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Trump never misses an opportunity to make any situation about himself. That's even true during the time of a deadly pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 67,000 Americans and where business shutdowns have resulted in likely the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression

in the approximately 780 minutes Trump spoke over the past month at press conference he offered less than 300 seconds of empathy to those suffering.

And while Trump has tweeted some recognition for first responders -- on March 19 he thanked them for their "dedication and sacrifice" -- just look at Trump's tweets in the last few days. They're all about Trump. On Sunday morning, right around the time he tweeted his complaint about to former President Bush's impeachment response, Trump also slammed the media for not "showing" polls that he believes make him look good -- "The Fake News doesn't show real polls."

Over the last few days, Trump reminded us time and time again that he sees himself as the victim in this crisis

While people can improve their recall through tricks and practice, eidetikers are born, not made, says Searleman. The ability isn't linked to other traits, such as high intelligence. Children are more likely to possess eidetic memory than adults, though they begin losing the ability after age six as they learn to process information more abstractly.

Although psychologists don't know why children lose the ability, the loss of this skill may be functional: Were humans to remember every single image, it would be difficult to make it through the day.

"If we can take some pressure off the economy fine, but my primary focus is to make sure the virus is contained and defeated. And we're just going to have to suffer through the economic consequences.”

Over the last few days, some economic policy advisers have started to focus on how long lockdowns and other measures to contain the virus might last, one outside adviser said.

Trump believes "we are strong and need a strong economy as we deal with this crisis," the source said.

Moore questioned California's plan to shut down much of the economy last week. "We have to ask this question, is it worth trillions of dollars of losses?," he said on Fox News. Moore didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

"We’re going to have, in my opinion, if it continues for long, because of the financial distress that people will have … a month from now, two months from now, three months from now when people are financially devastated, the domestic violence, suicides, deprivation that we’re inflicting upon ourselves," he said.

Clive Wynne, a psychologist specializing in dog behavior, contends that what makes your furry friend special is not its intellect but its ability to bond with you. And not just with you. The dog’s ability to bond across species — with sheep, goats, even (horrors!) cats

Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead trout are considered threatened or endangered in the Northwest’s Columbia basin region

The fish are a keystone food source for other species, and an endangered population of orcas may be starving for lack of enough wild salmon to eat. Many scientists favor removing dams on some rivers to save the orcas and the fish. But the idea faces resistance from government agencies that manage the rivers.

A video of salmon traveling through a long tube went viral in 2019. You probably watched it. But the Whooshh cannon — its actual name — is a serious tool that conservationists are testing not only to help fish migrate, but to contain invasive carp that foul North American waterways.

A New and Improved Table could come in handy: As more superheavy elements are discovered, their behaviors could challenge the integrity of Mendeleev’s memorable chart.

Stocks fell 4.5% in New York

Some pockets of the market reacted positively to the Fed moves. Signs of stress in the corporate debt sector eased, with the CDX Investment Grade index spread tightening. Bond ETFs eligible for central-bank purchases rallied and the dollar retreated versus major peers.

Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank chiefs separately joined an emergency call to work on a joint response to the economic blow dealt by the pandemic.

U.S. unemployment rate may hit 30% in the second quarter, along with a 50% drop in gross domestic product. Morgan Stanley expects the U.S. economy to plummet 30% in the second quarter.

The package included several unprecedented steps for the Fed, including intervention in the corporate bond market, purchases of commercial asset-backed mortgages and exchange-traded funds, and, if Congress clears the way, a significant Main Street lending program directly aimed at aiding small businesses.

emergency facilities will employ a total of $300 billion, backed by $30 billion from the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund.

Fed said a week ago it would buy at least $500 billion of Treasuries and $200 billion of agency MBS. The Fed will now make those purchases unlimited and will take on a slew of new efforts, many aimed at directly aiding employers and households, as well as cities and states.

Saying he had no regrets, he added: "I believe in all circumstances I behaved reasonably and legally. The legal rules do not inevitably cover all circumstances - including those I found myself in." Also on Monday, Johnson expressed "regret" for the "confusion, anger and pain" experienced by the British people as a result of the controversy; when pressed on whether he believes Cummings' decision has compromised the government's coronavirus message, Johnson doubled down on his support for Cummings, asserting, "I do not believe that anybody at Number 10 has done anything to undermine our message."

"The regulations made clear, I believe, that risks to the health of a small child were an exceptional situation."

To talk of the British sense of fair play is almost a cliché. But there is certainly a particular sensitivity among Britons to suggestions of hypocrisy which have thus far thwarted Cummings' attempts to brush off criticism of his excursion, and which contrast with, say, the relative lack of fuss in the US over the revelation that Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's daughter, traveled from Washington DC to New Jersey to celebrate Passover last month.

A controversial figure who relishes his role as an outsider, he also has a common touch when it comes to distilling a message with a brilliance complemented by Johnson's own flair for capturing the national mood. So while it was Johnson, then-Mayor of London, who in 2016 sensed an appetite for leaving the EU which his more senior colleagues missed, it was Cummings, head of the Vote Leave Campaign, who boiled it down to the simple and devastatingly effective slogan of "Take Back Control."

For a man known for his gregarious nature, the British Prime Minister has few close political friends; his inexperienced cabinet was appointed as much for their loyalty and support for his key policy of leading the UK out of the European Union as any long-term affinity with Johnson.

At the start of the lockdown, Dr. Catherine Calderwood, Scotland's Chief Medical Officer, fell on her sword after admitting two overnight visits at her seaside holiday cottage, having fronted the campaign urging Scots to stay home. Though Calderwood apologized for her actions and initially said she planned to stay on in her post, she later released a statement that she had quit and acknowledging that the "justifiable focus" on her actions could pose a distraction to the response to the pandemic.

As senior adviser since summer 2019 when Johnson became Prime Minister, the notoriously prickly Cummings has rubbed many Downing Street denizens the wrong way. But when coronavirus hit, it was he who crafted the message, "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives," which has come to define Britain's battle against the virus and the protective shield the country threw around its beloved health service.

The hitherto wildly popular Johnson's favorability ratings have begun to slip while a recent poll by YouGov found 49% disapproved of the Prime Minister's path out of lockdown compared to 36% who supported it.

The former Chief Constable of Durham Police, Mike Barton, has warned that Cummings' behavior, and the Prime Minister's defense of it, will make attempts to enforce the lockdown impossible, potentially endangering the slow but steady progress the UK has made in reducing the spread of the virus.

The consequences could be even more serious if a mass loss of faith in both the Johnson government and his lockdown results in the public breaking the rules just at the moment the Prime Minister is urging them to stand firm.

Fears about joblessness on this scale could jolt markets again. Investors have priced in a recession by now, but may still be processing the size of the hole the coronavirus has blown into the global economy, Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, told me.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down 35% from its all-time high in mid-February, erasing all its gains since President Donald Trump's inauguration. Between January 20 and last Thursday, $27 trillion was wiped off global stocks, according to Bank of America.

We ink-stained wretches admired Obama’s thoughtful ways around a subject, his meandering along pathways of implication and possibility, culminating in a formulation that, often as not, would be punctuated with an ellipsis rather than a period. One could often see his mind working as he spoke.

When Obama speaks, he obviously chooses each word with great care. He understands his responsibility to the nation and the world by expressing himself so carefully that nothing is left to interpretation.

Obama’s natural elegance, contrasted to Trump’s bombastic bleats, provided a reawakening to our better angels and the higher truths that have been diminished or forgotten these past four years.

we’ve learned that governance isn’t only about policies; it’s also about the persona embodied by the president of the United States.

Obama’s early losses, of his father through abandonment and his mother from premature death, are what propelled him to the summit. I spotted both engines in him long ago because I share them.

Yet the loss of leadership capability and potential that results from unresolved grief, as well as the human suffering and pain, can seem beyond measure.

America’s word is worth less today than at any time since 1945. Trust is not an easily recoverable commodity. Solemn accords entered into by the United States, like the Iran nuclear deal, are ripped up — and replaced by empty threats. Friends like the Kurds who have shed blood to inflict great harm on the Islamic State are betrayed. Day after day a president for whom facts don’t matter dismantles the idea of truth.

A recent report from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian quoted the Saudi ambassador to Britain calling Trump a “tweet monster” and saying the abrupt American troop withdrawal from northern Syria “does not give one incredible confidence.”

Sure, but this Middle East demeans the sacrifice of the thousands of Americans who died for something better, and makes a nonsense of the nearly trillion American dollars spent to that end. Trump is not cutting losses; he’s perpetuating them. Iran could not have asked for American chaos more conducive to its interests. Nor could Putin, al-Assad and Erdogan.

Trump folded to Turkey’s Kurd Derangement Syndrome. Even the plankton known as the Republican Party were so appalled that some lawmakers developed sufficient backbone to protest.

“Foreign policy is what I’ll be remembered for,” Trump has said. Damn right.

In 2014, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the “greatest dangers in the world.” A plurality put inequality first, ahead of “religious and ethnic hatred,” nuclear weapons, and environmental degradation. And yet people don’t agree about what, exactly, “equality” means.

One side argues that the city should guarantee procedural equality: it should insure that all students and families are equally informed about and encouraged to study for the entrance exam. The other side argues for a more direct, representation-based form of equality: it would jettison the exam, adopting a new admissions system designed to produce student bodies reflective of the city’s demography

In the past year, for example, New York City residents have found themselves in a debate over the city’s élite public high schools

The complexities of egalitarianism are especially frustrating because inequalities are so easy to grasp. C.E.O.s, on average, make almost three hundred times what their employees make; billionaire donors shape our politics; automation favors owners over workers; urban economies grow while rural areas stagnate; the best health care goes to the richest.

It’s not just about money. Tocqueville, writing in 1835, noted that our “ordinary practices of life” were egalitarian, too: we behaved as if there weren’t many differences among us. Today, there are “premiere” lines for popcorn at the movies and five tiers of Uber;

Inequality is everywhere, and unignorable. We’ve diagnosed the disease. Why can’t we agree on a cure?

In a book based on those lectures, “One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality,” Waldron points out that people are also marked by differences of skill, experience, creativity, and virtue. Given such consequential differences, he asks, in what sense are people “equal”?

According to the Declaration of Independence, it is “self-evident” that all men are created equal. But, from a certain perspective, it’s our inequality that’s self-evident.

More than twenty per cent of Americans, according to a 2015 poll, agree: they believe that the statement “All men are created equal” is false.

In Waldron’s view, though, it’s not a binary choice; it’s possible to see people as equal and unequal simultaneously. A society can sort its members into various categories—lawful and criminal, brilliant and not—while also allowing some principle of basic equality to circumscribe its judgments and, in some contexts, override them

Egalitarians like Dworkin and Waldron call this principle “deep equality.” It’s because of deep equality that even those people who acquire additional, justified worth through their actions—heroes, senators, pop stars—can still be considered fundamentally no better than anyone else.

In the course of his search, he explores centuries of intellectual history. Many thinkers, from Cicero to Locke, have argued that our ability to reason is what makes us equals.

Other thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, have cited our moral sense.

Some philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, have suggested that it’s our capacity to suffer that equalizes us

Waldron finds none of these arguments totally persuasive.

In various religious traditions, he observes, equality flows not just from broad assurances that we are all made in God’s image but from some sense that everyone is the protagonist in a saga of error, realization, and redemption: we’re equal because God cares about how things turn out for each of us.

Waldron himself is taken by Hannah Arendt’s related concept of “natality,” the notion that what each of us share is having been born as a “newcomer,” entering into history with “the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”

equality may be not a self-evident fact about human beings but a human-made social construction that we must choose to put into practice.

In the end, Waldron concludes that there is no “small polished unitary soul-like substance” that makes us equal; there’s only a patchwork of arguments for our deep equality, collectively compelling but individually limited.

Equality is a composite idea—a nexus of complementary and competing intuitions.

The blurry nature of equality makes it hard to solve egalitarian dilemmas from first principles. In each situation, we must feel our way forward, reconciling our conflicting intuitions about what “equal” means.

The communities that have the easiest time doing that tend to have some clearly defined, shared purpose. Sprinters competing in a hundred-metre dash have varied endowments and train in different conditions; from a certain perspective, those differences make every race unfair.

By embracing an agreed-upon theory of equality before the race, the sprinters can find collective meaning in the ranked inequalities that emerge when it ends

Perhaps because necessity is so demanding, our egalitarian commitments tend to rest on a different principle: luck.

“Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society—all of us regarded collectively—to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it.” Anderson, in an influential coinage, calls this outlook “luck egalitarianism.”

This sort of artisanal egalitarianism is comparatively easy to arrange. Mass-producing it is what’s hard. A whole society can’t get together in a room to hash things out. Instead, consensus must coalesce slowly around broad egalitarian principles.

No principle is perfect; each contains hidden dangers that emerge with time. Many people, in contemplating the division of goods, invoke the principle of necessity: the idea that our first priority should be the equal fulfillment of fundamental needs. The hidden danger here becomes apparent once we go past a certain point of subsistence.

a core problem that bedevils egalitarianism—what philosophers call “the problem of expensive tastes.”

The problem—what feels like a necessity to one person seems like a luxury to another—is familiar to anyone who’s argued with a foodie spouse or roommate about the grocery bil

The problem is so insistent that a whole body of political philosophy—“prioritarianism”—is devoted to the challenge of sorting people with needs from people with wants

the line shifts as the years pass. Medical procedures that seem optional today become necessities tomorrow; educational attainments that were once unusual, such as college degrees, become increasingly indispensable with time

Some thinkers try to tame the problem of expensive tastes by asking what a “normal” or “typical” person might find necessary. But it’s easy to define “typical” too narrowly, letting unfair assumptions influence our judgment

an odd feature of our social contract: if you’re fired from your job, unemployment benefits help keep you afloat, while if you stop working to have a child you must deal with the loss of income yourself. This contradiction, she writes, reveals an assumption that “the desire to procreate is just another expensive taste”; it reflects, she argues, the sexist presumption that “atomistic egoism and self-sufficiency” are the human norm. The word “necessity” suggests the idea of a bare minimum. In fact, it sets a high bar. Clearing it may require rethinking how society functions.

In those pictures of grief in which the subjects are caught looking directly at the photographer, their expressions are often oppositional: What are you looking at?

The point is to witness history, not to change it.

Grief, more often than not, is a reaction to the unspeakable

the song struck a deeper chord of loss in those who heard it, touching a place that sometimes only music can reach.