crew program. The Resilience crew includes three NASA astronauts and one from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who were mostly passengers during the flight of Crew Dragon, which generally flies without human input and docks to the ISS autonomously.

dcblogs writes: Japan's Fugaku ARM-based supercomputer is the world's most powerful in the latest Top500 list, setting a world record of 442 petaflops. But this was otherwise an unremarkable year for supercomputers, with a "flattening performance curve," said Jack Dongarra, one of the academics behind the twice-a-year ranking and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. This is a result of Moore's Law slowing down as well as a slowdown in the replacement of older systems, he said. But the U.S. is set to deliver an exascale system -- 1,000 petaflops -- next year and China as well. Meanwhile, the EU has a 550 petaflop system in development in Finland. "On the Top500 list, the second-ranked system was IBM Power Systems at nearly 149 petaflops using its Power9 CPUs and Nvidia Tesla GPUs. It is at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee," adds TechTarget.

"Third place went to Sierra supercomputer, which also uses Power9 and Nvidia GPUs, at about 95 petaflops. It is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The pandemic is helping Japan's demon slayers, monsters and robots make the leap to the global market. Animated video in the Japanese style -- aka anime -- has long been a niche taste for fans in the U.S. and elsewhere, and some anime films such as those by Hayao Miyazaki have become mainstream hits. Now, with the pandemic putting a premium on escapist video content, the business is getting hotter. Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are scouring the globe for fresh content, from documentaries to calming videos, and anime has an advantage over live-action content because it doesn't require actors and crew to expose themselves to virus contagion. With the latest anime hit bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in Japan, industry players say the next year is likely to bring more deals and more content for the U.S. "I used to have the sense that the anime category was spreading widely around the world, but what we're seeing these days is a big leap beyond that," said Taiki Sakurai, Netflix's chief anime producer. "The global anime fan base is expanding rapidly." Last month, Netflix said it had 16 projects in the works at its Tokyo-based anime production hub, including "Godzilla" and "Transformers" titles, with plans for global distribution that it said were pushed forward by the evidence of higher demand.

Netflix, which hired a creative team dedicated to anime production in Tokyo four years ago, said more than 100 million households around the world watched at least one anime title on the streaming site in the year to September 2020, growing by 50% from a year earlier. Anime titles have appeared in the top-10 list in nearly 100 countries this year, it said. Amazon Prime also features a wealth of anime titles. The financial reports of Tokyo-based Toei Animation, the studio responsible for anime such as the "Dragon Ball" and "Sailor Moon" franchises, give a glimpse into how the industry is changing. Four years ago, revenue received from outside Japan accounted for one-third of Toei Animation's overall revenue. The overseas portion rose to half of the total in the year ended this past March, and overseas revenue more than doubled to the equivalent of $243 million, with "Dragon Ball" programs available on streaming services such as Hulu in the U.S. In the most recent six months, overseas sales rose to nearly three-fifths of the total.

The big launch finally happens in 2 minutes. "All systems are go for tonight's launch at 7:27 p.m. EST of Crew Dragon's first operational mission with four astronauts on board," SpaceX tweeted this morning. But live coverage is already streaming on SpaceX's web site.

Space.com explains it's the first operational flight of SpaceX's "astronaut taxi," the Crew Dragon: Called Crew-1, this will be the second Crew Dragon mission to carry astronauts. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will lift off from the historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:27p.m. EST (0027 GMT) to begin a six-month mission.
Space.com reports that the astronauts completed their 9-mile (14 km) drive to the Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad inside a pair of Tesla's electric Model X SUVs.

In another report, CBS News has confirmed that SpaceX "plans to reuse the booster for the next Crew Dragon flight." NASA is counting on the Crew-1 flight and follow-on missions by SpaceX and Boeing to end the agency's sole reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for trips to and from low-Earth orbit. NASA has spent $4 billion since 2006 buying seats aboard Soyuz spacecraft and another $6 billion to date on its Commercial Crew Program, ultimately awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing... With two successful test flights behind them, NASA engineers were able to certify the spacecraft after a detailed analysis of telemetry and inspections of the flight hardware. It was the first such certification since the space shuttle was being built in the 1970s and the first ever granted a commercially developed spacecraft.

"I believe 20 years from now, we're going to look back at this time as a major turning point in our exploration and utilization of space," said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters. "It's not an exaggeration to state that with this milestone, NASA and SpaceX have changed the historical arc of human space transportation...

The station's life support systems, including its water recycling equipment and carbon dioxide removal gear, have been beefed up to support a seven-member crew and additional stores and supplies have been laid in. But the U.S. segment of the station only has four crew "sleep stations" and Hopkins plans to bunk with a sleeping bag in the powered-down Crew Dragon.

"Fifteen Asia-Pacific economies formed the world's largest free trade bloc on Sunday," reports CNBC, "a China-backed deal that excludes the United States, which had left a rival Asia-Pacific grouping under President Donald Trump." Amid questions over Washington's engagement in Asia, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) may cement China's position more firmly as an economic partner with Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea, putting the world's second-biggest economy in a better position to shape the region's trade rules...

RCEP could help Beijing cut its dependence on overseas markets and technology, a shift accelerated by a deepening rift with Washington, said Iris Pang, ING chief economist for Greater China. RCEP groups the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It aims in coming years to progressively lower tariffs across many areas... RCEP will account for 30% of the global economy, 30% of the global population and reach 2.2 billion consumers, Vietnam said...

"For the first time, China and Japan reached a bilateral tariff reduction arrangement, achieving a historic breakthrough," China's finance ministry said in a statement, without giving further details. The deal marks the first time rival East Asian powers China, Japan and South Korea have been in a single free trade agreement.

Japan's Honda Motor said on Wednesday it will be the world's first automaker to mass produce sensor-packed level 3 autonomous cars that will allow drivers to let their vehicles navigate congested expressway traffic. From a report: "Honda is planning to launch sales of a Honda Legend (luxury sedan) equipped with the newly approved automated driving equipment" before the end of March 2021, Honda said in a press release. The race to build self-driving cars is a key technology battleground for automakers, with technology companies such as Google parent Alphabet Inc also investing billions of dollars in a field expected to boost car sales. Japan's government earlier in the day awarded a safety certification to Honda's autonomous "Traffic Jam Pilot" driving technology, which legally allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. "Self driving cars are expected to play a big role in helping reduce traffic accidents, provide transportation for the elderly and improve logistics," said Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. There are six levels of vehicle autonomy, from 0 to 5, ranging from manual cars or those with simple functions such as cruise control to fully self-driving vehicles that would not need steering wheels, or brake and acceleration pedals.

A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work. Erica Klarreich, reporting for Quanta Magazine: In 2018, Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Japan to give a talk about a powerful cryptographic tool he and his colleagues were developing. As he detailed the team's approach to indistinguishability obfuscation (iO for short), one audience member raised his hand in bewilderment. "But I thought iO doesn't exist?" he said. At the time, such skepticism was widespread. Indistinguishability obfuscation, if it could be built, would be able to hide not just collections of data but the inner workings of a computer program itself, creating a sort of cryptographic master tool from which nearly every other cryptographic protocol could be built. It is "one cryptographic primitive to rule them all," said Boaz Barak of Harvard University. But to many computer scientists, this very power made iO seem too good to be true. Computer scientists set forth candidate versions of iO starting in 2013. But the intense excitement these constructions generated gradually fizzled out, as other researchers figured out how to break their security. As the attacks piled up, "you could see a lot of negative vibes," said Yuval Ishai of the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Researchers wondered, he said, "Who will win: the makers or the breakers?" "There were the people who were the zealots, and they believed in [iO] and kept working on it," said Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. But as the years went by, she said, "there was less and less of those people."

Now, Jain -- together with Huijia Lin of the University of Washington and Amit Sahai, Jain's adviser at UCLA -- has planted a flag for the makers. In a paper posted online on August 18, the three researchers show for the first time how to build indistinguishability obfuscation using only "standard" security assumptions. All cryptographic protocols rest on assumptions -- some, such as the famous RSA algorithm, depend on the widely held belief that standard computers will never be able to quickly factor the product of two large prime numbers. A cryptographic protocol is only as secure as its assumptions, and previous attempts at iO were built on untested and ultimately shaky foundations. The new protocol, by contrast, depends on security assumptions that have been widely used and studied in the past. "Barring a really surprising development, these assumptions will stand," Ishai said. While the protocol is far from ready to be deployed in real-world applications, from a theoretical standpoint it provides an instant way to build an array of cryptographic tools that were previously out of reach. For instance, it enables the creation of "deniable" encryption, in which you can plausibly convince an attacker that you sent an entirely different message from the one you really sent, and "functional" encryption, in which you can give chosen users different levels of access to perform computations using your data. The new result should definitively silence the iO skeptics, Ishai said. "Now there will no longer be any doubts about the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation," he said. "It seems like a happy end."

Panasonic has collaborated with JR East on a vacuum cleaner-style device to solve a new problem that has sprung up on recent years: a rise in people dropping wireless earbuds onto train tracks. "The device is being tested at Ikebukuro station, a major hub in northern Tokyo, and early results suggest it works much faster than the traditional grabber," reports The Verge. From the report: JR East, the part of Japan's formerly private railway group that covers the Tokyo and Tohoku regions of the country, says that there were 950 incidents of dropped earbuds across 78 Tokyo train stations in the July-September quarter, Jiji Press reports. The figure apparently accounts for a quarter of all dropped items. According to JR East, station staff normally use a grabber-style "magic hand" tool to pick up larger items that fall onto tracks, like hats or smartphones. But the gravel between the rails makes smaller objects -- like, say, a left AirPod Pro -- more difficult to retrieve, meaning staff sometimes have to wait until after the last train.

Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said this week, making an ambitious pledge to sharply accelerate the country's global warming targets, even as it plans to build more than a dozen new coal-burning power plants in the coming years. From a report: The prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, laid out the goal during his first major policy speech since taking office in September, when Japan's longest-serving leader, Shinzo Abe, abruptly resigned. The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan's regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060. Addressing Japan's Parliament, Mr. Suga called for the country to "be carbon neutral in 2050," a declaration that drew loud applause from lawmakers. Achieving that goal will be good not only for the world, he said, but also for Japan's economy and global standing. "Taking an aggressive approach to global warming will bring about a transformation in our industrial structure and economic system that will lead to big growth" in the economy, he said, answering critics who have warned of the economic consequences. Japan's new climate pledge is a major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees, as called for in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

"We're in a new world where governments are more concerned about the security of their digital infrastructure and the resiliency of their supply chains," Jimmy Goodrich, vice president of global policy with the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association, tells Bloomberg.

"The techno-nationalist trends gaining traction in multiple capitals around the world are a challenge to the semiconductor industry." At once highly globalized and yet concentrated in the hands of a few countries, the industry has choke points that the U.S. under the presidency of Donald Trump has sought to exploit in order to thwart China's plans to become a world leader in chip production. Washington says Beijing can only achieve that goal through state subvention [funding] at the expense of U.S. industry, while furthering Communist Party access to high-tech tools for surveillance and repression. China rejects the allegations, accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy and acting out of political motivation. For both sides, Taiwan, which is responsible for some 70% of chips manufactured to order, is the new front line...

Citing the need to promote "digital sovereignty," the European Commission is exploring a 30 billion-euro ($35 billion) drive to raise Europe's share of the world chip market to 20%, from less than 10% now. Japan is also looking to bolster its domestic capacity. At least one Japanese delegation traveled to Taiwan in May and June this year in the hope of convincing TSMC to invest in Japan, a person with knowledge of the visit said. But TSMC announced in May that it was building a $12 billion facility in Arizona, and the company declined to receive any foreign visitors seeking to woo it, said another person familiar with the company's thinking....

A focus of Beijing is to accelerate research into so-called third-generation semiconductors — circuits made of materials such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride, a fledgling technology where no country dominates. Yet without silicon capabilities it will be difficult for China to build a proper semiconductor industry, said a senior TSMC official. Another person from a company involved in third-generation chip production said designing them is an art, and even poaching a team of designers won't necessarily guarantee success. The consensus is it won't be easy for China to catch up, especially at the cutting-edge where TSMC and Samsung are producing chips whose circuits are measured in single-digit nanometers, or billionths of a meter. SMIC [a partially state-owned Chinese semiconductor foundry] would have to double annual research spending in the next two-to-three years just to prevent its technology gap with those companies widening, says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Charles Shum.

The tussle raises the prospect of a broader decoupling of the global industry with two distinct supply chains.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Contaminated water that could soon be released into the sea from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contains radioactive carbon with the potential to damage human DNA, environmental rights organization Greenpeace has warned.

The environmental group claims that the 1.23 million metric tons of water stored at the plant — scene of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster — contains "dangerous" levels of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 and other "hazardous" radionuclides, which it says will have "serious long-term consequences for communities and the environment" if the water is released into the Pacific Ocean.

To cool fuel cores at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has pumped in tens of thousands of tons of water over the years. Once used, the water is put into storage. But nine years on from Japan's worst nuclear disaster, storage space is running out, and the government is still deciding what to do with the water. Authorities, including the country's environment minister, have indicated the only solution is to release it into the ocean — a plan facing opposition from environmental campaigners and fishing industry representatives. On Friday, the Japanese government postponed a decision on what to do with the water.

Chinese technology companies including Huawei have expressed strong concerns to local regulators about Nvidia's proposed acquisition of Arm, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter said, potentially jeopardizing the $40 billion semiconductor deal. From a report: Several of the country's most influential tech firms have been lobbying the State Administration for Market Regulation to either reject the transaction or impose conditions to ensure their access to Arm technology, the people said. Chief among their concerns is that Nvidia may force the British firm to cut off Chinese clients, they said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations. China's fear is that Arm -- whose semiconductor designs and architecture are central to most of the world's electronics from smartphones to supercomputers -- will become yet another pawn in a U.S.-Chinese struggle for tech supremacy. Nvidia is buying the British firm from Japan's SoftBank, bringing it under American jurisdiction and theoretically threatening its cherished status as a neutral party in the chip industry.

Japan will join forces with the United States and Europe to take on any market abuses by the four Big Tech companies, the new head of its antitrust watchdog said on Monday, a sign Tokyo will join global efforts to regulate digital platform operators. From a report: Kazuyuki Furuya, chairman of Japan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC), also said Tokyo could open a probe into any merger or business tie-up involving fitness tracker maker Fitbit if the size of such deals are big enough. "If the size of any merger or business-tie up is big, we can launch an anti-monopoly investigation into the buyer's process of acquiring a start-up (like Fitbit)," he told Reuters. "We're closely watching developments including in Europe." EU antitrust regulators in August launched an investigation into a $2.1 billion deal by Google's bid to buy Fitbit that aimed to take on Apple and Samsung in the wearable technology market. Japan is laying the groundwork to regulate platform operators. Among them are big tech giants dubbed "GAFA" - Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook -- that face various antitrust probes in western nations.

hcs_$reboot shares a report from CBS News: Japan will release more than a million tons of treated radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea in a decades-long operation, reports said Friday, despite strong opposition from environmentalists, local fishermen and farmers. The release of the water, which has been filtered to reduce radioactivity, is likely to start in 2022 at the earliest. The decision ends years of debate over how to dispose of the liquid that includes water used to cool the power station after it was hit by a massive tsunami in 2011. A government panel said earlier this year that releasing the water into the sea or evaporating it were both "realistic options." The treated water is currently kept in a thousand huge tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi site, where reactors went into meltdown nearly a decade ago after the earthquake-triggered tsunami. Plant operator TEPCO is building more tanks, but all will be full by mid-2022.

A surge in worldwide demand by educators for low-cost laptops has created shipment delays and pitted desperate schools against one another. Districts with deep pockets often win out. From a report: A surge in worldwide demand by educators for low-cost laptops and Chromebooks -- up to 41 percent higher than last year -- has created monthslong shipment delays and pitted desperate schools against one another. Districts with deep pockets often win out, leaving poorer ones to give out printed assignments and wait until winter for new computers to arrive. That has frustrated students around the country, especially in rural areas and communities of color, which also often lack high-speed internet access and are most likely to be on the losing end of the digital divide. In 2018, 10 million students didn't have an adequate device at home, a study by education nonprofit Common Sense Media found. That gap, with much of the country still learning remotely, could now be crippling.

"The learning loss that's taken place since March when they left, when schools closed, it'll take years to catch up," Ms. Henry said. "This could impact an entire generation of our students." Sellers are facing stunning demand from schools in countries from Germany to El Salvador, said Michael Boreham, an education technology analyst at the British company Futuresource Consulting. Japan alone is expected to order seven million devices. Global computer shipments to schools were up 24 percent from 2019 in the second quarter, Mr. Boreham said, and were projected to hit that 41 percent jump in the third quarter, which just ended. Chromebooks, web-based devices that run on software from Google and are made by an array of companies, are in particular demand because they cost less than regular laptops. That has put huge pressure on a supply chain that cobbles laptop parts from all over the world, usually assembling them in Asian factories, Mr. Boreham said. While that supply chain has slowly geared up, the spike in demand is "so far over and above what has historically been the case," said Stephen Baker, a consumer electronics analyst at the NPD Group. "The fact that we've been able to do that and there's still more demand out there, it's something you can't plan for."

Members of the intelligence-sharing alliance Five Eyes, along with government representatives for Japan and India, have published a statement over the weekend calling on tech companies to come up with a solution for law enforcement to access end-to-end encrypted communications. From a report: The statement is the alliance's latest effort to get tech companies to agree to encryption backdoors. The Five Eyes alliance, comprised of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have made similar calls to tech giants in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Just like before, government officials claim tech companies have put themselves in a corner by incorporating end-to-end encryption (E2EE) into their products. If properly implemented, E2EE lets users have secure conversations -- may them be chat, audio, or video -- without sharing the encryption key with the tech companies. Representatives from the seven governments argue that the way E2EE encryption is currently supported on today's major tech platforms prohibits law enforcement from investigating crime rings, but also the tech platforms themselves from enforcing their own terms of service. Signatories argue that "particular implementations of encryption technology" are currently posing challenges to law enforcement investigations, as the tech platforms themselves can't access some communications and provide needed data to investigators.

BishopBerkeley writes: In another first, the editors of the The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) endorse Joe Biden by stating that the current government needs to be fired. Although they don't mention any names, the editors of the NEJM state in shockingly forceful and accusatory language that the current administration is totally incompetent and does not deserve to keep its job. The editorial, somberly titled "Dying in a Leadership Vacuum" bases its opinion on some dispiriting statistics:

"The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly."

The Administration's extreme rhetoric and extreme actions are earning extreme reactions. Last month, Scientific American broke a 175-year tradition of not endorsing a presidential candidate by throwing their support behind Joe Biden. "We'd love to stay out of politics, but this president has been so anti-science that we can't ignore it," editor in chief, Laura Helmuth told The Washington Post.

The editor in chief of Science Magazine also denounced Trump, but stopped short of endorsing presidential candidate Joe Biden.