Ripped from the Headlines: August 2020: This Week In Words: August 1–6, 2020

The Trump administration is ordering the Census Bureau to speed up its count by a month, meaning it has to finish six weeks from now, a task that four former directors say will result in severely incomplete counts. They called for the creation of an independent group to audit the quality of the count. Democrats have criticized this move, saying that it's a partisan attempt to undercount areas with more Democratic voters, depriving them of representation.

In the second episode of her podcast, former first lady Michelle Obama said that she's suffering from "some form of low-grade depression" because of everything that's happening: the pandemic, widespread racism, and what she says is the administration's mishandling of just about every crisis. Ipokrisis is Greek for "pretending" or "acting."

Facebook and Twitter both took down posts from President Trump and his campaign that the companies said broke their rules against misinformation about the coronavirus. The campaign's Twitter account was blocked until it deleted a post falsely claiming that children are immune to Covid-19, and the President's personal account also deleted the same post.

The federal pandemic assistance of $600 per week is running out, and Congress has not yet passed a law to continue helping families in need. With over 30 million Americans out of work, and with the ban on evictions also expiring, people are worried that their bad situations will get much worse before any more financial help arrives.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the National Rifle Association, saying that the organization's leaders have used the nonprofit for their personal financial gain, costing it $64 million in the last three years. She is asking the Court to dissolve the group, which was founded in New York, and to force the leadership to pay back the money they used for travel, clothing, and other expenses. Nefarius is Latin for "wicked" or "morally offensive."

On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, there are few survivors of the nuclear explosion remaining to tell their stories. To keep the memories of the event alive, the Hiroshima city government has hired people known as denshosha ("legacy successors") to learn survivors' stories and tell them as if they were their own. Pacifism, which has been Japan's national policy since the end of WWII, comes from the Latin pacificus, meaning "tending to make peace."

Hundreds were killed and thousands injured in a huge explosion in the port of Beirut, Lebanon when nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate — a fertilizer also used to make explosives — detonated after a fire. The blast did massive damage to large portions of the city, and was heard 100 miles away in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus.

The Manhattan District Attorney is investigating the Trump corporation for a number of crimes, and recently served Deutsche Bank with a subpoena for the company's financial records. The Trump organization is trying to have the case dismissed, but the DA says that there's abundant evidence of past and present crimes. including possible instances of bank fraud.

The city council in Portland, Maine voted unanimously to ban the use of facial recognition software. A number of groups, from the ACLU to Black Lives Matter, have been demanding that such software, which misidentifies darker-skinned people at rates much higher than white people, be prohibited. Maine is now the third state to have some kind of a law against facial recognition.

A recent poll shows that 82 percent of K–12 teachers say they're concerned about returning to in-person classes in September, and two thirds say that they'd rather teach remotely. Teachers say they're worried about their own health and that of their students, as well as other me members of their students' families who may be elderly or vulnerable. Additionally, the poll showed that teachers worry that safety protocols will interfere with learning.