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“These are very difficult tradeoffs that our society has to make,” said Dr. Woodcock. “The reason we approve these drugs is for people in pain. But we can’t ignore the epidemic on the other side.”

In 2011, about 131 million prescriptions for hydrocodone-containing medications were written for some 47 million patients, according to government estimates. That volume of prescriptions amounts to about five billion pills.

Schedule II drugs are those drugs with the highest potential for abuse that can be legally prescribed.

Along with changing how doctors prescribe these drugs, the classification change will also impose added storage and recordkeeping requirements on druggists. In some states, nurse practitioners and other health care professionals who can currently prescribe hydrocodone-containing drugs may no longer be able to do so.

it should be even more clear now: Facebook owns web media distribution.

The mobile web has exploded. This is due to the falling cost and rising quality of smartphones. Now, both Apple and Google have huge numbers of great apps, and people love them.

a good chunk of what we might have called dark social visits are actually Facebook mobile app visitors in disguise.

beginning last October, Facebook made changes in its algorithm that started pushing massive amounts of traffic to media publishers. In some cases, as at The Atlantic, where I last worked, our Facebook traffic went up triple-digit percentages. Facebook simultaneously also pushed users to like pages from media companies, which drove up the fan-counts at all kinds of media sites. If you see a page with a million followers, there is a 99 percent chance that it got a push from Facebook.

Chief among the non-gaming apps is Facebook. They’ve done a remarkable job building a mobile app that keeps people using it.

when people are going through their news feeds on the Facebook app and they click on a link, it’s as if someone cut and pasted that link into the browser, meaning that the Facebook app and the target website don’t do the normal handshaking that they do on the web. In the desktop scenario, the incoming visitor has a tout that runs ahead to the website and says, “Hey, I’m coming from Facebook.com.” In the mobile app scenario that communication, known as the referrer, does not happen.

Facebook—which every media publisher already knows owns them—actually has a much tighter grip on web traffic than anyone had thought. Which would make their big-footing among publishers that much more interesting. Because they certainly know how much traffic they’re sending to all your favorite websites, even if those websites themselves do not.

Whenever you go to a website, you take along a little profile called a “user agent.” It says what my operating system is and what kind of browser I use, along with some other information.

A story’s shareability is now largely determined by its shareability on Facebook, with all its attendant quirks and feedback loops. We’re all optimizing for Facebook now,

the social networks—by which I mostly mean Facebook—have begun to eat away at the roots of the old ways of sharing on non-commercial platforms.

what people like to do with their phones, en masse, is open up the Facebook app and thumb through their news feeds.

If you report long enough on politics and public life, even there you will see examples of exceptional strategic, analytic, and bargaining intelligence, along with a lot of clownishness.

They know what they don’t know. This to me is the most consistent marker of real intelligence. The more acute someone’s ability to perceive and assess, the more likely that person is to recognize his or her limits. These include the unevenness of any one person’s talents; the specific areas of weakness—social awkwardness, musical tin ear, being stronger with numbers than with words, or vice versa; and the incomparable vastness of what any individual person can never know. To read books seriously is to be staggered by the knowledge of how many more books will remain beyond your ken. It’s like looking up at the star-filled sky.

The bureau’s powers became clear during the Trump administration, which wielded its authority aggressively, though somewhat erratically, using the agency to curb exports of advanced technology goods like semiconductors to the telecommunications company Huawei and other Chinese businesses.

The Biden administration is still carrying out a review of its China policies and has not indicated how it plans to use the bureau’s powers.

“China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system — all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to,”

That includes how to use the Commerce Department’s powers, including whether to block more exports of American technology, whether to keep or scrap Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign metals, and how to set the standards for national security reviews of foreign investments.

They have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch because the United States are going to continue to grow and expand.”

Congress updated its laws governing export controls, giving the Bureau of Industry and Security more power to determine what kind of emerging technologies cannot be shared with China and other geopolitical rivals.

It’s that these guys have been trained for 30 years to think that exports are good for America and that’s that,” Mr. Scissors said. “So surprise, they don’t want tighter export controls.”

“The sense of urgency in recent years inclined our leadership to make decisions without reference to what industry thought,

the Biden administration is considering candidates to lead the Bureau of Industry and Security.

Mr. Wolf, who was previously assistant secretary at the bureau, issued the sanctions against ZTE. He has consistently argued that restrictions that are unclear and unpredictable can backfire, “harming the very interests they were designed to protect.”

The administration may also be considering less prominent candidates for the bureau’s three Senate-confirmed posts,

Whoever leads the bureau, officials at the National Security Council are likely to play a guiding role, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

With Germany set for a four-day-weekend in early April due to the Easter holiday, Spahn said the country isn't ready to relax travel and physical distancing rules. In fact, he said, Germans should be prepared to revert to tighter restrictions.

"Health experts are calling on the German government to order a third lockdown to prevent hospitals from being overrun," NPR's Rob Schmitz reports from Berlin.

As it tries to boost its vaccine campaign, Germany is also moving ahead with talks to acquire Russia's Sputnik V vaccine — with or without the rest of the EU's involvement.

Spahn said Friday that he believes a deal with Russia could be reached quickly once a delivery amount is agreed upon.

The pandemic, which had infected more than 64,000 and killed at least 900 in the US as of Wednesday evening, has upended American life and brought the economy to a halt a little more than seven months before the general election.

A new Gallup poll shows 60% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the crisis, while 38% disapprove. A Monmouth University survey shows a tighter margin: 50% say the President has done a good job; 45% say he has done a bad job.

Perrine called Democrats' ads "disgusting" and a "politicization" of the pandemic.

"There'll be plenty of time for voters to judge @realDonaldTrump & his handling of the Coronavirus crisis, including the first weeks when he sent dangerously misleading signals by downplaying the threat," David Axelrod, a CNN contributor and former aide to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter as the first round of coronavirus advertising began to emerge last week.

Using Trump's own words and actions to remind people of his failures while he tries to rewrite history is essential," Plouffe tweeted.

Not only does this country have more guns than people, but over the last 30 years, Americans have grown less supportive of stricter gun laws. Astonishingly, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns except those used by police officers and other authorized persons; today that figure is 19 percent.

Bearing in mind that the killers in Texas and Buffalo were both only 18, we could try to get through to the next generation.

Make guns less cool, less acceptable, less a part of the supposedly “American way of life.” Scare people. Gross them out. Even try humor.

Or it could go personal, using a testimonial from a child who lost his sister in a school shooting or a teenager whose friend committed suicide at 14 using a weapon kept in the house by his own parents.

Public education and creative P.S.A.s helped reduce teenage cigarette use significantly. While in the pocket of the tobacco industry, Hollywood played a key role in glamorizing smoking, but then later, after paid tobacco product placement was banned, clamped down on the appearance of smoking on film and TV. Those efforts are ongoing.

Sometimes, of course, a cigarette, like a gun, is key to a movie’s story line or characters

Through technology and schools, it could bring kids into creating and disseminating the message.