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The attackers destroyed and looted homes while using knives, machetes, hatchets and ropes to butcher or strangle victims

"The highly aggressive rhetoric on both sides regarding the fight for Mekelle is dangerously provocative and risks placing already vulnerable and frightened civilians in grave danger," Bachelet said in a statement.

CNN has been unable to verify claims from either parties due to a communications blackout. Internet, mobile phones and landlines are all down, making it difficult to contact those accused in the preliminary report.

Government forces say they are currently closing in on Mekelle ahead of a promised "final phase" of the military operation that includes plans to surround the regional capital Mekelle with tanks.

There have also been reports of atrocities committed by federal forces since Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered air strikes and a ground offensive against Tigray's rulers for defying his authority. Tigrayan leaders have accused federal forces of killing innocent civilians while targeting churches and homes.

Hundreds have died and more than 40,000 refugees have fled to neigboring Sudan since November 7, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Humanitarian organizations are struggling to provide services amid the tsunami of refugees.

The conflict has spread to Eritrea, where the TPLF has fired rockets, and also affected Somalia where Ethiopia has disarmed several hundred Tigrayans in a peacekeeping force fighting al Qaeda-linked militants.

The United Kingdom is "very concerned" about the escalating conflict in Tigray, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the UK parliament Tuesday. There is "risk of spill over and spread to the region", he added. The European Union and United States have also urged de-escalation since the conflict began.

What we have, instead, are the words of moderate Democratic lawmakers who believe those slogans left them unusually vulnerable to Republican attacks.

it had something to do with poor campaign infrastructure and a message that was unresponsive to the electorate.

Republicans have built a new working-class, multiracial coalition

If preliminary exit polls are any indication — and they have real flaws as measurement tools — Trump did hardly any better with Black voters than George W. Bush in 2004 and quite a bit worse with Hispanic voters.

He may not have transformed the Republican coalition, but he held onto much of his 2016 support and even enlarged it, if not in percentage terms then in absolute ones. Democrats who thought he would be swamped by high turnout were wrong; not only did he benefit, but his ability to turn nonvoters into voters is what likely kept him in the game.

There is no hard evidence that voters turned against Democratic congressional candidates because of “defund the police” and other radical slogans.

At the end of March, President Trump signed the Cares Act, which distributed more than half a trillion dollars in direct aid to more than 150 million Americans, from stimulus checks ($1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households below a certain income threshold) to $600 per week in additional unemployment benefits.

Personal income went up and poverty went down, even as the United States reported its steepest ever quarterly drop in economic output.

Now, the reason this many Americans received as much assistance as they did is that Democrats fought for it over the opposition of Republicans who believed any help beyond the minimum would degrade the will to work for whatever wage employers were willing to pay.

But voters, and especially the low-propensity voters who flooded the electorate in support of Trump, aren’t attuned to the ins and outs of congressional debate.

All they knew is that Trump signed the bill (and the checks), giving them the kind of government assistance usually reserved for the nation’s ownership class.

But I would not ignore the extent to which the Republican Party’s strong performance can be explained simply by the fact that it was the party in power when the government put a lot of money into the hands of a lot of people who didn’t have it before.

Do not listen to the debt worriers and the deficit hawks. Ignore the calls for means-testing and complicated workarounds. Embrace, instead, the simplicity of cash. Take a page from the left and give as much direct help to as many people as possible.

Biden said Congress should come together to pass a "robust" aid package, but also repeated his call for "immediate relief" in the lame-duck period, before he takes office.

He also laid out a laundry list of economic goals that must be addressed early on in his administration. These include keeping businesses and schools open safely, delivering economic relief for those who have lost jobs or had hours cut, stabilizing the nation's health care system and addressing racial inequities the virus has laid bare.

Yellen would become the first woman to lead the department in its 231 years of existence.

She would be just the fourth woman and the first Black woman to lead the CEA since it was established nearly 75 years ago.

Biden also named Wally Adeyemo, who, if confirmed, would become the Treasury Department's first Black deputy secretary.

Tanden — who is the CEO of the left-leaning public policy organization the Center for American Progress and a veteran of both the Clinton and Obama administrations — would be the first woman of color to lead OMB.

More than three decades ago, conventional Republicans and centrist Democrats signed on to an unwritten treaty. Conservatives agreed to mute their push for private school vouchers, their preference for religious schools and their desire to slash spending on public school systems. In return, Democrats effectively gave up the push for school integration and embraced policies that reined in teachers unions.

Curiously, the only time during her tenure that she prominently supported standardized testing was during the pandemic — a move seemingly intended to make public schools, which would obviously struggle to manage the task, look bad.

$5 billion annual tax credit for private school tuition, Ms. DeVos and her allies have made tremendous inroads at the state level.

And this past summer, the Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana declared that states could not bar religious schools from participating in state programs that provide scholarships to students attending private schools, clearing the way for further private expansion.

To capitalize on voter dissatisfaction with education policies in the coming years, Democrats can no longer lean on maligning Ms. DeVos.

And while Mr. Biden’s expansive (and expensive) education plans will confront the harsh reality of partisan division in Congress, he is guaranteed a powerful megaphone — one that he’ll share, not just with the next secretary of education, but with a former high-school teacher and current community-college professor, Jill Biden.

The claim plaintiffs bring alleges something horrific: that locaters in Mali sold them as children to an Ivorian farm where overseers forced them to work,” Mr. Katyal said

The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a cryptic 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

They sued Nestlé USA and Cargill, saying the firms had aided and profited from the practice of forced child labor.

“Even where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States,” he wrote, “they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.”

The court said foreign corporations may not be sued under the 1789 law, but it left open the question of the status of domestic corporations.

In Tuesday’s case, Nestlé USA v. Doe, No. 19-416, the companies sought to expand both sorts of limitations. They said the 1789 law did not allow suits even when some of the defendants’ conduct was said to have taken place in the United States, and they urged the court to bar suits under the law against all corporations, whether foreign or domestic.

Those questions suggested that the court could rule for the companies without making a broad statement about corporate immunity

Mr. Katyal said there were ways to hold such a corporation accountable. But he said the 1789 law was not one of them

The United States did not take an immediate public stand for or against the treaty’s final draft version.

Lobbying organizations that have followed the talks said the Obama administration would probably support it this time. “This is consistent with U.S. law and practice,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.

The treaty would push states to establish standards in barring the sale of conventional weapons if they would spur violations of international human rights law, aid terrorism or help organized crime.

The USSR crumbled — or so goes the lesson — because it became open, loosened its grip over politics and polity.

This idea has now received official stamp from the very top of Beijing’s leadership, and one can see it reverberating through the new wave of paranoia about foreign influence, reassertion of party power, and hostility to civil society

The Soviet fall, once seen at least in part as a result of the Communist Party’s own failings, has become reinterpreted as a deliberate US plot and a moral failure to hold the line against Western influence,” writes Palmer.

This paranoia guides and informs every step that Xi takes, be it the brutal repression of Uighur minority, the annihilation of their Muslim identity or the purge of his political opponents under the pretext of corruption.

Xi wrote in 2017: “As the world’s largest party, no external force can defeat us, and only we can defeat ourselves… We should stay alert to the ubiquitous factors that could weaken our Party’s pioneering nature and contaminate our Party’s purity… If we don’t take strict precautions and correct them in time… small problems will grow into big ones, minor slips will escalate into an irreversible landslide, probably even leading to a broader and subversive catastrophe.”

Xi and the CPC remain convinced that the US wants to balance and contain its rise, constrict it by fanning pro-democracy sentiments and challenge the ‘One China’ policy

Beijing’s actions are swayed by insecurity based on that fear. China blames the US for “influencing” the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, accuses Washington of instigating and sponsoring Taiwan’s defiance, and it has noted with concern American (mostly botched) efforts at regime change in post-second World War history

This has heightened Xi’s (and the party’s fears) to the extent that China believes a proactive, interventionist, in-your-face foreign policy — driven by a revanchist obsession with reassembling the Middle Kingdom’s imperial empire over the land and sea through military and non-military means — along with the relentless accumulation of economic and hard power are prerequisite to achieving the China Dream.

In keeping the party and the society focused on achieving that goal, fear (whether real or imagined) is a useful tool.

The CPC needs the west and its political system as the ‘other’ to operate in opposition to it, and paranoia remains the overwhelming driving force that binds the party, the state and society

in the last six months alone of the new decade — and amid a raging, global pandemic that originated in Wuhan — Xi’s China has undertaken a series of coercive steps and has gone into geopolitical jousting with almost all its neighbours and regional actors. The goal of a regional hegemon and a presumptive superpower should be creating conditions that aid its rise, not cause impediments in the path through abrasive overreach.

This naked bullying behaviour has consequences, even though China may like to believe that the ability of these regional actors in balancing against China is constrained by their economic dependence on Beijing. China has alienated regional players and given rise to a renewed push for Asian multilateralism underwritten by the US.

As former Indian ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale has said, for a minor tactical gain on the ground, China has “lost India” and forced New Delhi into fundamentally reassessing its China policy.

after Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, used an executive order on Nov. 13 to institute precisely such a mandate, a poll showed that a significant majority of North Dakotans favored it.

the state definitely should have taken that step last spring or summer — before the number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed, before hospitals were so overrun that sick North Dakotans had to be sent to neighboring states and before his own mother tested positive and died in early October.

Until recently, Governor Burgum was loath to exert much pressure on North Dakotans and steered clear of the social-distancing orders put in place by so many other states. But he did invest heavily in testing and never merrily shrugged off the threat of the coronavirus the way his Republican counterpart in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, did.

South Dakota, in contrast, was No. 1. Still no mask mandate there, and no leadership at all from Noem, who didn’t just welcome but beckoned President Trump to Mount Rushmore for that enormous Independence Day rally, the one at which his perpetually maskless entourage clustered near a similarly maskless crowd

Just before Thanksgiving, Noem announced the passing of her 98-year-old grandmother, one of 13 residents of a South Dakota nursing home who died in a two-week period. The home’s administrator told The Daily Beast that the other 12 residents, along with many of the nursing home’s workers, had tested positive for the coronavirus, but not Noem’s grandmother. (Hmmm …) While Noem publicly mourned her lost family member, she drew no particular attention to Covid-19’s rampage among her grandmother’s companions.

wrote to him to share a famous quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

They “scream at you for a magic medicine” and warn that Joe Biden will ruin America even as they’re “gasping for breath,” she wrote. She added: “They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real.”

“They stop yelling at you when they get intubated,” she wrote. “It’s like a horror movie that never ends.”

The truth is that the Dakotas are as emblematic as they are exceptional

In resisting the lockdowns, slowdowns and sacrifices that many other states committed to, they indulged and encouraged a selective (and often warped) reading of scientific evidence, a rebellion against experts and a twisted concept of individual liberty that was obvious all over the country and contributed mightily to our suffering.

“North Dakotans will come to each other’s aids in a heartbeat, but when asked to give up personal freedom for an amorphous common good — that’s difficult,

When I said “horror story,” I was cribbing. That was a description used in a series of mid-November tweets from a South Dakota emergency room nurse, Jodi Doering, that went viral. Doering was reeling from tending to dying Covid-19 patients who continued to insist that the coronavirus was some kind of hoax.

“We maybe believed that our rural nature sheltered us from what cities like yours were experiencing,” Carson said. “Then we found out, very brutally, that was wrong.”

“Over the past 24 hours, the president has continued to improve,” adding, “He’s met or exceeded all standard hospital discharge criteria.”

The president’s doctors evaded some key questions about the president’s condition, including his lung function and the date of his last negative coronavirus test before he tested positive. They said that he had received a third dose of the antiviral drug remdesivir, and that he has continued to take dexamethasone, a steroid drug that has been shown to be beneficial to patients who are very sick with Covid-19.

“One thing that’s for certain: don’t let it dominate you; don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it.”

The president’s comments drew outrage from scientists, ethicists and doctors, as well as some people whose relatives and friends were among the nearly 210,000 people who died in the United States.

“Is he actually trying to put more lives at risk?” Mr. Peoples said. “He needs to be held accountable for the deaths that could have been prevented if he never downplayed it.”

The coronavirus outbreak in the West Wing continued to spread on Monday, as the White House press secretary and two of her deputies joined the list of aides close to President Trump who tested positive for the virus, heightening fears that more cases are still to come.

He also promised that vaccines were "coming momentarily", although the US Centers for Disease Control has said no vaccine is expected to be widely available before the middle of next year.

It is a message almost messianic in its undertones - one that the rest of his party is amplifying. The president has suffered and overcome, and will lead the nation to a promised land beyond the virus.

He could experience a relapse or long-term medical difficulties. Americans who have lost loved ones to the disease may find his words and actions ill-considered or offensive.

But he said the medical team agreed the president's status and progress "support his safe return home, where he'll be surrounded by world-class medical care 24/7".

Dr Conley refused to answer questions about when Mr Trump last received a negative test or to go into the specifics of his treatment. He would not offer details regarding the president's scans to check for pneumonia, citing patient protection laws.

Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany became the latest high-profile figure close to the president to confirm a positive test earlier on Monday.

First Lady Melania Trump, senior aides and three Republican senators have also tested positive.

At least 12 people close to Mr Trump have now tested positive, as have several junior staff members.

Does he realize that the reason his party has never offered an acceptable alternative to the A.C.A., in particular an alternative that would protect pre-existing conditions, is that no such alternative is possible? That’s less clear.

The second part of this statement may come as news to many readers, because Biden’s health proposals haven’t drawn much attention so far.Why not? One reason is that the election is — rightly — being seen mainly as a referendum on Trump rather than on likely Democratic policy.

Joe Biden, if he wins (and gets a Democratic Senate), will make a big difference in the other direction, substantially expanding coverage and reducing premiums for middle-class families.

To the extent that the Biden plan has received any attention at all, this attention has largely been focused on his proposed introduction of a “public option” — a Medicare-like plan that individuals could buy instead of purchasing private insurance.

First and foremost, the Biden plan — Bidencare? ObamaBidencare? — would substantially increase the subsidies that currently help many but not all Americans who don’t get insurance from their employers.

So the Biden plan would increase subsidies and also remove the upper-income limit that prevents many middle-class families from receiving aid.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts the price tag at $850 billion over a decade. But it would cost far less than the 2017 tax cut, much of which went to corporations, which were supposed to respond by increasing investment, but didn’t.

The Biden plan would also automatically enroll low-income Americans in the public option, which is more important than it might sound.

On Trump call with GOP leaders, the President signaled he wanted a deal and didn't say he was going to pull the plug on the talks, according to a source familiar with the call. 

Republican Rep. John Katko, a New York lawmaker who represents a swing district, responded to the news in a tweet saying, "I disagree with the President. With lives at stake, we cannot afford to stop negotiations on a relief package," and adding, "I strongly urge the President to rethink this move."

"Today, once again, President Trump showed his true colors: putting himself first at the expense of the country, with the full complicity of the GOP Members of Congress," Pelosi said, adding, "Walking away from coronavirus talks demonstrates that President Trump is unwilling to crush the virus."

"The Speaker expressed her disappointment in the President's decision to abandon the economic & health needs of the American people," Hammill said.

Pelosi also questioned whether Trump taking a steroid was impacting his thinking, according to two people on the call. Trump was given the corticosteroid drug dexamethasone on Saturday after his oxygen level transiently dipped, White House physician Sean Conley said during a briefing on Sunday.

"Believe me, there are people who think that steroids have an impact on thinking," Pelosi told Democrats as she tried to explain her view of what the President was trying to do, a person on the call said. "So I just don't know."

Last week, the House of Representatives approved a $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus measure put forward by House Democrats with no bipartisan deal in sight as Pelosi and Mnuchin continued talks.

That vote came after House Democrats moved in May to pass a sweeping bill to spend roughly $3 trillion on relief measures, a proposal that similarly generated opposition from Republicans, who dismissed the aid package as a liberal wish list.

“I guess an email is notification of exposure,” said Erin Sanders, a nurse practitioner and certified contact tracer in Boston. “But that is not contact tracing,” she said, “and not how a responsible public health agency handles a super-spreading cluster of a deadly virus.”

an internal C.D.C. email on Friday asked the agency’s scientists to be ready to go to Washington for contact tracing, but a request from the White House for assistance never came, according to two senior C.D.C. scientists.

Experts at the C.D.C. could have immediately put in place contact tracing for President Trump and others who have been infected, working with health departments of the states to which Mr. Trump and others have traveled. But regulations require that the C.D.C. be asked to step in.

During the 48-hour window before Mr. Trump’s diagnosis that White House contact tracers are focusing on, the president debated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Cleveland; traveled to a rally of thousands in Minnesota; met with supporters and donors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and conferred with dozens of aides at the White House, all while not wearing a mask.

The timing of the diagnosis of Mr. Trump’s illness makes it highly likely that he and the others became infected on Saturday, medical experts said. Symptoms typically appear around five days after exposure to the virus; Mr. Trump began showing symptoms on Thursday, “right smack dab in the day” he would be expected to, Dr. Maldonado said.

“Staff should not go to the White House Medical Unit clinic for any Covid-19 testing inquiries,” the memo said. But some officials have continued to go to work.

There are three hundred and twenty-one testing locations in the city, and the system is so extensive that in June, when Beijing suffered an outbreak, Wuhan hospitals sent seventy-two staffers to the capital to help with tests.

When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighborhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities.

Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.”

Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated.

Zhang said the experience of working through the pandemic had left him calmer and more patient. He drove more carefully now; he wasn’t in such a rush.

I often asked Wuhan residents how they had been personally changed by the spring, and there was no standard response. Some expressed less trust in government information; others said they had increased faith in the national leadership.

Wuhan had most recently reported a locally transmitted symptomatic case on May 18th. It’s the most thoroughly tested city in China: at the end of May, in part to boost confidence, the government tried to test every resident, a total of eleven million.

I never met a cabdriver who had been swab-tested less than twice, and a couple had been tested five times. Most of the cabbies had no relatives or friends who had been infected; swabbing was simply required by the city and by their cab companies.

“I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, it’s unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” she said

The physician who handled testing told me that, on average, his hospital still recorded one positive for every forty thousand exams. Most of these positives were repeat patients: after having been infected during the initial run of the virus, they recovered fully, and then for some reason, months later, showed evidence of the virus again. So far, most of the positives had been asymptomatic, and the physician saw no indication that the virus was spreading in the city.

In town, there were few propaganda signs about the epidemic, and Wuhan newspapers ran upbeat headlines every morning (Yangtze Daily, August 29th, front page: “STUDENTS DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS”). Movie theatres were open; restaurants and bars had no seating restrictions. At the Hanyang Renxinghui Mall, I saw barefaced kids playing in what may have been one of the last fully functioning ball pits on earth, a sight that seemed worthy of other headlines (“CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN WUHAN BALL PITS”).

Across town, colleges and universities were in the process of bringing back more than a million students. Wuhan has the second-highest number of students of any city in China, after Guangzhou.

Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.

In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul.

One was a director of streaming media whom I’ll call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually he’d find other ways to use the material. “It will be in the hard drive,” he said, tapping his camera.

After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldn’t be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didn’t want to say too much. “One person said, ‘Ten years later, if the climate has changed, I’ll tell you my story,’ ” Yin told me. “He knew that he would be judged by history.” She continued, “These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.”

Such fare is much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south. It’s possible that the disease arrived from somewhere else and then spread in the wet, cool conditions of the fish stalls. A few Wuhan residents told me that a considerable amount of their seafood comes from Guangdong, and they suggested that perhaps a southerner had unwittingly imported the disease,

When I spoke with scientists outside China, they weren’t focussed on the government’s early missteps

In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic—a period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.

Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the virus’s genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. “I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it,” she said. “There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.”

For much of El-Sadr’s career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat trade—the first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat.

El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of people’s encroachment on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics,” she wrote to me, in an e-mail. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”

There’s a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadn’t cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly.

Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. “It’s middle-level officials,” he said. “Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.”

Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. “There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year,” he told me. “It was winter, and bats are not out as much.”

His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. “But generally it’s people who live near bat caves,”

Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade.

He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. “You would take those samples and look for the virus,” he said. “They’ll find something eventually. These things just don’t happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. We’ve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.”

Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation.

There’s also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But there’s no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.

“Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish,” Daszak said. “It really drives openness and transparency.”

He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. “If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there,” he said. “In sixteen years, I’ve never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. They’ve never hidden data. I’ve never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didn’t want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?”

In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trump’s comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people.

I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information.

At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. “That’s the politically correct thing to do,” a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. “To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.”

But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that it’s typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. “You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians,” he said, in a phone conversation. “And the doctors’ response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.”

Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. “Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said. “Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.” The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world.

In the West, China’s image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef.

But He believes that the situation is fluid. “All of these feelings can turn around quickly,” he told me. “I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.”

There’s also a competitive element. “China wants to beat America,” He said. He believes that the C.N.B.G. vaccine will receive some level of approval for public use by the end of October. “Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” he said. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.”

No matter how quickly the Chinese develop a vaccine, or how effectively they have handled the pandemic since January, it’s unlikely to make Westerners forget the mistakes and misinformation during the pandemic’s earliest phase.

Some of this is due to a cultural difference—the Chinese response to errors is often to look forward, not back. On January 31st, Fang Fang commented in her diary, “The Chinese people have never been fond of admitting their own mistakes, nor do they have a very strong sense of repentance.” It’s often hard for them to understand why this quality is so frustrating for Westerners. In this regard, the pandemic is truly a mirror—it doesn’t allow the Chinese to look out and see themselves through the eyes of others.

The pandemic illuminates both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chinese system, as well as the relationship between the government and the people. They know each other well: officials never felt the need to tell citizens exactly what happened in Wuhan, but they understood that American-level casualties would have been shocking—given China’s population, the tally would have been more than a million and counting.

In order to avoid death on that scale, the government also knew that people would be willing to accept strict lockdowns and contribute their own efforts toward fighting the virus.

In turn, citizens were skilled at reading their government. People often held two apparently contradictory ideas: that the Party lied about some things but gave good guidance about others. More often than not, citizens could discern the difference. During the pandemic, it was striking that, when the Chinese indulged in conspiracy theories, these ideas rarely resulted in personally risky behavior, as they often did in the U.S.

Perhaps the Chinese have been inoculated by decades of censorship and misinformation: in such an environment, people develop strong instincts for self-preservation, and they don’t seem as disoriented by social media as many Americans are.

Early in the year, I corresponded by WeChat with a Wuhan pharmacist who worked in a hospital where many were infected. On February 26th, he expressed anger about the early coverup. “My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and suppressed dissent,” he wrote. “Because of this, they lost a golden opportunity to control the virus.”

In Wuhan, we met a few times, and during one of our conversations I showed him what he had written in February. I asked what he would do now if he found himself in Li Wenliang’s position, aware of an outbreak of some unknown disease. Would he post a warning online? Contact a health official? Alert a journalist?The pharmacist thought for a moment. “I would tell my close friends in person,” he said. “But I wouldn’t put anything online. Nothing in writing.”

I asked if such an event would turn out differently now.“It would be the same,” he said. “It’s a problem with the system.”

He explained that, with an authoritarian government, local officials are afraid of alarming superiors, which makes them inclined to cover things up. But, once higher-level leaders finally grasp the truth, they can act quickly and effectively.

We have to stand together!” He seemed to both sense and reject the idea that Trump has made it hard to do that.

In 2016, the N.F.L. player Colin Kaepernick declined to stand for the pre-game playing of the national anthem, saying that he could not “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color.” Trump won praise from his political base by condemning Kaepernick as un-American.

n 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white-supremacist rally featured the American flag, but most of the marchers carried Confederate flags and swastika banners. After one of the white supremacists plowed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing one of them, Heather Heyer, the far right appeared to rebrand, according to Bethan Johnson, a University of Cambridge scholar and a fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right

Recently, Trump suggested a mandatory year in jail for anyone who desecrates the flag. (Burning or otherwise desecrating the flag is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution, which Trump had cited in his defense of the flag at Mar-a-Lago.) In August, Trump held the final night of the Republican National Convention, for the first time American history, at the White House; aides built a stage on the South Lawn and loaded it with fifty-four American flags.

Outraged veterans started showing up at the funerals en masse, on motorcycles, to provide protection and emotional support to the families of the dead. They flew American flags on their choppers and drowned out protestors’ chants by revving their engines. These counter-demonstrators became the Patriot Guard Riders, a nonpartisan group with chapters nationwide. The Riders required only that members demonstrate “unwavering respect for those who risk their very lives for America’s freedom and security.” An early leader once said, “We show families in grieving communities that America still cares.”

The flag has represented different ideas at different times in American history: during the Revolution, it was a sign of radical democracy, though the eagle was the more dominant emblem; in the eighteen-forties, it stood for anti-immigration politics; during the Civil War, it was used by both anti- and pro-slavery causes; in the eighteen-nineties, the Pledge of Allegiance was created, and waves of immigrants were given flags as part of their “Americanization”; during the Vietnam era, it was seen as a pro-war symbol. Immediately after 9/11, the flag had a more unifying presence; with the invasion of Iraq, during the Presidency of George W. Bush, it also became synonymous with the U.S. military.

the American flag “moves from one meaning to another.”

Teachout associates the Trump-era use of the flag with a “rhetoric of threat and strength and defense,” and told me that, in certain hands, the flag seems to serve as “a kind of legitimacy” for some of these groups “in terms of how they think of themselves.” Trump’s flag rhetoric rarely involves “the language of sacrifice or shared purpose. It’s about fighting and winning.”

The conflation of Trump and the flag has become so pervasive that progressives have reported feeling reluctant to buy property in areas rife with the flag. Just before the 2018 midterm elections, Bruce Watson, a writer living in western Massachusetts, lamented that liberals and progressives had “shied away from the flag.” He warned that “ceding the nation’s most enduring symbol to one party is just bad politics” and said the flag is “the symbol of ‘we, the people’ ”—including those who “staunchly oppose the president’s policies and behavior.” Watson noted, “Even if it festoons every Trump rally, the flag belongs to all of us.” What Teachout noted more than a decade ago holds true today: “The story of the flag is a story of a country in search of itself.”

The silent majority, if you will,” Hartley said

The people on the bridge had several things in common. All were white. They told me that they get their information from Fox News; the woman from Iowa also listens to Rush Limbaugh. None believed news reports that Trump had repeatedly disparaged members of the military, calling the American war dead “losers and suckers.” Carr said he could not accept that Trump made such comments, then added, “Even if he did say it, look at how much he’s done for us.”

"Outside of that, the administration has had no contact with the Trump campaign about its events," wrote Wolf spokeswoman Sarah Goulet

Mr. Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, echoed the “dark winter” language during the most recent presidential debate, and he is already using his bully pulpit to promote and reinforce a culture of mask wearing.

He could use his authority under federal transit law to require masks on public transportation. He could also prod governors who are resisting mask mandates to at least require masks in public buildings in their states.

Instead of making it about the president’s coercive authority under law it should be about whether the president can support a norm that supports public health, which is in people’s self interest

Experts say there is growing scientific evidence that face masks can considerably reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses like the one that causes Covid-19.

Research also shows that states that have passed mask mandates have had lower growth rates of Covid-19, beginning on the day the mandate was passed

the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated that “universal mask use” — when 95 percent of people wear masks in public — could prevent nearly 130,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the coming months, though those numbers are based on certain assumptions and could change if people alter their behavior

any hint of a sweeping federal requirement would “go over like a lead balloon” and “divide and harden areas of the country in opposition,”

that has not produced the kind of compliance that public health experts say is necessary to reduce the spread of the virus

Some public health experts fear that Mr. Trump — who routinely mocks Mr. Biden for wearing masks and whose aides often forgo them even as the White House has become its own coronavirus hot spot — has so poisoned the discussion around masks that wearing them will always be construed as a political statement.

She also suggested that insurance industry executives might be persuaded to adjust their policies to require that businesses mandate mask wearing by customers and employees in order to receive coverage.

“There’s a presumption that a mask mandate would have to be backed up with fines and set off scuffles with law enforcement,

There is some evidence that norms are changing.

The jobless rate for people 25 and under jumped from 14.7 percent in January to 17.6 percent in August, its highest level since 2017.

But in Europe, the pandemic’s economic impact puts an entire generation at risk, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Graduates are facing unprecedented competition for even entry-level positions from a tsunami of newly laid-off workers.

The scarring effects may linger. “If you’re unemployed earlier on in your career, you’re more likely to experience joblessness in the future,” said Neal Kilbane, a senior economist at Oxford Economics.

Many are resorting to internships, living with parents or returning to school to ride out the storm. Young workers without higher education risk sliding even further.

Ms. Davis recently took a four-week gig conducting surveys for a car company. It pays Britain’s minimum wage of £8.20 an hour.

The work leaves her with less time to push out job applications, and she wonders when she will get an opportunity to start a career in occupational psychology.

“I have energy, and I know how to roll up my sleeves at any sort of job,” Mr. Palumbo said. “But everything is stuck, and my hands are tied.”

To earn extra cash, she babysits occasionally and would tend bar at night if she could. But her current workload leaves her exhausted with little time to spare.