The swearing in of new citizens often makes news in the U.S., especially if it happens in unusual circumstances such as one party's national convention. Much less reported are the many citizenship renunciations by Americans, and the travails leading up to these life decisions. Almost all those giving up their U.S. nationality are expats. And for each renouncer going through the ordeal, there are countless others thinking about it. Why? One recent press release in particular has caused quite a stir. It suggested that, after "a steep decline" in recent years, renunciations in the first half of this year soared to 5,816, more than twice as many as gave up their passport in all of 2019. The implication, as reported breathlessly in the American media, was that expats, already fed up with President Donald Trump, finally despaired over his mishandling of Covid-19 and quit. Other factors were cited as merely secondary. But these renunciation numbers are notoriously flawed. They're based on a list of names of renouncers published every quarter by the Internal Revenue Service — experts call this a form of "doxxing." That list lags in time and jumbles data. In reality, most embassies and consulates stopped making renunciation appointments this spring, owing to the pandemic. And the dip in prior years, according to experts, was due to backlogs and underreporting. Read the whole thing. China Just Called Trump's Bluff on TikTok — Tim Culpan Iceland Has Very Good News About Coronavirus Immunity — Ferdinando Giugliano New Polls Don't Bode Well for Trump — Jonathan Bernstein Buffett Going Big in Japan Is All About the Cash — David Fickling AT&T, Ready for Your $30 Billion DirecTV Haircut? — Tara Lachapelle Black Lives Matter in Unlikely Places — Francis Wilkinson Most Dangerous Waters in the World Are in the Mediterranean — James Stavridis America Needs President Bill Lincoln — John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Trump Is Winning the Vaccine Debate With Public-Health Experts — Tyler Cowen This is the Weekend Edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a roundup of the 10 most popular stories Bloomberg Opinion published this week based on web readership. New subscribers to the newsletter can sign up here. | 
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