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Why would a president say such things? And in public? My view, for what it’s worth, is that Trump’s pathological narcissism overrides reality on a minute-by-minute basis, and that because of this, the very idea of the rule of law, which makes no distinction between the really stable geniuses and everybody else, is impossible for Trump to understand

Looking at his long and abysmal business career, the rule of law was always, always an object of scorn, something only suckers cared about and lawyers were paid to circumvent. For Trump, the law is something to break, avoid or pay off. And as president, he clearly believes he is above it.

narcissism is no defense. Delusional mania and paranoia are no defenses eithe

No myth is stronger in progressive circles than the magical, wonderworking powers of voter turnout. It’s become a sort of pixie dust that you sprinkle over your strenuously progressive positions to ward off any suggestion that they might turn off voters.

Sanders’s explanation of why this is not a problem is simple, and he has repeated it endlessly. When a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked him whether “a candidate as far to the left as you” would “alienate swing voters and moderates and independents,” the senator replied: “The only way that you beat Trump is by having an unprecedented campaign, an unprecedentedly large voter turnout.”

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, adds: “Bernie Sanders has very unique appeal amongst [the younger] generation and can inspire, I think, a bunch of them to vote in percentages that they have never voted before.”

Washington (CNN)The campaign rallies are a distant memory. The final chapter of the primary calendar is awash in uncertainty. The summer political conventions are in doubt.

"It's hard not to be happy with the job we're doing, that I can tell you," Trump said Wednesday in the White House briefing room, where he stands before dinnertime most every night to deliver a rosy assessment of the crisis that seldom mentions the rising US death toll, overwhelmed hospitals and cries for help from doctors, nurses and local leaders.

It's an open question whether those early reviews represent more of a rallying effect, which presidents often experience during times of national emergency, or if the support will endure after the true scope of the deadly outbreak is fully known.

Democrats were already talking about health care before the coronavirus, but the outbreak gives new urgency to a central issue for the party.

The future of America’s health insurance system has already been a huge part of the 2020 presidential race. At campaign events over the past year, voters have shared stories of cancer diagnoses, costly medications and crushing medical debt.

“Health care was always going to be a big issue in the general election, and the coronavirus epidemic will put health care even more top of mind for voters,”

Chris Richardson, 39, said he was not surprised that many black voters in South Carolina were unfazed by Mr. Biden’s poor results in Iowa and New Hampshire. He flipped the question around: Why would anyone assume they’d care?

“Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves,” Mr. Richardson said. “So yeah, we’ll back Biden, because we know who white America will vote for in the general election in a way they may not tell a pollster or the media.”

“We’ve had a campaign season where people are calling out structural racism and saying ‘white supremacy’ on the debate stage,” Mr. Robinson said. “The fact that black people are being talked about in more nuanced ways — like black youth vote versus black baby boomers vote — it speaks to how much the movement building has been translated to electoral power.”

Your highlight number is over quota: 500 highlights for Free Plan, you have 500 highlights.

From South Asia to Africa to Latin America, the pandemic is confronting developing countries with a public health emergency combined with an economic crisis, each exacerbating the other. The same forces are playing out in wealthy nations, too. But in poor countries — where billions of people live in proximity to calamity even in the best of times — the dangers are amplified.It is unfolding just as many governments are burdened by debt that limits their ability to help those in need. Since 2007, total public and private debt in emerging markets has multiplied from about 70 percent of annual economic output to 165 percent, according to Oxford Economics.

The pandemic has triggered a sharp reversal of international investment away from emerging markets and toward the safety of U.S. government bonds.

Epidemics and pandemics have plagued German territory - and the rest of the world - for thousands of years.

One of the first significant outbreaks of disease in what is today Germany can be studied and traced is the Antonine Plague of 165 - 180 CE. While we cannot be certain, this was thought to be a severe strain of smallpox brought back to the provinces Germania Major and Inferior, via returning legions. In their cramped quarters in bases along the Rhine, the disease raged, leading to a significant loss of manpower. 

Far more well known than these pandemics is the Black Death. Originating in the Near East around 1348, three distinct strains of the Bubonic Plague, or Yersinia Pestis bacteria, killed up to a half of the population of Europe - hundreds of millions strong at the time. Central to the spread of this epidemic was the nature of the medieval world. Trade routes pilgrimage destinations and heavily trafficked Hanseatic cities were natural havens for the fleas that carried the bacteria.

Americans do not and should not worship idols. We do not and should not worship the flag. As a nation we stand in respect for the national anthem and stand in respect for the flag not simply because we were born here or because it’s our flag. We stand in respect because the flag represents a specific set of values and principles: that all men are created equal and that we are endowed with our Creator with certain unalienable rights.

These ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, codified in the Constitution, and defended with the blood of patriots. Central to them is the First Amendment, the guarantee of free expression against government interference and government reprisal that has made the United States unique among the world’s great powers. Arguably, it is the single most important liberty of all, because it enables the defense of all the others: Without the right to speak freely we cannot even begin to point out offenses against the rest of the Constitution.

Now, with that as a backdrop, which is the greater danger to the ideals embodied by the American flag, a few football players’ taking a knee at the national anthem or the most powerful man in the world’s demanding that they be fired and their livelihoods destroyed for engaging in speech he doesn’t like?

Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.

What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. Quickly moving in a radically different direction may be great for their bottom line, but it is detrimental to the media companies that rely on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events—and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users’ feeds.

The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability, however. It’s also the way tech companies dictate the patterns of work; the way their influence can affect the ethos of an entire profession, lowering standards of quality and eroding ethical protections.

“Mexico was second-deadliest country in 2016″ and “Mexico Now World’s Deadliest Conflict Zone After Syria: Survey,”

The reports say that Syria had about 50,000 conflict deaths last year and that Mexico came in second with 23,000, followed by Afghanistan with 17,000.

Many homicides have nothing to do with organized crime. For example, men kill their intimate partners terrifyingly often. Yet these family violence deaths — and many others — are included in IISS’s figure of 23,000 conflict deaths for Mexico.

The defiance and demand of the marginalized or disempowered is inherently defensive in nature whereas the defiance and demand of the powerful is inherently aggressive and menacing.

It is when the powerful feel threatened and vulnerable that things get dangerous, often very dangerous.

1930s Germany presents the most harsh and chilling example. Nazi Germany launched an aggressive war of conquest which triggered the Second World War. But it presented itself as the victim of Jewish and Communist conspiracies and encircled by the Western Powers to the West and Communist Russia to the East.

This strange endurance is a central fact of our present politics. We have an empty majority, a party that can rule but cannot govern

a party that’s terrible at governing can still win elections if the other party is even worse at politics.

One possibility is that this is a temporary situation, a transitional moment — that the Republican majority seems uncanny because it is a walking corpse, that Americans vote for Republican politicians out of a Reagan-forged habit that just takes a long time to fully break.

We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”

I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles.

But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist.

In the United States, Trump is leading something that is best described as plutocratic populism, a mixture of traditional populist causes with extreme libertarian ones.

Martin Wolf, the sober and fact-based chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, concludes, “This is a determined effort to shift resources from the bottom, middle and even upper middle of the U.S. income distribution toward the very top, combined with big increases in economic insecurity for the great majority.”

Pierson notes that Trump’s program does have strong populist aspects, especially on trade and immigration. But, he points out, “On the big economic issues of taxes, spending and regulation — ones that have animated conservative elites for a generation — he has pursued, or supported, an agenda that is extremely friendly to large corporations, wealthy families, and well-positioned rent-seekers. His budgetary policies (and those pursued by his Republican allies in Congress) will, if enacted, be devastating to the same rural and moderate-income communities that helped him win office.”

President Biden is doubling his original COVID-19 vaccination goal to 200 million shots in arms by his 100th day in office — which is just over a month away.

When he entered office, Biden said his goal was 100 million vaccine doses in 100 days — a target many observers thought was not ambitious enough. According to federal health officials, that 100 million figure was hit on Biden's 58th day in office.About 2.5 million vaccine doses are being administered every day in the United States.He detailed his new goal Thursday, during the first news conference of his presidency.

Biden is also sticking to a goal of having a majority of K-8 schools open full time — in person, five days a week — by that same 100-day mark. So far, he said, roughly half of them are open full time.

Within the next 24 hours, the House is expected to pass and President Joe Biden is expected to sign the American Rescue Plan -- a massive $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus bill that will likely be the signature accomplishment of the 46th president's first year (if not entire first term) in office.

The central question -- in both the near- and long-term -- around the bill is a simple one, with lots of potential answers: Was it worth it?

"When the histories of the Biden presidency are written, there's a fair chance that this will be looked upon as a serious error of judgement—one that may plague this administration for a good while."

MEXICO CITY — President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has never been short of criticisms about his predecessor’s legacy. But he has reserved a special contempt for the sweeping overhaul that opened Mexico’s tightly held energy industry to the private sector.

The measure, which was recently approved by Mexico’s Congress with the forceful support of Mr. López Obrador, would also limit the participation of private investors in the energy sector. Both effects are central to his long-held aim of restoring energy self-sufficiency and safeguarding Mexican sovereignty.

Opponents of the legislation say that it would not only fail to resuscitate the energy sector or help achieve energy independence but that it would also violate Mexico’s international commitments to reducing carbon emissions, run afoul of trade agreements and further chill foreign investment in Mexico just as the nation is struggling to regain economic momentum amid the pandemic.

The Biden administration never considered sanctions as a viable option against the powerful Saudi crown prince named as responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, even though the new President promised to punish senior Saudi leaders during the election.

Administration officials tell CNN there was little debate or tension inside the White House last week in the leadup to the release of a long-awaited intelligence report into the brutal 2018 murder of Khashoggi— and that the notion of sanctioning Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, was never really on the table.

The White House has been hammered over what many critics say was its weak response to the report's findings, especially given the administration's tough talk about recalibrating the relationship with Saudi Arabia, and Joe Biden's campaign promises of making the Saudis pay a price for their role in Khashoggi's murder.

One of the great moral stains on the United States is that the richest and most powerful country in history has accepted staggering levels of child poverty. With final legislative approval of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on Wednesday, the United States has decided to scrub at that stain.

Most historic in the package are provisions that should sharply reduce child poverty. If these measures are made permanent, a Columbia University study suggests, child poverty could fall by half. By half! Biden will have done for children something analogous to what Franklin Roosevelt did for senior citizens with Social Security.

Bangladesh was born 50 years ago this month amid genocide, squalor and starvation.

One of the great moral stains on the United States is that the richest and most powerful country in history has accepted staggering levels of child poverty. With final legislative approval of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on Wednesday, the United States has decided to scrub at that stain.

But then the government and civic organizations promoted education, including for girls. Today, 98 percent of children in Bangladesh complete elementary school. Still more astonishing for a country with a history of gender gaps, there are now more girls in high school in Bangladesh than boys.

I was right that Bangladesh faces huge challenges, not least climate change. But over all my pessimism was dead wrong, for Bangladesh has since enjoyed three decades of extraordinary progress.