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the time has passed when tech companies can simply build tools, write algorithms and amass data without regard to who uses the technology and for what purpose.

Nearly a decade ago, Cisco Systems was sued in federal court on behalf of 11 members of the Falun Gong organization, who claimed that the company built a nationwide video surveillance and “forced conversion” profiling system for the Chinese government that was tailored to help Beijing crack down on the group

According to Cisco’s own marketing materials, the video analyzer — which would now be marketed as artificial intelligence — was the “only product capable of recognizing over 90 percent of Falun Gong pictorial information.”

The failure to punish Cisco set a precedent for American companies to build artificial intelligence for foreign governments to use for political oppression

Thermo Fisher, sold DNA analyzers to aid in the current large-scale domestic surveillance and internment of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, in the region of Xinjiang.

Mr. Yang defended Yahoo’s human rights commitments and emphasized the importance of the Chinese market. Google used a similar defense for Dragonfly last year.

Tech companies are spending record amounts on lobbying and quietly fighting to limit employees’ legal protections for organizing. North American legislators would be wise to answer the call from human rights organizations and research institutions by guaranteeing explicit whistle-blower protections similar to those recently passed by the European Union

Ideally, they would vocally support an instrument that legally binds businesses — via international human rights law — to uphold human rights.

Mr. Obama’s reading lists are peppered with science and science fiction titles such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction,” Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal” and Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem.”

But Mr. Obama’s grasp of real science before becoming president was sketchy. He once admitted to a room full of scientists to not doing “well enough in chemistry or physics to impress you much on those topics.” And some scientists who met Mr. Obama before the presidency said they were not wowed by his grasp of their fields.

“He’s an academic, he’s one of us,” Dr. Varmus said. “He’s a rational, levelheaded guy who makes decisions based on the evidence. Now, that might actually be a deficiency as a politician.”

“Losing two months is close to disastrous, and that’s what we did,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Bloomberg.

if we are being honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that the United States has long been failing. We remain one of the richest countries in the world, but by international standards we look more like a Third World nation.

we lag in almost every measure of societal well-being among the wealthy nations (now 36) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

we had the second-highest poverty rate, the highest level of income inequality and the highest level of obesity.

We were also below average on renewable energy, infrastructure investment and voter turnout.

We spent the most on education but produced less-than-average results

We are the only OECD nation that doesn’t mandate paid family leave.

One area where we do lead is gun violence. Our homicide rate is nearly 50 percent above the OECD average.

We spend more on health care than any other country in the world, but we are the only OECD country without universal medical coverage (27.9 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2018)

Child mortality in the United States is the highest in the OECD, and life expectancy is below average

We have far fewer hospital beds per 1,000 people than other advanced democracies (2.4 compared to 12.2 in South Korea), which makes us particularly vulnerable to a pandemic.

Why has America become so backward? That is a complex topic. I would direct readers to the work of analysts such as Jonathan Rauch, Francis Fukuyama, and Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann

I would ascribe a lot of what’s wrong to growing partisan polarization that makes it almost impossible to address our most pressing needs. Republicans are getting more conservative and Democrats more liberal — although not to the same degree. The GOP is far more extreme than the Democratic Party.

President Trump has exacerbated the problem, but he didn’t start it. He is himself the product of decades of right-wing revolt against government and increasingly against reason itself.

America is unusual in having a major party — and a major television network — devoted to climate denialism and protecting the “right” of everyone to own an assault rifle. The GOP and the right-wing media have long been a hotbed of nutty conspiracy theories, and their reluctance to face the reality of the new coronavirus set back efforts to save lives.

The Republicans’ decades-long demonization of government has consequences

the federal civilian workforce has fallen as a percentage of total nonfarm employment from 18 percent in 1980 to 15 percent today, and their salaries top out at just under $200,000 — “only slightly more than an entry-level engineer makes at Google.”

There are still plenty of high-quality civil servants, but their ranks are too thin, and they are too much at the mercy of political yahoos.

“When a typical European parliamentary government changes hands from one party to another, the ministers and a handful of staffers turn over,” Fukuyama notes. “In the U.S., a change of administration (even within the same party) opens up some 5,000 ‘Schedule C’ job positions to political appointees.”

We must not only beat this pandemic; we must also address a host of other ills that have been festering for decades. In recent years, America has been “exceptional” mainly in the scale of our governmental failures compared with those of other industrialized democracies.

New York is conducting more testing per capita than countries such as South Korea, which may partially explain the spike in numbers.

“We need to be smarter about this … we need the federal help and we need it now,” he said, calling on Donald Trump to utilise the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force companies to produce medical equipment and provide them the necessary financial support to do so. So far, the administration has relied on volunteer efforts that Cuomo said were not appropriate for the urgency of crisis.

“What happens to New York is gonna wind up happening to California, and Washington state and Illinois. It’s just a matter of time. We’re just getting there first,” Cuomo said. “Look at us today … where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future.”

Speaking later in the day, the vice-president, Mike Pence, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) had sent New York 2,000 ventilators and plans to send 2,000 more on Wednesday.

He also rejected the suggestion, floated by the president in recent days, that advice from public health officials could be rowed back in a matter of weeks to protect the US economy, saying that sensible steps in both areas could be made now without increasing risk to more vulnerable people in society.

uomo’s urgent message comes as a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) warned the US has the potential to become the next global hotspot for the pandemic. The country already has more than 46,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases, resulting in close to 600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

With cases surging, Cuomo said new projections estimate his state will need 140,000 hospital beds once the crisis reaches its apex, which could happen within 14 to 21 days instead of in May as previously forecast.

The outbreak has led to a dramatic change in America’s social fabric: as of Monday, the New York Times estimated that more than 158 million people in 16 states would soon be under strict orders to stay at home – approaching half of the population.

The shift in messaging came after James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, predicted unemployment could reach 30% nationwide, according to Bloomberg News, and as negotiations for a coronavirus stimulus package dragged on for days in the US Senate. For weeks, suddenly jobless workers have been imploring the government for help, and Trump is staring down what could become a historic recession during an election year.

Even still, medical experts have cautioned against such an abrupt restart to the economy while the virus continues to spread exponentially. “You can’t call off the best weapon we have, which is social isolation, even out of economic desperation, unless you’re willing to be responsible for a mountain of deaths,” Arthur Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at NYU School of Medicine, told the New York Times. “Can’t we try to put people’s lives first for at least a month?”

“If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest,” Cuomo said. “No American is going to say, accelerate the economy at the cost of human life, because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

Steyer hates the comparison

a 77-year-old who used to work at the sprawling dog food factory that greets visitors to Clinton, pumping out both steam and a vague smell of meat.

Nevertheless, there have been grumblings, about Steyer’s campaigning methods. By 13 January he had spent $123m on tv and digital advertising, according to NPR. Not including fellow Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who is even wealthier than Steyer, that is more than all the other Democratic candidates combined.

ettner was open to voting for Steyer, potentially, but preferred the more progressive candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Indeed, for all the goodwill Steyer received in Clinton, none of the people the Guardian spoke to actually planned to vote for him, and it was a similar story in Dubuque. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it vote for you.

“There’s no way that anybody, including Mike Bloomberg, can buy an election, the only thing you can do is see if Americans respond to what you have to say, and who you are, and what you’ve done in the past.

On Monday, when Iowans go to the caucuses, we’ll find out if that is, actually, how Americans see it.

We come back to the cui bono question: What’s the value to Trump in hyping the drugs

That said, only 3.3 percent of the fund’s holdings are in that company. What’s more, Trump’s disclosure, filed in May, shows that the three trusts each hold between $1,001 and $15,000 in the Dodge & Cox fund. In other words, Trump’s stake in Sanofi from each trust is between $33 and $495 — or between about $100 and $1,500 in total. However much he overstates his net worth, Trump is still worth nearly $3 billion, according to Bloomberg News, mostly as a function of the property he owns.

That Sanofi investment would therefore constitute between 0.000003 and 0.00005 percent of Trump’s net worth. If you were worth $100,000, it would be like worrying about the nickel in your pocket.

The most logical answer is what it was Monday. By now, the use of the drug has become a benchmark in the political culture wars, with Trump allies echoing his calls for the drug as a sign of their confidence in his instincts and as a way of promoting what they see as an optimistic view of the pandemic

The president is probably also promoting the drug because it offers a big political upside — getting to say he was right and the experts were wrong — with a small downside. (If the drugs continue to prove not to be particularly useful, precedent suggests that he will simply ignore the time he spent promoting them.)

“Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country opened,” he said Tuesday.

Trump’s “warrior” turn meant something very different. He’s given up on arguing that anything will be safe or okay. Indeed, he appears to have ditched the idea that people are clamoring to get back to work. They just have to.

For Trump the ‘warrior’ talk isn’t about shared sacrifice. He is adding a cheap patina of valor to his demand that people endanger themselves and in some cases die to restore the greatest economy that ever was … the one he created, the one he thinks will get him reelected in November. This is less warrior than cannon fodder.

What will Trump’s Katrina moment look like? Will it be the collapse of health insurance due to administration sabotage? A recession this White House has no idea how to handle? A natural disaster or public health crisis? One way or another, it’s coming.

They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to believe and spread it.

They have targeted online ads designed to intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.

The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work. Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll farms

Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers.

The West has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.

What was first perceived as a targeted attack — Russia attempting to hack the U.S. election — is proving to be a broader and bolder war.

Seeking to weaken and discredit the Western alliance that has constrained Russia’s global ambitions for 70 years, Putin pushed the Brexit vote that rattled the European Union.

His cyber-sappers have also aided nationalist movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary

Russia did not need to collude with Trump. He was already an ideal host for the virus they are spreading. Putin’s goal, in May’s words, is to “sow discord in the West,” and Trump eats, sleeps and breathes discord. He understands that our siloed, targeted, algorithmic media feeds on conflict and outrage, and he is happy to dish it up.

We can’t defend ourselves until we see clearly what is happening, and understand that fact-checking, truth-telling and goodwill are more than virtues now. They are patriotic duties. Pogo’s words were never so true: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.

So why is Japan going ahead with the Olympics, against the public’s objections, while the pandemic is still a major public health concern? The answer is familiar: collusion among the elites.

As of March 21, Japan ranked last for inoculations per capita among the 37 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; just 0.3 percent of the population has received a shot, according to Bloomberg. There is virtually no chance that Japanese people will be vaccinated in large enough numbers by the time the Olympics are supposed to start in late July.

Take Dentsu, the largest advertising and public relations company in Japan and the Tokyo 2020 Games’ exclusive marketing agency. Shun Sakurai, a former vice minister at MIC, is now the company’s executive vice president and representative director. That transition — from a senior post in a ministry to a post-retirement position in a company regulated by that ministry — is called “amakudari,” descent from heaven.

Dentsu’s involvement with Japan’s Olympics are deep and deeply problematic. French prosecutors say that the Tokyo bid committee paid a former Dentsu executive more than $8 million to bribe members of the International Olympic Committee.

The pandemic might still derail the Tokyo Olympics. Athletes and celebrities alike have pulled out of the torch relay run over infection concerns, and some national teams could withdraw from the competition altogether.

Ship owners and operators have some options, but none of them are particularly good ones. The adage that time is money couldn't be more true in the shipping business. For the vessels already backed up in the canal, if the waterway isn't clear for transit soon, a decision will need to be made about whether to continue waiting or go to Plan B.

To get an idea just what a shortcut could be lost, commodity analysts Kpler said that for a vessel averaging 12 knots (14 mph), Suez to Amsterdam, takes 13 days via the canal. Around the Cape of Good Hope, it takes 41 days.

The situation could become clearer in the next week, Karatzas said, but if the Ever Given looks likely to require a massive operation to break free, shippers will have to make some tough and potentially costly decisions. The same goes for vessels that haven't yet left port, although the cost in time and money for them wouldn't be as great.

Another possible option is to go through the Panama Canal by way of the Pacific. But many of the largest commercial vessels today, such as the 1,300-foot Ever Given, are too big to fit through the Panama Canal.

Jonathan Roach, a container market analyst for Braemar ACM Shipbroking, said in a recent letter to clients that the route via the Cape of Good Hope was the most likely detour, even for vessels that can fit through the Panama Canal.Last year, due to a combination of excess capacity and falling fuel prices, some shippers did just that — opting to go the Africa route to avoid the Suez Canal transit fees.

There is one more possibility, but it too has severe limitations. A shorter route through the Arctic known alternately as the Northeast Passage, or the Northern Sea Route, or NSR, is being touted by Russia.

The number of vessels using the NSR has increased to several hundred each year, thanks in part to global warming that has reduced polar ice. However, traffic there still amounts to a mere fraction of what passes through the Suez.

The Northern Sea Route is still not considered practical by most shipping companies. For example, in 2018, Maersk, the world's largest container line, sent one of its ships via the NSR, but the company emphasized it doesn't see the route "as an alternative to our usual routes" and that the voyage was merely "a trial to explore an unknown route for container shipping and to collect scientific data."

Lastly, it's worth noting that a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal is not unprecedented. The waterway was closed for eight years, beginning in 1967, after war broke out between Egypt and Israel. As a result, ships were forced to divert around the tip of Africa.

Global supply chains, already significantly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, could be further stressed by a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal, said Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy with the National Retail Federation.

The greatest impact would be felt in the European market, which relies most on transfers through the canal, but given the interconnected nature of global manufacturing and commerce, there's likely also to be a knock-on effect for the United States.

Bisceglie said it's time for companies to consider "having more disparate [supply hubs] instead of having all our eggs on one cargo ship." Maersk told NPR on Friday that it was too early to commit to rerouting any of its massive global container fleet. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company said in a statement, that while "out of our control, we apologize for the inconvenience this incident may cause to your business and for critical shipments."

Like much else about the situation, it depends on how long it goes on. A weeklong delay for a few hundred ships at the Suez might have only a negligible impact for consumers, but a prolonged delay could increase the cost of shipping, complicate manufacturing and ultimately drive up prices.

That's $80,000 a day in fuel and an extra 10 days travel time — both to and from Asia. "So, you're looking at the best part of a million dollars with your operating costs. So it's a million dollars out and a million dollars back," he said.

In his letter to clients, Roach also noted problems at the Suez Canal could disrupt the flow of containers. A trade imbalance between Europe and Asia means that filled containers going west return mostly empty to ports in the east to be refilled. "If empty stocks dwindle in Asia, there is the short-term possibility of an increase" in prices, Roach wrote.

Overall, though, Joanna Konings, a senior economist at ING, told Bloomberg that she's "relatively sanguine" about the impact on trade. But she doesn't rule out "an inflationary shock that could come right to the consumer."

Shipping rates for petroleum products have nearly doubled since the Ever Given's grounding on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Although oil prices may also be feeling some upward pressure in the wake of the Ever Given incident, their increase so far has been blunted by news of further COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe that are likely to continue to depress demand.

There’s a growing consensus among economists that the U.S. economy spent most of the decade after the 2008 financial crisis producing less and employing fewer people than it should have

The good news is that the Biden administration’s economists understand all of this perfectly well, and by all accounts they’re already in the process of putting together a very ambitious infrastructure plan.

“Every bit of polling evidence I have reviewed,” wrote Gallup’s Frank Newport, “shows that Americans are extremely supportive of new government infrastructure legislation.” Remember, the Trump administration spent four years promising a plan any day now, although it never delivered.

Republicans will probably offer similar lock-step opposition to anything Democrats propose on infrastructure. In fact, the very popularity of infrastructure spending will stiffen their opposition, because what they want, above all, is to make the Biden administration a failure.

The relief bill is done; infrastructure may be harder.

Economists have noticed the good news. Forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg predict 5.5 percent growth this year, the highest rate since the 1990s. I think they’re being conservative; so does Goldman Sachs, which expects 7.7 percent growth, something we haven’t seen since 1984.

Exactly why we found ourselves in this condition is a subject of some debate, but a few factors are obvious. A drastic slowdown in growth of the working-age population reduced investment demand; so did an apparent slackening in the pace of technological progress. Whatever the reasons, the prepandemic economy spent most of its time underperforming relative to its potential.

The answer is actually obvious: a large program of public investment, paid for largely with borrowing, although with a case for new taxes, too, if it’s really big. Such a program would do double duty. Macroeconomics aside, we need to spend a lot to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, fight climate change, and more. And public investment can also be a major source of jobs and growth, helping to pull us out of the stagnation trap.