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the fact that airplanes help spread disease across geographies does not mean that you are necessarily at risk during flight.

Airplanes also use the same air filter — a HEPA filter — recommended by the CDC for isolation rooms with recirculated air. Such filters capture 99.97 percent of airborne particles.

Consider one study that examined a passenger with tuberculosis on an airplane. It found that the median risk of infection to the other 169 passengers on the airplane was between 1 in 10,000 to 1 in a million.

Wearing a mask, as some airlines now require, reduced the incidence of infection another 10-fold.

The required aircraft systems do a really good job of controlling airborne bacteria and viruses.

To get technical, airplanes deliver 10 to 12 air changes per hour. In a hospital isolation room, the minimum target is six air changes per hour for existing facilities and 12 air changes per hour for new.

If planes made you sick, we would expect to see millions of people sick every year attributable to flights. We haven’t seen it because it’s just not happening.

What’s more, airplanes are essentially designed to isolate airflow. Even if someone coughs on your flight without a mask, it is likely those virus particles will travel one or two rows,

To guard against transmission via large droplets and contaminated surfaces, we do need to take some additional steps. Wearing a mask on planes should be mandated, and wiping down tables and arm rests with a disinfectant provides an additional layer of defense.

you are more at risk of getting sick when traveling, but it’s not the airplane that’s making you sick.

Every time you fly, you may also take a cab, bus or subway; stand in long lines in the airport; eat unhealthy foods; sit for extended durations; spend time in spaces with hundreds or thousands of other travelers; stay at a hotel or friend’s home; arrive in a different climate and change time zones, disrupting your sleep. All of these factors are known to affect your immune system.

In 2013, I was one of the lead authors of a report for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies on infectious disease mitigation in airports and airplanes. Let me distill some of the recommendations from that report

For starters, airports should mandate mask wearing; increase ventilation rates; make bathrooms touchless; consider deploying upper-room germicidal UV fixtures in areas with high-occupant density; institute temperature screening; deploy hand-sanitizer stations; and, once passengers arrive at their gates, require that they stay in their designated area except for bathroom usage.

Airlines should ensure gate-based ventilation is operating during boarding and disembarkation; carefully choreograph the loading of airplanes; mandate mask use; and provide meals and bottled water during boarding and discontinue in-flight meal and drink service.

Individuals have an important role to play, too. First, stay home and do not travel if sick. Comply with rules for mask wearing; wash hands before and after each step at the airport; keep the personal overhead ventilation on and pointed down; and maintain physical distancing to the extent possible.

The two have lately engaged in sabre-rattling and name-calling. But such tension has been rare during their seven-decade rivalry as modern nations.

long as India and China were focused on building their own core structures, each largely ignored the other.

India and China maintained overlapping claims, and their forces sometimes clashed, as in a brief war in 1962. But they both also judged that there was not enough at stake to fight a big war over.

unresolved challenges multiply, the advantage shifting to whoever poses the sharpest ones

China appears to have decided that this future is now

From a weiqi perspective China’s boldness is understandable

China’s infrastructure has expanded towards its peripheries at a speed India has been unable to match

China’s southern neighbour looks weak in other ways

20 Indians and at least four Chinese dead

India’s army has little functional interoperability with any other.

the board fills up and one player emerges dominant, there should be no surprise for it to push the advantage

India’s remains packed with upward potential.

July 10

Panamanian customs officers

crew of 35

25 containers of military hardware

35-strong crew at a former US naval base,

air defence systems

missiles

two Soviet era MiG-21 fighter

200,000 sacks of sugar.

(North Korean) Foreign Ministry will pay to free the sailors and the ship,

command and control vehicles

million-dollar penalty on the communist state.

32 of them who did not know the content of the load.

admitted to having given a false statement on the ship's load and agreed to pay

12 years in prison

none of them knew the content of the shipment

released "immediately" after the fine is paid.

"I have not been informed of this, and I don't know where Nunez got this information."

reduced to $666,666

Cubans in Havana

exert pressure on North Korea to pay the fine

pay between late November and early December.

Havana and Pyongyang

weapons aboard the freighter were obsolete Cuban arms

refurbishment under a legitimate contract.

Panama

said the shipment violated the UN arms embargo against North Korea.

United Nations had determined that the weapons were an infringement on sanctions imposed over the reclusive North's nuclear weapons program.

Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department.

Finally, Kerry, a defeated presidential candidate, was devoid of the sexiness that automatically attaches to a figure, like Hillary Clinton, who remains a legitimate presidential prospect

The consensus in Washington was that Kerry was a boring if not irrelevant man stepping into what was becoming a boring, irrelevant job.

Nearly a year into his tenure, Kerry is the driving force behind a flurry of Mideast diplomacy the scope of which has not been seen in years. In the face of widespread skepticism, he has revived the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; brokered a deal with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria; embarked on a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, holding the highest-level face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats in years; and started hammering out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.

“He’s front and center on all these issues. That clearly represents a very ambitious first year for any secretary of state.”

Kerry has a bad habit of wandering off script. On a trip to Pakistan in August, he created two diplomatic incidents in a single interview. First he said that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy” when it toppled the country’s democratically elected president.

President Obama had “a timeline” for ending U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

he overshot in the opposite direction, promising that any American strike against Syria would be “unbelievably small”—a bit of impressively self-defeating rhetoric that undermined days of administration efforts to argue that a few dozen Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes would be more than what hawkish critics were calling a pointless “pinprick.”

a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is gasbag. He had few close friends in the Senate, where he served for nearly 30 years. A former diplomat says Kerry’s recent foreign-policy successes have made him more insufferable than ever.

his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out.

“Nobody would challenge the notion that he’s been very much a team player and willing to take on really hard assignments from the president and go to the toughest places.”

(In one late-night press conference in Moscow last May, he uttered a staggering 95-word sentence.

“Even as a junior or senior, he was a pompous blowhard,” says someone who attended Yale with Kerry in the 1960s and asked not to be named.

he is not so much arrogant as awkward.

Liberal Democrats call his hawkish views on Syria a betrayal of his antiwar past. Republicans say he is a perennial flip-flopper: he fought in the Vietnam War and then protested against it; he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then opposed it; he tried to negotiate with Bashar al‑Assad in 2009, then compared him to Adolf Hitler—and then reopened the door to negotiating with him again.

Kerry “just can’t dance.”

Washington mandarins dismiss Kerry’s foreign-policy ambitions as grandiose and overweening, especially relative to what America’s diminishing power can achieve after Iraq and Afghanistan

old foreign-policy hands say that instead of acknowledging the limits of American power in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, Kerry looks for misguided ways to apply power the country no longer has.

Current aides argue that Kerry’s recent successes belie the caricatures of him. “Show me where he hasn’t done this job well,” one demanded when I interviewed him in mid-October.

“I would ask John Kerry, ‘How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?’ ”

Kerry seem “pompous” is that “oftentimes he tries too hard.” According to Manley and others, Kerry had a knack for walking up to fellow members on the Senate floor at precisely the wrong time.

His enormous ambition motivates him to aim for major breakthroughs despite daunting odds. And his healthy self-confidence allows him to believe that he can convince anyone of virtually anything.

Kerry also has bottomless reserves of patience that allow him to engage for hours in seemingly fruitless negotiations; he persists long past the time others would have given up in exhaustion.

The amount of time he’s spent negotiating with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov alone should qualify him for some kind of diplomatic medal of honor.

an indifference to his own political standing.

Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say.

“I don’t care at all,” he said. “I could care less about it. You know, David, I ran for president, so I’m not scared of failure.”

secretary of state is the job for which Kerry was born and bred

“I’m not worried about the politics,” Lowenstein recalls Kerry telling him. “I want to get things done.”

Obama, too, no longer has to worry about reelection; concerns about the 2012 election may have limited the president’s own appetite for diplomatic risk taking in the Mideast during his first term.

But his enthusiasm for his current job is unquestionable; one aide told me that he will have to be dragged from the office—fingernails scraping against the floor—at the end of his term.

As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.

if there is no breakthrough with Iran, or if his efforts to broker peace in Syria fall short, or if the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks founder, history will likely view Kerry as the tragicomic figure his detractors already judge him to be.

“After you lose the presidency, you don’t have much else to lose.”

Following stints as an assistant district attorney and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Kerry would, after his election to the Senate in 1984, go on to serve for 28 years on the same committee he had stood before in 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

(But for Ohio, where he lost to Bush by 119,000 votes, Kerry would have been president.

But Kerry stepped into the role at a singularly weak moment for the position. For one thing, America, weary after a decade of conflict, is turning inward; activist diplomacy is out of favor. For another, State Department employees I interviewed told me that morale is low.

the department is too hierarchical, inflexible, and risk-averse—and is in danger of becoming even more so in the aftermath of Benghazi.

the intensely controlling Obama administration has centralized foreign-policy decision making in the National Security Council, weakening the State Department.

Just a day after Kerry delivered one of the most impassioned speeches of his career, assailing Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians as a “crime against conscience” and sending a clear signal that U.S. air strikes on Syria were imminent, the president announced that missile strikes might in fact not be imminent, and that he would be seeking congressional authorization to attack Syria.

the president risked causing foreign leaders and negotiators to doubt whether any future warnings or statements issued by Kerry were backed by the White House.

Kerry conducted long interviews with every living former secretary of state—Kissinger, George Shultz, Baker, Madeleine Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—and set out to model himself after Shultz, who, in six and a half years serving under Ronald Reagan, was seen as a combination of the two prototypes, both a great diplomat and a good manager.

“I don’t care about risk, honestly,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, spoiling for a fight. “The riskiest thing to do is to not act. I would far rather try and fail than fail not trying.”

When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship

He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.

Recent secretaries of state have had different strengths. Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two secretaries who had close relationships with their presidents (Nixon in Kissinger’s case, George H. W. Bush in Baker’s), were powerful bureaucratic players.

But isn’t staking America’s credibility, and his own reputation, on long-odds breakthrough agreements with Tehran or Moscow, or on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a dubious exercise, as Obama’s failed first-term efforts at Mideast peace demonstrated?

Colin Powell lost a crucial internal administration battle in failing to halt the Bush White House’s march to war in Iraq—but was adored at the State Department for implementing sweeping administrative reforms.

Clinton embraced a new, Google Hangout era of town-hall diplomacy, and she elevated economic development and women’s issues. She was an architect of the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and she took risks in supporting the Afghanistan troop surge and the intervention in Libya.

steered clear of the Middle East, delegating special envoys like Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, peace talks with the Taliban

Clinton was much more prudent and careful than Kerry, whom one former State Department official describes as more of a “high-risk, high-reward”

“My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.”

“My assessment was that she made a calculated political choice not to hang her hat on that thankless task,” Kim Ghattas,

the former secretary would have taken bolder risks but was reined in by the White House—especially during her first couple of years in office, when hostility from the bitter 2008 primary campaign still lingered between the Obama and Clinton staffs.

she actively engaged in Middle East talks, at one point meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seven hours in New York.

Kennan warned Powell about the dangers of traveling too much—of prioritizing activist diplomacy over providing the White House with solid foreign-policy analysis.

Powell gave a copy of Kennan’s letter to Kerry. So far, Kerry is not following the advice. As October came to a close, Kerry had already flown more than 213,000 miles and spent more than 100 days—roughly 40 percent of his time—outside the United States. In his first nine months, he’d traveled more miles than Clinton had in her entire first year in office.

In 2009, he convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consent to a runoff in his country’s disputed presidential election.

2011, he was dispatched to Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden to persuade local officials to return the tail of an American helicopter that had crashed at the site.

cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates.

Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin.

Kerry agreed that the U.S. should try to revive Middle East negotiations before the Palestinians again pushed for statehood, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013.

In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pushed for a resumption of negotiations. At a final press conference before returning to Washington, Obama announced that he was handing the pursuit of talks over to Kerry.

“What I can guarantee is that Secretary Kerry is going to be spending a good deal of time in discussions with the parties.”

He met alone with Abbas for two hours in Amman and then flew to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and three of his aides.

Kerry pressed on, returning in April to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank. After 24 hours of talks with both sides, Kerry held a press conference at the airport in Tel Aviv.

Kerry held three meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas in three days, including one meeting with the Israeli prime minister that lasted six hours, until 3 a.m. On June 29, he canceled a trip to the United Arab Emirates so he could keep talking with Netanyahu and Abbas, raising expectations of a breakthrough. On June 30, he held another press conference at the Tel Aviv airport.

“We started out with very wide gaps, and we have narrowed those considerably.”

Five months into the job, Kerry was off to an ominous start. His wife was in the hospital. Syria was convulsing. Progress toward Israeli-Palestinian talks was stalled. Egypt was burning. And Republican attack ads were making it appear as though the secretary of state had spent the weekend yachting.

Kerry said, according to the aide. “The only thing I’m interested in is a serious negotiation that can lead to a final-status agreement.”

“On behalf of President Obama, I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final-status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry said, calmly and deliberately. “This is a significant and welcome step forward.” He declined to take questions.

Nine days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of the 104 Palestinian prisoners. The next day, Israeli and Palestinian officials arrived in Washington to begin peace talks.

The smallness of his circle of aides, which had been seen early on as a detriment to his management of the State Department, now made it easier to keep information contained.

Working with consultants from McKinsey, diplomats estimated that $4 billion in long-term private investment would flow to the Palestinians in the wake of an agreement.

Palestinian officials appear to have compromised on their demand for a settlement freeze.

From the beginning, Kerry had insisted that the Obama administration not allow a halt in Israeli settlement construction to become a public precondition.

Kerry also reiterated a core argument: the security that Israel currently enjoys is temporary, if not illusory. Without a two-state solution, Israel will face a European-led campaign of delegitimization, a new intifada, and a Palestinian leader far more radical than Abbas.

The crucial concession—the release of the 104 prisoners—came from the Israeli side

“It takes time to listen, it takes time to persuade,” Frank Lowenstein told me. “This is where Kerry’s willingness to stay up all night pays off.”

The U.S. provided nonlethal aid to the opposition, but White House officials were so fearful of American assistance inadvertently falling into the hands of jihadists that the National Security Council Deputies Committee monitored the distribution of the aid in granular detail. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were funneling cash and weapons to hard-line militants, including Al Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Russia continued providing Syria with arms and blocking any action by the UN Security Council.

When Putin finally received Kerry, after a three-hour delay, Putin reportedly fiddled continuously with his pen and “more resembled a man indulging a long-ago scheduled visit from the cultural attaché of Papua New Guinea than participating in an urgent summit with America’s top diplomat,”

At a late-night press conference, a beaming Kerry announced that he and Lavrov would co-host a peace conference in Geneva.

“They were great efforts, and again, I reiterate my gratitude to President Putin for a very generous welcome here.”

Earlier, in April, after American intelligence officials had confirmed that Assad had carried out several small-scale chemical-weapons attacks, Obama had reluctantly agreed to mount a covert CIA effort to arm and train moderate rebels.

if the United States did not “impose consequences” for Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrian leader would see it as “a green light for continued CW use.” But the White House did not alter course.

Both Obama and Kerry favored a military response—air strikes—according to a senior administration official. As American intelligence agencies accumulated evidence suggesting that Assad was responsible, Kerry offered to make the public case for strikes. White House officials welcomed the idea and vetted his speeches.

“My vision is that, if you can make peace, if you can get Israel and Palestine resolved and can get the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon put to bed appropriately—even if Syria didn’t calm down—if you get those two pieces or one piece of that, you’ve got a hugely changed dynamic in a region that is in turmoil. And if you take just the Palestinian-Israeli situation, you have the potential to make peace with 57 nations—35 Muslim nations and 22 Arab nations. If the issue is resolved, they will recognize Israel.”

Mr Mende said the attackers at the state TV and radio headquarters had been armed with weapons such as knives, and there was "no chance of them even to maintain their positions, even for a single hour".

"People were frightened when security personnel were firing against these attackers," the minister told the BBC's Focus on Africa radio programme after visiting the RTNC headquarters.

He said the attackers numbered fewer than 100 and that the security forces had killed about 46 of them and captured about 10.

In 1997, Rwandan-backed troops ousted DR Congo's long-serving ruler Mobutu Sese Seko and installed Laurent Kabila - the father of incumbent leader Joseph Kabila - as president.

In a separate incident, a taxi driver told AFP that he had heard about "six or seven shots" from heavy weapons fired at the Tshatshi military camp. The shots were heard between 09:00 and 09:30 local time.

The US embassy in Kinshasa has advised all US citizens not to travel around the city until further notice.

"The embassy has received multiple reports of armed engagements and fighting around Kinshasa… The embassy has also received reports that there are police and military checkpoints and barricades in many places," it said in a statement posted on its Facebook page at 10:00 local time.

“What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Mr. Obama said. “This is a matter of national security.”

“Seems to me that the greatest importance of this is to get the ball rolling so more people follow, and ideally the federal government,” Mr. Webster said. “I suspect more states will do this.”

own a gun.

Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

The National Rifle Association “does not want terrorists or dangerous people to have access to weapons,” said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the organization’s lobbying arm. “But this is a constitutional issue,” she said, adding that mere suspicion should not be enough to take away the righ

The no-fly list is a subset of the watch list.

Correction: December 10, 2015 An earlier version of this article, using information from state officials, erroneously attributed a distinction to the proposed measure in Connecticut. It would not be the first such law in the nation; at least one other state has such a ban.

“These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican candidate for president, told CNN. “They wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon.”

Abe Mashal, a former Marine and a Muslim of mixed Palestinian-Italian background who lives in the Chicago area, was on the no-fly list until last year, for reasons he said were still a mystery to him.

“Never had any trouble with that,” he said of the gun purchase.

Since 2004, there have been 2,233 people who, like Mr. Mashal, landed on the government’s no-fly list because of terrorism suspicions and applied to buy a gun, according to a recent review of F.B.I. data by the Government Accountability Office.

But only rarely are legal reasons found to prohibit the sale, according to federal auditors. Since the F.B.I. began tracking the data, only 190 gun sales to people on the list — or 8.5 percent of all the attempted sales — have been blocked for other reasons, including mental illness or criminal convictions, auditors found.

But Democrats say increased fears of domestic terrorism stoked by the recent gun attacks in San Bernardino and in Paris are reason enough to stop people on a watch list from being able to buy a gun.

Mr. Malloy has lobbied federal lawmakers on the issue. “I have previously written to Congress on this matter,” he said. “But inaction is not an option. So here in Connecticut, we are acting.

The federal government’s terrorism watch list is a database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an arm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

“Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris,” Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters. “This should be a wake-up call to all of us. This is a moment to seize in America, and today I’m here to say that we in Connecticut are seizing it.”

With his decision, Mr. Malloy has stepped into a fiery debate that has stretched from the Oval Office to the contest to become its next occupant: Should being a terrorism suspect prohibit a person from buying firearms? At the moment, it does not.

With the mass shooting in California last week focusing attention on terrorism and guns, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut announced on Thursday that he intended to sign an executive order barring people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms in the state.

President Obama has moved it to the front of his continuing push for stricter gun restrictions. “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” he said in

While Democrats in Congress have been calling almost daily for a fix to the so-called watch list loophole, Republicans have succeeded in defeating measures that would prevent people on the lists from buying guns. Democrats say they intend to keep pushing the issue, and on Thursday the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, introduced a motion demanding a vote to restrict the sale of guns from anyone on a federal terrorism watch list. House Republicans swiftly shelved it.

What some critics have called a startling gap in the law has gnawed at counterterrorism officials for years. But it has now emerged as a flash point following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in which a married couple who the authorities believe were inspired by foreign extremists killed 14 people using legally obtained firearms.

But the argument, gun rights advocates say, is a matter of due process. They say that the no-fly list — with tens of thousands of names on it — is unreliable, with innocent people like Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who died in 2009, and other well-known Americans wrongly placed on the list.

While federal gun control legislation has gone nowhere in recent years, certain states have had more success. Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said it was unclear what the practical implications of Connecticut’s proposed ban would be in stopping someone who is determined to carry out an act of terrorism. That person could simply travel to another state.

Chinese and American companies are on relatively even footing when it comes to breadth. Though American Internet companies have a smaller domestic user base than China, which has over a billion users on 4G devices, the best American companies can also draw in users from around the globe, bringing their total user base to over a billion.

when it comes to depth of data, China has the upper hand. Chinese Internet users channel a much larger portion of their daily activities, transactions and interactions through their smartphones. They use their smartphones for managing their daily lives, from buying groceries at the market to paying their utility bills, booking train or bus tickets and to take out loans, among other things.

Weaving together data from mobile payments, public services, financial management and shared mobility gives Chinese companies a deep and more multi-dimensional picture of their users. That allows their AI algorithms to precisely tailor product offerings to each individual. In the current age of AI implementation, this will likely lead to a substantial acceleration and deepening of AI’s impact across China’s economy. That is where the “data gap” appears

The radically different business model in China, married to Chinese user habits, creates indigenous branding and monetization strategies as well as an entirely alternative infrastructure for apps and content. It is therefore very difficult, if not impossible, for any American company to try to enter China’s market or vice versa

companies in both countries are pursuing their own form of international expansion. The United States uses a “full platform” approach — all Google, all Facebook. Essentially Australia, North America and Europe completely accept the American methodology. That technical empire is likely to continue.

The Chinese have realized that the U.S. empire is too difficult to penetrate, so they are looking elsewhere. They are trying, and generally succeeding, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Those regions and countries have not been a focus of U.S. tech, so their products are not built with the cultures of those countries in mind. And since their demographics are closer to China’s — lower income and lots of people, including youth — the Chinese products are a better fit.

If you were to draw a map a decade from now, you would see China’s tech zone — built not on ownership but partnerships — stretching across Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Africa and to some extent South America. The U.S. zone would entail North America, Australia and Europe. Over time, the “parallel universes” already extant in the United States and China will grow to cover the whole world.

Policy-wise, we are seeing three approaches. The Chinese have unleashed entrepreneurs with a utilitarian passion to commercialize technology. The Americans are similarly pro-entrepreneur, but the government takes a laissez-faire attitude and the entrepreneurs carry out more moonshots. And Europe is more consumer-oriented, trying to give ownership and control of data back to the individual.

An AI arms race would be a grave mistake. The AI boom is more akin to the spread of electricity in the early Industrial Revolution than nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Those who take the arms-race view are more interested in political posturing than the flourishing of humanity. The value of AI as an omni-use technology rests in its creative, not destructive, potential.

In a way, having parallel universes should diminish conflict. They can coexist while each can learn from the other. It is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers.

We will see a massive migration from one kind of employment to another, not unlike during the transition from agriculture to manufacturing. It will largely be the lower-wage jobs in routine work that will be eliminated, while the ultra-rich will stand to make a lot of money from AI. Social inequality will thus widen.

The jobs that AI cannot do are those of creators, or what I call “empathetic jobs” in services, which will be the largest category that can absorb those displaced from routine jobs. Many jobs will become available in this sector, from teaching to elderly care and nursing. A great effort must be made not only to increase the number of those jobs and create a career path for them but to increase their social status, which also means increasing the pay of these jobs.

There are also issues related to poorer countries who have relied on either following the old China model of low-wage manufacturing jobs or of India’s call centers. AI will replace those jobs that were created by outsourcing from the West. They will be the first to go in the next 10 years. So, underdeveloped countries will also have to look to jobs for creators and in services.

I am opposed to the idea of universal basic income because it provides money both to those who don’t need it as well as those who do. And it doesn’t stimulate people’s desire to work. It puts them into a kind of “useless class” category with the terrible consequence of a resentful class without dignity or status.

To reinvigorate people’s desire to work with dignity, some subsidy can help offset the costs of critical needs that only humans can provide. That would be a much better use of the distribution of income than giving it to every person whether they need it or not. A far better idea would be for workers of the future to have an equity share in owning the robots — universal basic capital instead of universal basic income.

Trump’s administration has suggested that it sees nuclear weapons as useful against “non-nuclear strategic attacks” on U.S. infrastructure, perhaps including cyber or terrorist attacks.

It proposes two new nuclear-capable systems.

Neither weapon is needed to deter potential adversaries, and would instead raise the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon—whether because an adversary thinks it is being attacked or whether a U.S. president thinks he has to order an attack. As it stands, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the institutions that would handle the warhead changes, will struggle to find the funding or the manpower to meet existing modernization requirements. New programs would only compound this uncertainty and endanger core nuclear-modernization priorities. Moreover, developing new warheads creates an unpalatable choice: They will either be deployed without a test or with a test. Both options are bad. Lastly, the draft NPR asserts that its program proposals are affordable, but avoids making fiscal trade-offs between different military priorities. Yet Congress will have to ask whether new nuclear weapons programs are really worth the money, given that there is still no plan to pay the $1.2-trillion bill for nuclear weapons over the next 30 years.

Even as the Trump administration is proposing expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities, it is subverting traditional mechanisms for controlling them.

Today, an astonishing 58 percent of Americans lack confidence in the president’s judgment with the nuclear arsenal. It is difficult to believe that Congress or the American public will quietly acquiesce to a major expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities and missions. Yet, without concerted pressure, the Trump Nuclear Posture Review will abandon U.S. leadership to reduce nuclear risks and instead follow our adversaries into a world where nuclear competition is commonplace.

"I want to speak particularly to our largest generation now, our millennials," Birx said Monday. "I (am) the mom of two wonderful millennial young women who are bright and hardworking and I will tell you what I told to them -- they are the core group that will stop this virus."

If a black man is carrying a weapon, the chance is 0.00075. One is too many, but it seems to me important to get the scale of this right. Our perceptions are not reality.

I have no doubt at all that Kaepernick and Reid are sincere, and I absolutely defend their right to protest in the way they have, and am disgusted by the president’s response. But on the deaths of unarmed black men, the left-liberal characterization of the problem just does not match the statistical reality.

A Cornell Ph.D. student, Philippe Lemoine, has dug into exactly that: by examining the data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is testimony from black people themselves, not the police; it’s far less tainted than self-serving police records.

It’s a big survey — around 150,000 people, including 16,000 African-Americans.

are black men in America disproportionately likely to have contact with the police? Surprisingly, no. In the survey years that Lamoine looked at, 20.7 percent of white men say they interacted at least once with a cop, compared with 17.5 percent of black men.

black men (1.5 percent) are indeed more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to have more than three contacts with police per year — but it’s not a huge difference.

You could also argue that lynching was statistically very rare in the past, but it instilled a real terror that belied this real fact.

If you restrict it to physical violence, the data is worse: Of men who have had at least one encounter with the police in a given year, 0.9 percent of white men reported the use of violence, compared with 3.4 percent of black men.

I think it shows the following: that police violence against black men, very broadly defined, is twice as common as against white men, and narrowly defined as physical force, three times as common, but that there’s no racial difference in police violence that might lead to physical harm, and all such violence is rare.

the 3.4 percent of black men who experience violence at the hands of the police are 3.4 percent of the 17.5 percent of those who have at least one encounter with the cops, i.e., 0.5 percent of all black men.)

Is “rare” a fair judgment? It’s certainly a subjective one, and I do not know how I would feel if there were a 0.5 percent chance that any time I encountered a cop, I could be subjected to physical violence, as opposed to the 0.2 percent chance that I, as a white man, experience.

What makes it worse for black men, of course, is something called history, in which any violence by the state rightly comes with immensely more emotional and political resonance — and geography. Police violence may be rare across the entire country, but it is concentrated in urban pockets, where the atmosphere is therefore more fearful — and there’s a natural tendency to extrapolate from that context.

Specific horrifying incidents — like Alton Sterling’s death — operate in our psyches the way 9/11 does. It understandably terrified Eric Reid — but also distorted his assessment of the actual risk that one of his family members could suffer the same fate.

It’s true, too, that the huge racial discrepancy in the prison population affects our judgment.

On the key measure of use of force by the cops, however, black men with at least one encounter with cops are more than twice as likely to report the use of force as whites (one percent versus 0.4 percent). That’s the nub of it. “Force,” by the way, includes a verbal threat of it, as well as restraining, or subduing.

we’re not talking about extralegal lynchings by civilians, in the context of slavery or segregation or state-imposed discrimination. We’re talking about instantaneous decisions by cops, often in contexts where their own lives are at stake as well. Their perspective — and many of these cops are also African-American — matters as well.

This is the balance we have to strike. We can and should honor the spirit of the protests. But we cannot allow ourselves to let emotion, however justified, overwhelm reality

t the election wasn’t just an anti-May vote. It was also a pro-Corbyn one, especially among the rising generation. Millennials, having never experienced socialism, love it. And Corbyn is on the leftist edge of socialism. He’s for huge increases in taxation and public spending, he promises free college for all, he wants to instate rent controls across Britain’s major cities, and, in his speech last Wednesday, he described gentrification as “social cleansing.”

Most of his proposals would add mountains of debt to the British economy, and he doesn’t really care. Austerity is so over.

This makes him a bigger leap to the left than Trump is to the right. It’s as if Roy Moore were the GOP nominee — and leading in the polls.

another key factor is Corbyn’s effortless Englishness. He is a very specific character — a very English leftist. He’s mild-mannered in speech, even as his ideas are radical. In the last election campaign, he came off as an ordinary man of the people

Evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology are the foundation of Buddhism Is True. And I find much of it both intellectually convincing, and also recognizable with my own developing practice.

In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.

“These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.

The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any

In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom.

In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious.

But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.

debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.

In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged

Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.

The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history.

Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.

Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia

A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.

in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.

Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered.

At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”

this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.

it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.

Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”

With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press.

In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).

the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.

One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives.

his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.

Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians.

In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation”

These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.

The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.

Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.

nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.

It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US,

This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.

We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.

Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.

em, it doesn't mean the battle against the group's ideology or its ability to stage an insurgency is finished - whether in Iraq, Syria or the wider world.

Attacks may be at a lower level than they once were, but Iraqi towns and cities still fall prey to suicide bombers,

Our forces are in complete control of the Iraqi-Syrian border and I therefore announce the end of the war against Daesh [IS].

The Iraqi armed forces issued a statement saying Iraq had been "totally liberated" from IS.

"The United States joins the government of Iraq in stressing that Iraq's liberation does not mean the fight against terrorism, and even against Isis [IS], in Iraq is over," she added.

historic moment" but warned that IS still posed a threat, including from across the border in Syria.

aid it had "fully liberated" the eastern border town of Albu Kamal, the last last urban stronghold of IS

he mission to defeat bandit units of the Islamic State terrorist organisation on the territory of Syria, carried out by the armed forces of the Russian Federation, has been accomplishe

Russia's military presence in Syria would now concentrate on preserving ceasefires and restoring peace.

will escape over Syria's borders to carry out more attacks abroad.

As of January 2020, North Korea had 30 to 40 nuclear warheads and could produce enough fissile material for six or seven bombs a year, according to an estimate by the Arms Control Association.

North Korea has extracted plutonium, an atomic bomb fuel, from its Soviet-designed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang.

North Korea’s ballistic missiles can carry nuclear warheads, and the country conducted six increasingly sophisticated underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. The last four of them happened under Mr. Kim.

In 2017, North Korea made big strides in its weapons capabilities.That year, the country fired its intermediate-range ballistic missile, Hwasong-12, over Japan and threatened an “enveloping” strike around the American territory of Guam.

By the end of the year, Mr. Kim claimed that his country had the ability to launch a nuclear strike against the continental United States.

And at a party congress in January, Mr. Kim doubled down on his nuclear arms buildup, offering a laundry list of weapons he said he planned to develop. They included “multi-warhead” nuclear missiles, “hypersonic” missiles, land- and submarine-launched I.C.B.M.s that use solid fuel, and “ultramodern tactical nuclear weapons.”

When North Korea resumed missile tests in 2019 following the collapse of the Kim-Trump talks, the tests featured three new weapons, code-named KN-23, KN-24 and KN-25 by outside experts.

Unlike its older missiles that used liquid fuel, all three of the new missiles used solid fuel. The new solid-fuel weapons, mounted on mobile launchers, are easier to transport and hide and take less time to prepare.

Mr. Kim said in January that his country would also build a nuclear-powered submarine in order to acquire the means to deliver nuclear weapons to its adversaries more stealthily.

North Korea has one of the largest standing armies in the world, with more than one million soldiers. But much of its equipment is old and obsolete, and the military lacks fuel and spare parts.

North Korea has sought to make up for its shortcomings by building nuclear weapons.

At the January party congress, Mr. Kim said that his weapons program “never precludes diplomacy” but “guarantees its success.” He has also said he no longer holds any expectations for dialogue unless Washington makes an offer that satisfies his government.

It showed that “North Korea was pushing ahead with the plans” set down by Mr. Kim during the party meeting, said Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

The United States has not been directly involved in the illicit arms race. But it bears responsibility for the mess by bailing out of the conflict soon after Colonel el-Qaddafi was overthrown and killed

In any event, a major infusion of military support for the Government of National Accord by Turkey blunted Mr. Hifter’s offensive, leading to a cease-fire in October, the convening of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in November and the appointment of an interim administration.

The interests of the foreign powers range from avarice to influence, and given the vast resources they have invested in Libya, they no doubt stand ready to resume their meddling if the peace process collapses. But they also appear to appreciate that they and their clients have fought to a stalemate, and that reverting to their zero-sum game might be futile.

Peace in Libya matters for reasons beyond its own sake. The country has huge reserves of oil, and the anarchy of the past decade has made it a prime jumping-off point for refugees seeking to flee to Europe across the Mediterranean. Shortly after leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama declared in an interview that the failure to plan for the aftermath of Colonel el-Qaddafi’s exit was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

here’s a glimmer of hope.

id Dbeibah, a billionaire who was a close associate of Colonel el-Qaddafi, stands accused of buying the votes that gave him the job. The interim team and the cabinet it proposes need to survive a vote of confidence in a House of Representatives that is also split in two, one side based in Tobruk and the other in

This peace process is the best chance to date to put Libya together again. Libyans are thoroughly sick of the fighting, banditry and destruction that have plagued their country for a decade, and tired of the foreign powers and mercenaries who have spread death across the land, much of it through armed drones. The U.N. estimates there are now at least 20,000 mercenaries in Libya.

statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month praised Ms. Williams for her “creativity and tenacity” in facilitating the process, and declared that the United States “supports the Libyan vision of a peaceful, prosperous and unified Libya with an inclusive government that can both secure the country and meet the economic and humanitarian needs of it

The new President, Joe Biden, will deliver his first prime-time address on Thursday to mark the yearlong mark in the country's struggle with the coronavirus. In addition to giving the country a morale boost and highlighting the light on the horizon, he will hope to showcase his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, expected to finally pass Congress the day before.

Under the new protocols, vaccinated people can visit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancing. They can also see unvaccinated people from a single household without either precaution if those yet to get the injection are at low risk for severe disease.

These guidelines will allow a real -- if qualified -- return of freedoms once taken for granted for millions of people. They apply two weeks after a second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and 14 days after the single-dose Johnson & Johnson injection.

Already, 60 million Americans know that moment of euphoria that comes with getting a first dose. And more than 30 million are fully protected -- a figure that has just overtaken the total number of US Covid-19 cases.

The announcement on Monday could have an important public health impact in itself. To the majority of Americans who are still waiting, the glimpse of post-vaccination liberation could offer a new incentive to buckle down with social distancing and masking for just a few months longer.

The proven promise of vaccines and the accelerating pace that they are going into American arms -- at a rate of about 2 million or more a day -- offers something like the prospect of a normal summer.

"There is so much that's critical riding on the next two months," CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday. "How quickly we will vaccinate versus whether we will have another surge really relies on what happens in March and April."

"The good news is that it was coming down. The sobering news is that it's starting to plateau a bit," Fauci told a National League of Cities Conference. "The history with this virus has told us when you start to plateau at a level as high as this, which is about 60 to 70,000 cases a day, that you are by no means out of the woods."

"I actually would go further and say that people who are fully vaccinated should be able to travel -- should be encouraged to travel, and that's one of those incentives that we can give as a way for restoring freedoms, that you now are able to travel and go visit your loved ones and go to museums and cultural institutions once you're fully vaccinated," Wen said.

"I think they really haven't gone far enough," Reiner told CNN's Erin Burnett, while suggesting that the CDC was worried about sending a message that might convince non-vaccinated Americans to start taking to the skies.

More than 131,300 people are now hospitalized with Covid-19, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

On Tuesday, Arizona reported a record-high 5,082 hospitalized Covid-19 patients. The same day, it broke a second record: more than 1,180 Covid-19 patients in ICU beds.

More than a quarter of the population in 30 US counties comes from full-time enrollment at higher education institutes, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In 10 of those counties, at least 90% of staffed ICU beds are occupied, according to the NCES. Those counties include Oktibbeha County, home to Mississippi State University, where almost all ICU beds are occupied by Covid-19 patients.

In Williamsburg, Virginia -- home to William & Mary -- Covid-19 cases nearly tripled in one week.

While vaccinations continue to lag behind predictions, health experts are begging Americans to hunker down in their bubbles for these next few months as soaring hospitalizations lead to record daily deaths.

Mass vaccinations, warmer weather, a new presidential administration and a population building immunity could lead to a "dramatically better" summer, he said.

Two "remarkably effective" vaccines are already being administered, and two more vaccines -- from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca -- "are right around the corner," Offit said.

The incoming Biden administration "isn't into this cult of denialism"

If another 55% to 60% of the population can be vaccinated -- something Offit said can be done if the US gives 1 million to 1.5 million doses a day -- "then I really do think that by June, we can stop the spread of this virus."

"We are telling states they should open vaccinations to all people ... 65 and over and all people under age 65 with a comorbidity with some form of medical documentation," Azar said.

The Pfizer vaccine doses should be spaced 21 days apart, and the Moderna doses should be 28 days apart.More than 27.6 million vaccine doses have so far been distributed, according to CDC data, and more than 9.3 million people have received their first dose -- a far cry from where some experts hoped the country would be by now.

Fauci said, "When people are ready to get vaccinated, we're going to move right on to the next level, so that there are not vaccine doses that are sitting in a freezer or refrigerator where they could be getting into people's arm."

And starting in two weeks, vaccines will be distributed to states based on which jurisdictions are getting the most doses into arms and where the most older adults reside. "We will be allocating them based on the pace of administration as reported by states and by the size of the 65 and over population in each state," Azar said.

Only six states have administered more than 50% of the doses distributed to them, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Connecticut, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Nearly 2.3 million children tested positive for Covid-19 from the pandemic's start through January 7, a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association shows

More than 171,000 of those cases were reported between December 31 and January 7, while over two weeks -- between December 24 through January 7 -- there was a 15% increase in child Covid-19 cases, the report said.

The findings mean children now represent 12.5% of all infections in the US.

Kashmir has been mired in crisis for decades and this past year the Indian government upended decades of delicate, albeit flawed policies by unilaterally revoking the statehood of Jammu and Kashmir, the part of the region it controls. It sent in thousands of additional troops, arrested practically the entire intellectual class there, including elected representatives, business people and students, and shut down the internet.

Mr. Modi’s party has been pushing a religious nationalist ideology that critics say favors India’s Hindu majority and deeply alienates its Muslim minority. Just last month, Mr. Modi’s government passed a highly divisive law that creates a special path for migrants to get Indian citizenship — if they are not Muslim. Outrage at the law set off weeks of nationwide antigovernment protests, which are continuing.

Kashmir was India’s only predominantly Muslim state until August, when Mr. Modi’s government summarily erased its statehood. Since then, it has been suspended in tension, with most internet service still shut off and schools deserted.

General Rawat made the suggestion about sending Kashmiris to deradicalization camps at an international affairs conference in New Delhi attended by government officials, foreign diplomats, business executives and scholars.

Saket Gokhale, a civil rights activist in Mumbai, said this was the first he had ever heard of deradicalization camps inside India.He said that in some areas where the security forces were battling armed groups, such as the Maoist belt in central India, the military ran deradicalization programs including community visits and vocational training. But those were voluntary and did not involve confinement.

Many Kashmiri intellectuals denied that Kashmir had a radicalization problem, at least not a religious radicalization problem. The militancy is minuscule — fewer than 300 armed fighters by most estimates — and much of the combatants’ ideology turns on political differences with the Indian government, not religious ones.