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neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.

The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us

Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.

The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.

the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.

Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels

Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences

we can’t simply replace one simplistic narrative, about the super power of mitigation policy, for another, focused only on the burdens it imposed and not at all on the costs of doing much less — or nothing at all.

Let’s start with the title. What is the big failure, as you see it?

McLean: I think it gets at things that had happened in America even before the pandemic hit. And among those things were, I think, a failure to recognize the limits of capitalism, a failure of government to set the right rules for it, particularly when it comes to our health care system; a focus on profits that may have led to an increase in the bottom line but created fragility in ways people didn’t understand; and then our growing polarization that made us incapable of talking to each other

How big is the failure? When I look at The Economist’s excess mortality data, I see the U.S. had the 53rd-worst outcome in the world — worse than all of Western Europe, but better than all of Eastern Europe.

McLean: I think one way to quantify it is to take all those numbers and then put them in the context of our spending on health care. Given the amount we spend on health care relative to other countries, the scale of the failure becomes more apparent.

o me, the most glaring example is the schools. They were closed without people thinking through the potential consequences of closing down public schools, especially for disadvantaged kids.

to compound it, in my view, public health never made the distinction that needed to be made between the vulnerabilities of somebody 70 years old and the vulnerabilities of somebody 10 years old.

In the beginning of the book you write, in what almost feels like a thesis statement for the book: “A central tenet of this book is that we could not have done better, and pretending differently is a dangerous fiction, one that prevents us from taking a much needed look in the mirror.”

This claim, that the U.S. could not have done any better, runs against your other claim, that what we observed was an American failure. It is also a pretty extreme claim, I think, and I wanted to press you on it in part because it is, in my view, undermined by quite a lot of the work you do in the book itself.

Would the U.S. not have done better if it had recognized earlier that the disease spread through the air rather than in droplets? Would it not have done better if it hadn’t bungled the rollout of a Covid test in the early months?

McLean: Everything that you mentioned — the point of the book is that those were set by the time the pandemic hit.

in retrospect, what we were doing was to try to delay as much spread as we could until people got vaccinated. All the things that we did in 2020 were functionally serving or trying to serve that purpose. Now, given that, how can you say that none of that work saved lives?

McLean: I think that the test failure was baked into the way that the C.D.C. had come to operate

But the big question I really want to ask is this one: According to the C.D.C., we’ve had almost 1.2 million deaths from Covid. Excess mortality is nearly 1.4 million. Is it really your contention that there was nothing we might’ve done that brought that total down to 1.1 million, for instance, or even 900,000?

McLean: It’s very — you’re right. If you went through each and every thing and had a crystal ball and you could say, this could have been done, this could have been moved up by a month, we could have gotten PPE …

When I came to that sentence, I thought of it in terms of human behavior: What will humans put up with? What will humans stand for? How do Americans act? And you’ve written about Sweden being sort of average, and you’ve written about China and the Chinese example. They lock people up for two years and suddenly the society just revolts. They will not take it anymore. They can’t stand it. And as a result, a million and a half people die in a month and a half.

Well, I would tell that story very differently. For me, the problem is that when China opened up, they had fully vaccinated just under two-thirds of their population over 80. So to me, it’s not a failure of lockdowns. It’s a failure of vaccinations. If the Chinese had only achieved the same elderly vaccination rate as we achieved — which by global standards was pretty poor — that death toll when they opened up would have been dramatically lower.

What do you mean by “lockdown,” though? You use the word throughout the book and suggest that China was the playbook for all countries. But you also acknowledge that what China did is not anything like what America did.

Disparities in health care access — is it a dangerous fiction to think we might address that? You guys are big champions of Operation Warp Speed — would it not have been better if those vaccines had been rolled out to the public in nine months, rather than 12

. But this isn’t “lockdown” like there were lockdowns in China or even Peru. It’s how we tried to make it safer to go out and interact during a pandemic that ultimately killed a million Americans.

McLean: I think that you’re absolutely right to focus on the definition of what a lockdown is and how we implemented them here in this country. And I think part of the problem is that we implemented them in a way that allowed people who were well off and could work from home via Zoom to be able to maintain very much of their lives while other people couldn’t

And I think it depends on who you were, whether you would define this as a lockdown or not. If you were a small business who saw your small business closed because of this, you’re going to define it as a lockdown.

n the book you’re pretty definitive. You write, “maybe the social and economic disasters that lockdowns created would have been worth it if they had saved lives, but they hadn’t.” How can you say that so flatly?

I think there are still open questions about what worked and how much. But the way that I think about all of this is that the most important intervention that anybody did anywhere in the world was vaccination. And the thing that determined outcomes most was whether your first exposure came before or after vaccination.

Here, the shelter-in-place guidelines lasted, on average, five to seven weeks. Thirty nine of the 40 states that had issued them lifted them by the end of June, three months in. By the summer, according to Google mobility data, retail and grocery activity was down about 10 percent. By the fall, grocery activity was only down about 5 percent across the country

Nocera: Well, on some level, I feel like you’re trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, you’re saying that lockdowns saved lives. On the other hand, you said they weren’t real lockdowns because everybody was out and about.

I don’t think that’s having it both ways. I’m trying to think about these issues on a spectrum rather than in binaries. I think we did interrupt our lives — everybody knows that. And I think they did have an effect on spread, and that limiting spread had an effect by delaying infections until after vaccination.

Nocera: Most of the studies that say lockdowns didn’t work are really less about Covid deaths than about excess mortality deaths. I wound up being persuaded that the people who could not get to the hospital, because they were all working, because all the doctors were working on Covid and the surgical rooms were shut down, the people who caught some disease that was not Covid and died as a result — I wound up being persuaded about that.

We’re in a pandemic. People are going to die. And then the question becomes, can we protect the most vulnerable? And the answer is, we didn’t protect the most vulnerable. Nursing homes were a complete disaster.

There was a lot of worry early on about delayed health care, and about cancer in particular — missed screenings, missed treatments. But in 2019, we had an estimated 599,600 Americans die of cancer. In 2020, it was 602,000. In 2021, it was 608,000. In 2022, it was 609,000.

Nocera: See, it went up!But by a couple of thousand people, in years in which hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying of Covid.

Nocera: I think you can’t dispute the excess mortality numbers.I’m not. But in nearly every country in the world the excess mortality curves track so precisely with Covid waves that it doesn’t make sense to talk about a massive public health problem beyond Covid. And when you add all of these numbers up, they are nowhere near the size of the footfall of Covid. How can you look back on this and say the costs were too high?

Nocera: I think the costs were too high because you had school costs, you had economic costs, you had social costs, and you had death.

McLean: I think you’re raising a really good point. We’re making an argument for a policy that might not have been doable given the preconditions that had been set. I’m arguing that there were these things that had been put in place in our country for decades leading up to the pandemic that made it really difficult for us to plant in an effective way, from the outsourcing of our PPE to the distrust in our health care system that had been created by people’s lack of access to health care with the disparities in our hospital system.

How would you have liked to see things handled differently?Nocera: Well, the great example of doing it right is San Fran

I find the San Francisco experience impressive, too. But it was also a city that engaged in quite protracted and aggressive pandemic restrictions, well beyond just protecting the elderly and vulnerable.

McLean: But are we going to go for stay-at-home orders plus protecting vulnerable communities like San Francisco did? Or simply letting everybody live their lives, but with a real focus on the communities and places like nursing homes that were going to be affected? My argument is that we probably would’ve been better off really focusing on protecting those communities which were likely to be the most severely affected.

I agree that the public certainly didn’t appreciate the age skew, and our policy didn’t reflect it either. But I also wonder what it would mean to better protect the vulnerable than we did. We had testing shortages at first. Then we had resistance to rapid testing. We had staff shortages in nursing homes.

Nocera: This gets exactly to one of our core points. We had spent 30 years allowing nursing homes to be owned by private equity firms that cut the staff, that sold the land underneath and added all this debt on

I hear you saying both that we could have done a much better job of protecting these people and that the systems we inherited at the outset of the pandemic would’ve made those measures very difficult, if not impossible, to implement.

But actually, I want to stop you there, because I actually think that that data tells the opposite story.

And then I’m trying to say at the same time, but couldn’t we have done something to have protected people despite all of that?

I want to talk about the number of lives at stake. In the book, you write about the work of British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson. In the winter of 2020, he says that in the absence of mitigation measures and vaccination, 80 percent of the country is going to get infected and 2.2 million Americans are going to die. He says that 80 percent of the U.K. would get infected, and 510,000 Brits would die — again, in the abs

In the end, by the time we got to 80 percent of the country infected, we had more than a million Americans die. We had more than 200,000 Brits die. And in each case most of the infections happened after vaccination, which suggests that if those infections had all happened in a world without vaccines, we almost certainly would have surpassed two million deaths in the U.S. and almost certainly would’ve hit 500,000 deaths in the U.K.

In the book, you write about this estimate, and you endorse Jay Bhattacharya’s criticism of Ferguson’s model. You write, “Bhattacharya got his first taste of the blowback reserved for scientists who strayed from the establishment position early. He co-wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal questioning the validity of the scary 2 to 4 percent fatality rate that the early models like Neil Ferguson’s were estimating and that were causing governments to panic. He believed, correctly as it turns out, that the true fatality rate was much lower.”

Nocera: I know where you’re going with this, because I read your story about the nine pandemic narratives we’re getting wrong. In there, you said that Bhattacharya estimated the fatality rate at 0.01 percent. But if you actually read The Wall Street Journal article, what he’s really saying is I think it’s much lower. I’ve looked at two or three different possibilities, and we really need some major testing to figure out what it actually is, because I think 2 percent to 4 percent is really high.

He says, “if our surmise of 6 million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%. That is ⅒th the flu mortality rate of 0.1%.” An I.F.R. of 0.01 percent, spread fully through the American population, yields a total American death toll of 33,000 people. We have had 1.2 million deaths. And you are adjudicating this dispute, in 2023, and saying that Neil was wrong and Jay was right.

hird, in the Imperial College report — the one projecting two million American deaths — Ferguson gives an I.F.R. estimate of 0.9 percent.

Bhattacharya’s? Yes, there is some uncertainty around the estimate he offers. But the estimate he does offer — 0.01 percent — is one hundred times lower than the I.F.R. you yourselves cite as the proper benchmark.

Nocera: In The Wall Street Journal he does not say it’s 0.01. He says, we need to test to find out what it is, but it is definitely lower than 2 to 4 percent.

Well, first of all, the 2 percent to 4 percent fatality rate is not from Neil Ferguson. It’s from the W.H.O.

But I think that fundamentally, at the outset of the pandemic, the most important question orienting all of our thinking was, how bad could this get? And it turns out that almost all of the people who were saying back then that we shouldn’t do much to intervene were extremely wrong about how bad it would be

The argument then was, more or less, “We don’t need to do anything too drastic, because it’s not going to be that big a deal.” Now, in 2023, it’s the opposite argument: “We shouldn’t have bothered with restrictions, because they didn’t have an impact; we would have had this same death toll anyway.” But the death toll turned out to be enormous.

Now, if we had supplied all these skeptics with the actual numbers at the outset of the pandemic, what kind of audience would they have had? If instead of making the argument against universal mitigation efforts on the basis of a death toll of 40,000 they had made the argument on the basis of a death toll of more than a million, do you think the country would’ve said, they’re right, we’re doing too much, let’s back off?

McLean: I think that if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die, that would’ve been one thing. But if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die and a large percentage of them are going to be over 80, you might’ve gotten a different answer.

I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have been trying to get a clearer sense of the true fatality rate, or that we shouldn’t have been clearer about the age skew. But Bhattacharya was also offering an estimate of fatality rate that turned out to be off by a factor of a hundred from the I.F.R. that you yourselves cite as correct. And then you say that Bhattacharya was right and Ferguson was wrong.

And you, too, Joe, you wrote an article in April expressing sympathy for Covid skeptics and you said ——Nocera: This April?No, 2020.Nocera: Oh, oh. That’s the one where I praised Alex Berenson.You also cited some Amherst modeling which said that we were going to have 67,000 to 120,000 American deaths. We already had, at that point, 60,000. So you were suggesting, in making an argument against pandemic restrictions, that the country as a whole was going to experience between 7,000 and 60,000 additional deaths from that point.

when I think about the combination of the economic effects of mitigation policies and just of the pandemic itself and the big fiscal response, I look back and I think the U.S. managed this storm relatively well. How about each of you?

in this case, Congress did get it together and did come to the rescue. And I agree that made a ton of difference in the short term, but the long-term effects of the fiscal rescue package were to help create inflation. And once again, inflation hits those at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution much harder than it does those at the top. So I would argue that some of what we did in the pandemic is papering over these long-term issues.

I think as with a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about today, I agree with you about the underlying problems. But if we take for granted for a moment that the pandemic was going to hit us, when it did, under the economic conditions it did, and then think about the more narrow context of whether, given all that, we handled the pandemic well. We returned quickly to prepandemic G.D.P. trends, boosted the wealth of the bottom half of the country, cut child poverty in half, pushed unemployment to historical lows.

What sense do you make of the other countries of the world and their various mitigation policies? Putting aside China, there’s New Zealand, Australia, South Korea — these are all places that were much more aggressive than the U.S. and indeed more than Europe. And had much, much better outcomes.

Nocera: To be perfectly honest, we didn’t really look, we didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at that.

McLean: But one reason that we didn’t is I don’t think it tells us anything. When you look at who Covid killed, then you have to look at what the pre-existing conditions in a country were, what percentage of its people are elderly. How sick are people with pre-existing conditions?

I just don’t think there’s a comparison. There’s just too many factors that influence it to be able to say that, to be able to compare America to any other country, you’d have to adjust for all these factors.

But you do spend a bit of time in the book talking about Sweden. And though it isn’t precisely like-for-like, one way you can control for some of those factors is grouping countries with their neighbors and other countries with similar profiles. And Sweden’s fatality rate in 2020 was 10 times that of Norway, Finland and Iceland. Five times that of Denmark. In the vaccination era, those gaps have narrowed, but by most metrics Sweden has still done worse, overall, than all of those countries.

On the matter of omniscience. Let’s say that we can send you back in time. Let’s put you both in charge of American pandemic response, or at least American communication about the pandemic, in early 2020. What would you want to tell the country? How would you have advised us to respond?

McLean: What I would want is honesty and communication. I think we’re in a world that is awash in information and the previous methods of communication — giving a blanket statement to people that may or may not be true, when you know there’s nuance underneath it — simply doesn’t work anymore

o I would’ve been much more clear — we think masks might help, we don’t know, but it’s not that big of an ask, let’s do it. We think the early data coming out of Italy shows that these are the people who are really, really at risk from Covid, but it’s not entirely clear yet. Maybe there is spread in schools, but we don’t know. Let’s look at this and keep an open mind and look at the data as it comes in.

While most police commanders have denied putting a quota in place, city officials have not shied from explaining that they keep close track of how productive their officers are, as would any other employer of a large work force.

A 2010 state law forbids the department from retaliating against officers for not making a certain minimum number of street stops. But Mr. Beirne testified that performance goals did not violate that law. “My feeling was that the supervisors or the department could set performance goals for employees,” Mr. Beirne said. “Whether they be numerical or not was not an issue.”

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"You know, we tried to get it moved quickly 'cause we'd like to help DACA. I think everybody in this room wants to help with DACA, but the Supreme Court just ruled that it has to go through the normal channels, so it's going back in," Trump told a group of state governors at the White House. "There won't be any surprise. I mean, it's really sad when every single case filed against us -- this is in the 9th Circuit -- we lose, we lose, we lose, and then we do fine in the Supreme Court. But what does that tell you about our court system? It's a very, very sad thing. So DACA's going back, and we'll see what happens from there."<img alt="Sen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim " class="media__image" src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180214095613-dick-durbin-2-13-large-169.jpg">JUST WATCHEDSen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCHtheoplayer-texttra

"While we were hopeful for a different outcome, the Supreme Court very rarely grants certiorari before judgment, though in our view, it was warranted for the extraordinary injunction requiring the Department of Homeland Security to maintain DACA," O'Malley said. "We will continue to defend DHS's lawful authority to wind down DACA in an orderly manner."

Atlanta Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. said Wednesday the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, frequented the two Atlanta spas and bought the gun used in the shooting the day of the incident.

President Joe Biden ordered flags to be flown at half-staff Thursday to honor the victims. Biden also plans to visit Atlanta on Friday to meet with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, as well as Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders, according to Georgia State Rep. Bee Nguyen.

Among the issues they will bring up is the concern that the shootings be "taken seriously" and seriously considered as a hate crime against Asians and not dismissed as the suspect having a "bad day,"

Across the US, Asian Americans are riddled with fear as unprovoked attacks against them intensify. Anti-Asian hate crimes have more than doubled during the pandemic,

The violence has surged amid racist rhetoric during the coronavirus pandemic -- some popularized by ex-President Donald Trump. Many Asian Americans have been subjected to vitriol about the "China virus" or the "kung flu" -- even those who have never been to Asia.

whenever anyone disagrees with her opinion or policies, the first thing they do is criticize the country her parents came from and, second, her gender.

Three of the victims were 52, 75 and 64 years of age, according to birth years listed in an Atlanta police incident report.

Bottoms told CNN that nowadays "there seems to be permission now to be hateful."

"There seems to be a permission that I've not seen, at least in my lifetime," Bottoms said. "It does predate Donald Trump, but he certainly has given permission and done his part to elevate the hatred."

Kim, a 24-year-old Korean American, said she often feels like she has a target on her back. Last year, she said a parent wanted to remove one of her students from her second-grade class because Kim was Asian.

Yet despite outrage over the shootings, attacks against Asian Americans continue. An Asian man and woman were assaulted Wednesday by the same suspect in separate attacks,

"While we're relieved the suspect was quickly apprehended, we're certainly not at peace as this attack still points to an escalating threat many in the Asian American community feel today,"

Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, of Acworth; Paul Andre Michels, 54, of Atlanta; Xiaojie Tan, 49, of Kennesaw; and Daoyou Feng, 44, were all fatally shot at Youngs Asian Massage in Cherokee County.

Actress Lucy Liu told CNN's Erin Burnett on Thursday that she believes race relations will get worse before they can get better.

Three more victims were found dead at Gold Massage Spa in Atlanta, and another victim was found dead across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa.

Long, 21, faces eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.Long was on his way to Florida, possibly to take the lives of more victims, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said, citing investigators.

The suspect told police he believed he had a sex addiction and that he saw the spas as "a temptation ... that he wanted to eliminate,"

It's not clear whether any of the three businesses offered sexual services in addition to massages. But authorities have given no indication the three businesses were operating illegally

Capt. Jay Baker on Tuesday said Long "was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did."

Sheriff Frank Reynolds said in a statement Thursday he has known and worked with Baker for many years and his comments "were not intended disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect."

Shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday, deputies were called to Youngs Asian Massage between the Georgia cities of Woodstock and Acworth after reports of a shooting, Cherokee County sheriff's officials said.That shooting left four people -- two Asian and two White -- dead and one person injured, Baker said.

About an hour later and 30 miles away, Atlanta police responded to the Gold Massage Spa on Piedmont Road in Atlanta. Police said they found three people dead.While there, police received another call of shots fired across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa, where they found one person dead

Investigators found surveillance video of a suspect near the Cherokee County scene and published images on social media.Long's family saw the images, contacted authorities and helped identify him, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Wednesday."(The family members) are very distraught, and they were very helpful in this apprehension," Reynolds said.

Long has claimed responsibility for the shootings at the spas, the Cherokee County sheriff's office said.

He is facing four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder,

A law enforcement source told CNN that Long was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours watching pornography online.

"It looked like a hate crime to me," she said. "This was targeted at Asian spas. Six of the women who were killed were Asian so it's difficult to see it as anything but that."

"Sex" is a hate crime category under Georgia's new law. If Long was targeting women out of hatred for them or scapegoating them for his own problems, it could potentially be a hate crime.

The shootings don't have to be racially motivated to constitute a hate crime in Georgia.

"We hear your concerns and want it to be known that these victims will receive the very best efforts of this office," Wallace said. "We anticipate beginning to meet with the impacted families in the near future, and earn their trust, as we continue to develop our case against the defendant."

But Marks notes that no amount of reparation payment would have been acceptable to the leaders of the Weimar Republic because such payments were erroneously connected in the mind of the German public with the widespread myth of the “war guilt clause.” As she has reminded us in her earlier work, the word “guilt” does not appear in the notorious Article 231, and virtually identical language was included in the treaties signed with Germany’s allies. Yet the myth of the “war guilt clause” unilaterally imposed on Germany, which was propagated in the early 1920s by Weimar officials and opinion makers, has stood the test of time and continues to find its way into histories of the peace settlement.

On the question of Germany’s capacity to pay, Marks is merciless in dissecting and disproving the various claims of penury. “There are those, not all German, who claim that reparations were unpayable,” she observes. “After 1871, France, with a much smaller economy than Germany’s fifty years later, paid nearly as much in two years (by French estimate) to liberate its territory as the Weimar Republic paid from 1919 to 1932”

In the end, as Stephen A. Schuker has shown, the Weimar Republic actually paid no net reparations at all, discharging its reparation bill with the proceeds from American bank loans and then defaulting on both reparations and foreign debts in the Great Depression.

The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points in Wisconsin and Florida; 3 points in Arizona and 2.4 points in Pennsylvania.

More broadly, Mr. Trump is facing an avalanche of opposition nationally from women, people of color, voters in the cities and the suburbs, young people, seniors and, notably, new voters. In all four states, voters who did not participate in 2016, but who have already voted this time or plan to do so, said they support Mr. Biden by wide margins. That group includes both infrequent voters and young people who were not yet eligible to vote four years ago.

Melissa Dibble, 47, of Boynton Beach, Fla., is one of those newly active voters. A registered independent, Ms. Dibble said she did not vote in 2016 because she did not believe Mrs. Clinton was “the right president for our country” and found Mr. Trump “laughable.” She said on Friday that she planned to vote for Mr. Biden that afternoon.

Vince Kowalewski, 73, of Muhlenberg Township, Pa., said he had never voted in his life but was intent on voting against Mr. Trump, whom he called “the worst president we’ve ever had.”“I have to go in there and vote against him,” Mr. Kowalewski said.But Mr. Kowalewski said he also appreciated Mr. Biden’s health care policies, including the Affordable Care Act, which he credited with helping his daughter receive lifesaving cancer treatment.

Based on the poll, however, it seems that Mr. Biden rather than Mr. Trump could be the beneficiary of record-busting turnout.

In Arizona, for example, the president had an eight-point advantage with men but Mr. Biden was the overwhelming favorite of women, winning 56 percent of them compared with Mr. Trump’s 38 percent.

The other group that is propelling Mr. Biden is college-educated white voters, a traditionally Republican bloc that has fled the Trump-era party. The former vice president is leading by double digits among white voters with college degrees in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona and beating him, 48 percent to 45 percent, with that constituency in Florida.

But Ms. Robles also said she believed there was a larger issue at stake in the vote.“I don’t want to be dramatic,” she said, “but I’m voting this year because it feels like democracy is at stake.”

No, there aren’t any new online-voting options.Claim: People can vote by text message, by email or on a state-run website.Fact: Outside of a small amount of overseas absentee voters, no state allows Americans to vote by email, website or text message.Background: In 2016 and 2018, posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites claimed that voters could cast their ballots through newly formed websites, or through text-messaging services.

No, voting machines aren’t doing strange things.Claim: Voting machines are malfunctioning and causing votes to be improperly recorded.Fact: A handful of voting-machine malfunctions are reported every election cycle in most states. The errors are most often due to mistakes by users.Background: Frequently circulated videos purport to show machines malfunctioning or refusing to let people cast their vote for a particular candidate. A 2016 video shot by a woman in Pennsylvania and posted to Twitter claimed that a voting machine was not allowing her to vote for Mr. Trump. The video, which is likely to resurface this year, was provided as evidence that machines were rigged. But as ProPublica reported, the problem with the machine was user error.

No, ICE isn’t monitoring polling locations.Claim: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be at polling stations.Fact: ICE will not be at polling stations.Background: This rumor has made the rounds for a decade. During the 2018 election, claims that ICE would be at polling stations proliferated on Twitter, making misinformation aimed at suppressing the vote one of the most prevalent forms of misinformation on the platform, according to Twitter.

And I keep telling people, I'm not asking some of America to do it. We all got to do it. This is one of those interventions that got to be 95%, 96%, 97%, 98%, 99%, if it's going to work for us.

it's clearly going to be a major cause of death in the United States.

But if we don't do that, as I said last April, this could be the worst fall from a public health perspective, we've ever had.

one of my hopes that we'll take from this is that people now realize that public health matters. This nation is going to spend somewhere between $3, 4, 5, 6, 7 trillion in responding to this pandemic.

I think many people may not realize CDC is the background funding for the public health infrastructure of every city and every state in this nation. We need to over-invest. Get over-prepared.

"One of the most common requests we receive from customers is to be able to trade more assets on our platform," Coinbase said in a blog post Tuesday.

"We will make a separate announcement if and when this support is added," the company said.

But Musk is cheering the dogecoin comeback. Following the Coinbase announcement, Musk resurfaced a tweet of his from last July that showed a gigantic cloud with a dog's face on it and the text "dogecoin standard" that was approaching a landscape labeled "global financial system."Enter your email to receive CNN's nightcap newsletter. "close dialog"We read all day so you don’t have to.Get our nightly newsletter for all the top business stories you need to know.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! Thanks for signing up for the CNN Business Nightcap newsletter."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1334631 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1334631 *//* custom css from creative 52221 */@keyframes bx-anim-1334631-spin { 100% { transform: rotate(360deg); }}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1334631 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 240px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #00c59e;border-style: none;background-size: contain;background-color: #00c59e;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 18px;vertical-align: middle;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 18px 5px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(0, 0, 0);stroke-width: 1.5px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-3EEWyi6 {width: 310px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-3EEWyi6 {text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1 {width: 290px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1 {width: 230px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1> *:first-child {alt: CNN business Nightcap;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-ZEoAbMC {width: 380px;padding: 15px 0 0 10px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-ZEoAbMC {width: 300px;padding: 18px 0 0;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 700;font-size: 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs> *:first-child {font-size: 15px;min-width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 16px;padding: 8px 0 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;padding: 6px 0 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-UY4jwxF {width: 695px;paddi

the power of the first consul was so well established that there was no hope of intervening in France. Instead, the house of Orléans became reconciled with the elder branch of the Bourbon family. Even so, Louis-Philippe never took up arms to fight with émigré forces for the royalist cause against other Frenchmen

On November 25 he married Marie-Amélie, a daughter of King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria. About this time there was some suggestion that Louis-Philippe should join the English forces in the Peninsular War. Maria Carolina—who held the real power in Naples and whose sister Marie-Antoinette had been executed by the French Revolutionary government—had long backed the campaign against the Revolutionary armies and Napoleon. She certainly would have supported such a move by her son-in-law, but nothing came of it, probably because Louis XVIII again feared any activity that might further the Orleanist cause.

Louis-Philippe returned to France at the First Restoration (1814). Although Louis XVIII refused to grant Louis-Philippe the style of royal highness (later allowed to him by Charles X), the king did grant Louis-Philippe the dignities traditionally held by the head of his family. More important perhaps, Louis-Philippe regained possession of the family estates and forests that had not been sold after his own emigration and his father’s execution. During the Hundred Days (1815) he returned to England instead of following the court to Ghent.

Under the second Restoration the duc d’Orléans was a steady and more or less open adherent of the liberal opposition

when Louis-Philippe had become king and his eldest son, Ferdinand-Louis-Philippe, was heir to the royal domain, he could reserve the Orléans inheritance for his other sons instead of merging it with the crown lands.

In 1830 Charles X’s attempt to enforce repressive ordinances touched off a rebellion (July 27–30) that gave Louis-Philippe his long-awaited opportunity to gain power.

The revolution that brought Louis-Philippe to power constituted a victory for the upper bourgeoisie over the aristocracy. The new ruler was titled Louis-Philippe, king of the French, instead of Philip VII, king of France. He consolidated his power by steering a middle course between the right-wing extreme monarchists (the Legitimists) on the one side and the socialists and other republicans (including the Bonapartists) on the other. The July Monarchy, with its “Citizen King,” could never command the support of all the factions, however. Its opponents resorted to political intrigue, insurrection, and even assassination plots. In July 1835 an attempt on the king’s life by Giuseppe Fieschi resulted in the deaths of 18 people and the wounding of many more, but the royal family escaped injury. Throughout Louis-Philippe’s reign, it was said that “for shooting kings there is no close[d] season.”

before abdicating in favour of his 10-year-old grandson, Henri Dieudonné d’Artois, comte de Chambord. On August 7 the provisional government of deputies and peers present in Paris declared the throne vacant. Following the terminology of the Constitution of 1791, Louis-Philippe was on August 9 proclaimed “king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the people.” A modified version of the Charter of 1814 was issued, which the new king was obliged to accept.

The death of the popular duc d’Orléans in a carriage accident in July 1842 not only grieved Louis-Philippe very deeply but also seriously weakened the dynasty. The new heir to the throne, the duke’s son Philippe d’Orléans, comte de Paris, was an infant for whom a regency had to be prearranged.

The marriage (August 1832) of his daughter Marie-Louise to Queen Victoria’s uncle Leopold I, king of the Belgians, established an excellent relationship between Paris and London, almost foreshadowing the Entente Cordiale.

The British were finally alienated by Louis-Philippe’s policy on the “Spanish marriages.” In an attempt to revive the traditional family alliance between the French and Spanish Bourbons, he had at first wanted his sons Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, and Antoine, duc de Montpensier, to marry Spanish Queen Isabella II and her sister and heiress presumptive, the infanta Luisa Fernanda, respectively. The British objected to this obvious threat of French predominance in Spain, and in 1843 Louis-Philippe agreed that Isabella should marry neither Henri nor the British nominee, Prince Albert’s cousin Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, but rather some Spanish Bourbon instead.

French opposition to the regime had become much more embittered. The industrial and agricultural depression of 1846 aroused widespread popular discontent, and Louis-Philippe’s constant refusal of any electoral reform meant that many members of the lower middle class—from whom he might still have drawn support—remained without the vote. Finally, his narrow-minded conservatism and his unwillingness to seek any solution for pressing political and social problems drove many divergent interests into union against him.

The July Monarchy was but one casualty of the great revolutionary movement that swept through Europe in 1848. In any case, a change had come to seem unavoidable in France.

The July Monarchy was really an anachronism. To the French people—for whom, whether or not they favoured the institution, monarchy meant the splendours and absolutism of the ancien régime

In power Louis-Philippe strove to implement his desire to rule as well as to reign. The political difficulties with which he was faced revealed in him the weaknesses of an obstinate man; increasingly, his only response to crises was words and theories, and ultimately inaction lost him his crown.

The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship — one of golf’s four prestigious global major men’s championships — at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.

Citigroup, which gave $1,000 in 2019 to the campaign of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the senators who voted against the certification of the Electoral College results, said it had paused all campaign contributions until March.

Morgan Stanley said it suspended contributions to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the election, but has not suspended contributions across the board.

Deutsche Bank, which has been Mr. Trump’s primary lender for two decades, and Signature Bank, are also seeking distance from him and his business.

“Last week’s attempts by some congressional members to subvert the presidential election results and disrupt the peaceful transition of power do not align with our American Express Blue Box values,”

The New York State Bar Association has started an inquiry into whether Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, should be removed from its membership

AT&T, Amazon, Comcast, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Ford, Best Buy and Marriott International also said they had suspended or ended contributions to members of Congress who voted against the certification of the Electoral College vote last week.

Hilton said it had already suspended its political contributions because of the impact of the pandemic, and that, because of the Capitol Hill violence, it would keep its PAC suspended indefinitely.

Wagner College on Staten Island also said on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004.

In 2017, both Lehigh and Wagner considered revoking the degrees after Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” who violently clashed in Charlottesville, Va. The schools later decided to let Mr. Trump keep the degrees.

The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.

The hotel giant Marriott International said it was taking similar action.

Four of the country’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, said they would temporarily stop sending donations from their political action committees.

The banks have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and donated to candidates of both parties

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced on Friday that it was suspending political contributions to Republicans in Congress who tried to block the electoral vote tallies for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The association is one of the nation’s largest federations of insurance companies, which provide health insurance to about 109 million Americans.

The decision to strip Mr. Trump’s resort of hosting the second of four major tournaments on the tour’s calendar was a heavy loss to a president who has emphasized his portfolio of golf resorts and spent significant time on the course while in office.

Lehigh University in Pennsylvania awarded Mr. Trump a degree in 1988, after its president called the real estate developer a “symbol of our age — all the daring and energy that the word tycoon conjures up.” On Friday, two days after the attack on the Capitol, the university said in a statement that its board of trustees had “voted to rescind and revoke the honorary degree.”

Wagner College on Staten Island — the New York City borough where Mr. Trump has remained popular — announced on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004. No explanation was given.

On Sunday, Laurie L. Patton, president of the college, said it had initiated the process to consider revoking that degree because of Mr. Giuliani’s role in “fomenting the violent uprising against our nation’s Capitol building,” which Ms. Patton called “an insurrection against democracy itself.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

The online payment platform Stripe will no longer process payments for Mr. Trump’s campaign website, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Under the terms of that policy, Stripe users must agree not to accept payments for “high risk” activities, including for any business or organization that “engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property.

In the past, drug abuse deaths were more common in middle-aged blacks than in middle-aged whites. Now they are more common in whites. The same pattern holds for deaths from alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. The suicide rate for whites was four times that of blacks.

Could people be taking drugs and killing themselves as a response to the economic slowdown? Maybe. But, if so, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case said, then why aren’t people in other countries responding the same way?

Recent reports of illness and disability might provide some clues. More middle-aged whites report that their general health is not good; and, more report chronic pain

older people are actually doing better — less addiction, disability rates falling.

how much of what they are seeing might be attributed to the explosive increase in prescription narcotics.

the people who report pain in middle age are the people who report difficulty in socializing, shopping, sitting for three hours, walking for two blocks.

Dr. Deaton envisions poorly educated middle-aged white Americans who feel socially isolated are out of work, suffering from chronic pain and turning to narcotics or alcohol for relief, or taking their own lives. Starting in the 1990s, he said, there was a huge emphasis on controlling pain, with pain charts going up in every doctor’s office and a concomitant increase in prescription narcotics.

Dr. Deaton noted that blacks and Hispanics may have been protected to an extent. Some pharmacies in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics live do not even stock those drugs, and doctors have been less likely to prescribe them for these groups.

So we're all the same after all.Under the right conditions - no control over your life, low pay, no job, little in the way of job prospects, no healthcare, little education, families break down when the man can't be the breadwinner, and then along comes poor health, substance abuse, depression, despair - all those ills that were blamed on black people's supposed lack of morals.Now that white kids are dying of heroin we need to change the laws, end the war on drugs, legalize pot, and change how we talk about what were formerly known as 'junkies'.White men are in despair as a result of economic problems, white kids are doing hard drugs in numbers that everyone's starting to notice, and AIDS is plaguing white communities, and now we need to care. So we're all human?

Because white people are depressed over their diminution in society by the policies of the Federal Government, the education system, racial animosity and biased media outlets that are rampant through the society. These doctors are clueless liberals that will try to find any reason to blame, other than the truth. It's not the drugs, it's what is causing them to want the drugs. White males have been denigrated for the past 50 years. The effects have to be building up and weighing on them.

John is a trusted commenter Boston 6 hours ago No, their diminution in society came from globalized capitalism. A lot of these working class white people were Reagan voters. I'm the same age as them, I saw it happen. They thought they were getting "Morning in America" but instead they got morning for Walmart and sunset for the working class. That's enough to make anybody turn to pills and booze.

DougH Lithonia, GA 7 hours ago To some extent, it's of their own making. High school educated whites tend to vote Republican. Over the last 30 years, Republicans have sold them a bill of goods. They abandoned unions, opposed increases in the minimum wage, and opposed regulation, including safety, wage fairness, etc.So now they are paid less. They have no way of changing that (short of high education) and the big beneficiaries of lower taxes have been the businesses and owners that for which they work. Did those owners bless the workers with the fruits of their benefits? Of course not. They kept the reduced expenses as profit, increased CEO wages, and kept cutting benefits before finally shipping their jobs overseas.Perhaps, if they stopped voting against their own interests, they would fair better.

dw659 Chicago 8 hours ago Why? Simple. Because to males, a 'loss of control' is an unacceptable change. 200 years of being 'in control' just because you are born white and male is ending. Many men can't face a world where they are of 'lower status' than women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. They don't want to live in that world.....

dale south africa 5 hours ago Its true ! I am a conservative man and i live i johannesburg. I cant imagine what it must be like respecting all things under the suns . From females, gays blacks etc Children of slaves dictating societies . oprah picking presidents. the bully is not allowed to be at his natural best and strongest with this new liberal socialist agenda , everyone equal attitude. im not white but if I was who would want that

Linda is a trusted commenter Oklahoma 54 minutes ago I know so many white men in this small town I live in who never had anything to do with their children. They didn't care about anybody through their productive years and now they're surprised that nobody cares about them.

AC USA 5 hours ago Could it be because these guys have no close family ties? They are the ages that their parents are probably in nursing homes or already passed away. These blue collar, high school educated guys fathered unwanted children with women to whom they may or may hot have been married and divorced. But now at middle age comes time for them to feel wanted and valued by their progeny (dad, dispense some life wisdom to us, help us with college, getting married, a down payment on a house, take your grand-kids fishing, etc.), but they dumped their kids by not wanting to pay child support, or having a bad attitude and not helping their kids at all past age 18. So they kids moved on without dad's love and "support" (monetary or emotionally). The "all for myself mentality" they have espoused has finally come home to roost. There is no going back in time, they are all alone, have no purpose as jobs are hard to come by at that age - even more-so blue collar ones - so they drink/take pills to dull the pain, then overdo it.

suzinne bronx 5 hours ago Think white families more often DO NOT stick together. At middle age and white, have ZERO contact with any family members. By the time I was 16 most had died, moved away or become estranged. Know this amps up my chances for suicide, and that's probably going to pan out too. Flag

Paul '52 is a trusted commenter NYC 2 hours ago The is the first cohort to experience the phenomenon that if you do the same job as your parents you won't do as well or better. These are the auto workers, the airport baggage handlers, the truck drivers. They are, in fact, more productive than their fathers, but they're not paid as well and they don't have pensions. And the disappointment is taking its toll.

Ms. Warren did highlight her status as the top-polling female contender at several points in the debate, ending her closing statement with a reference to the possibility of electing the first woman president.

Warren makes her electability pitch.

One of Ms. Warren’s biggest political obstacles is the perception among some voters that she would face daunting challenges in a general election — both thanks to her boldly progressive outlook, and to societal sexism that many Democrats believe damaged Mrs. Clinton in 2016. @charset "UTF-8"; /*********************** B A S E S T Y L E S ************************/ /************************************* T Y P E : C L A S S M I X I N S **************************************/ /* Headline */ /* Leadin */ /* Byline */ /* Dateline */ /* Alert */ /* Subhed */ /* Body */ /* Caption */ /* Leadin */ /* Credit */ /* Label */ /********** S I Z E S ***********/ /******************** T Y P O G R A P H Y *********************/ .g-headline, .interactive-heading, .g-subhed { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; } .g-alert, .g-alert.g-body, .g-alert_link, .g-byline, .g-caption, .g-caption_bold, .g-caption_heading, .g-chart, .g-credit, .g-credit_bullet, .g-dateline, .g-label, .g-label_white, .g-leadin, #interactive-leadin, .g-refer, .g-refer.g-body, .g-table-text { font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; 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And she invoked her 2012 victory over then-Senator Scott P. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, as she declared herself “the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican anytime in the past 30 years.”

Klobuchar throws punches.

Yet while she described herself as a winner tethered to the Midwest, somebody whose friends and neighbors hail from flyover country, she didn’t come out of Tuesday’s debate with any significant headlines of her own.

The only vetting of Buttigieg came from the moderator Abby Phillip on race.

Mr. Buttigieg deftly dodged by suggesting that the black voters who “know me best” — in his native South Bend — chose him twice to lead the city. And he cited recent endorsements from Representative Anthony Brown of Maryland and Mayor Quentin Hart of Waterloo, Iowa, who this week became the two most prominent African-American elected officials to back him.

Biden avoids attacks.

Mr. Biden, who flew under the radar particularly at the last debate, often stayed in his comfort zones — discussing foreign policy and health care — and he was not the center of the kind of memorable exchanges that had dealt his campaign blows earlier in the race.

This CDC advisory group had previously recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities should be the first to receive a vaccine when it receives EUA. The first shipments of the vaccine will be limited, so states will have to prioritize who should receive the vaccine first.

Keeping doctors and nurses healthy will be important for the continuing fight against the virus, which will stretch on for months, even after a vaccine is authorized. But Romero said that first group includes other people working in health care institutions, like those who deliver food and perform housekeeping.

Residents of long-term care facilities like nursing homes also need the protection. So far, they account for about 40% of coronavirus deaths in the US.

"I would project by the time you get to April, it will be ... 'open season,' in the sense of anyone, even the non-high priority groups could get vaccinated," Fauci said.

"We'll be in facilities that day in states that choose to begin as soon as possible," spokesman Ethan Slavin said.

The FDA is set to make a decision on a separate vaccine candidate by Moderna in the coming days

it's possible that 20 million people could get vaccinated in the next several weeks

Phase 1a would be followed by Phases 1b and 1c, which could include essential workers at high risk of infection, other emergency personnel and people with underlying conditions who are at a higher risk of Covid-19 complications and death.

Army Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of the federal government vaccine initiative Operation Warp Speed, previously said he believed vaccine administration will be able to begin vaccinations within 96 hours of authorization.

In the meantime, it's important that people continue to wear masks and social distance. JUST WATCHEDDr. Fauci explains importance of vaccine approval processReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH Play</

It's important to note, however, that Pfizer's vaccine requires two doses administered several weeks apart to reach 95% efficacy. So 100 million doses would vaccinate half the number of people.

Azar said earlier this month that 6.4 million doses of Pfizer vaccine would be allocated for shipment the first week. The initial shipment would include half of the doses, followed by the second half three weeks later.

Slaoui said he believes most doses will be injected within three to four days, but after that, "I think it will take a week."

The first shipments of the vaccine departed a Pfizer plant in Michigan on Sunday morning. A total of 189 boxes of vials are expected to arrive in all 50 states Monday. Another 3,900 vials are expected to ship later Sunday to US territories. Another 400 boxes packed with about 390,000 vials are expected to ship Monday and arrive at their destinations on Tuesday.

The vaccines will then be flown across the country, and the Federal Aviation Administration has said its air traffic controllers will prioritize flights carrying the vaccines.

But Pfizer's vaccine needs to be stored at incredibly cold temperatures, making the logistics of delivery even more complicated.

According to a briefing document released by the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, the most common side effects were reactions at the point of injection on the body, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain and fever.

Health authorities in the UK, where the vaccine roll out began earlier this week, said Wednesday that people with "significant history of allergic reactions" should not receive the vaccine. The advice came after two health care workers "responded adversely" following their shots.

Mr. Giuliani expressed frustration with the way the news media was keeping its distance, and said he would have preferred to have pushed out the materials earlier.“I would have loved to have had this six months ago,” he said in a recent interview. “It would have solved a lot of my problems.”

Mr. Guo and Mr. Bannon began working together after Mr. Bannon left the White House in 2017, quickly bonding over their mutual antipathy toward the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Guo, who is also known as Miles Kwok, left China in 2014, as the government there began leveling corruption allegations against his business associates and eventually Mr. Guo. He moved to New York, buying a $67.5 million apartment along Central Park and spending time aboard the Lady May.

Mr. Bannon asserted that the effort to limit the spread of the New York Post’s articles on social media had backfired, drawing more attention to them. “Social media overplayed this and did us a favor,” Mr. Bannon said.

At the same time Mr. Bannon and Mr. Giuliani were shopping the purported hard drive, two other efforts were afoot to disseminate related information on Hunter Biden.

Now, to the East, this behaviour is both jaw-dropping and bewildering. It goes beyond mere irresponsibility, and is considered something more like stupidity, ignorance, malice, deceit, or all four

That is what civilization is, and where it begins: the presence of the very first kind of enlightened mind, which can nourish, protect, and elevate another

What does Mead’s Femur have do with the West’s stunning failure that let Covid spiral out of control? As it turns out, everything.

These days, the tourists are gone, mostly. But — and here’s the point — the bars, restaurants, and clubs are still full. I pass by them on my daily walk to the park and wonder: what are these people doing? How are they sitting there so close to one another, with no social distancing in place, laughing, joking in the middle of a literal pandemic that’s exploding all around them? What the?

The people I pass by in the bars are made of two social groups, largely. Young people, and the working class. That’s the same group, in a sense, since most young people are working class, until they amass enough wealth to rise beyond it

They have made a choice. Their beer and burger or cocktail and steak matters more than stopping the spread of a deadly disease. What the?

This group is putting the most vulnerable in society at profound risk. Those who are already ill, and immunocompromised. Those even lower down the socioeconomic ladder than them — minorities, the underclass, and so forth, among whom death rates are astronomical. The elderly, the frail, the aged.

Certain groups in Western society have made the decision that the vulnerable’s lives matter less than their right to party, to have a beer and a burger, a cocktail and a steak, a laugh at the pub with friends. What the?

The groups who are now apparently completely indifferent to spreading Covid seem to have taken their cues from leaders. Young people and the working class seem to have no conscience or compunction left whatsoever about spreading Covid

To act in such a way as to put your elders, or the ill, especially, at risk, is something that is a grave violation of social norms. Easterners can’t understand why Westerners are behaving like…spoiled children. Are they right?

There is a kind of toxic indifference that seems to have spread through Western societies. Life itself is treated with a kind of shrugging fatalism — especially those of the vulnerable. It is literally valued less than a night out at the pub by much of society.

The attitude of toxic indifference is what the West seems to share in common now, and that is why it has been brought to its knees by Covid.

the West” is not monolithic. Certainly, toxic indifference is not at the same level across all of it

let me discuss the most extreme examples — America and Britain — to highlight where toxic indifference comes from: leadership.

In Britain and America, Covid cases have now exploded well past their first peak. America is approaching 100,000 cases per day — the point at which social breakdown will begin. Britain is hitting more than that, on a per capita basis. And yet neither of these societies has a national lockdown.

uccessful societies — New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and many more — deliberately crunched the curve. Their strategy was to eradicate Covid, through what’s now a global template of best practices — lock down, test, trace, quarantine, isolate, and so forth.

The approach of Western leaders, in other words, was reactive, hesitant, and cautious, not decisive, swift, and proactive:

Margaret Mead once said that the beginning of human civilisation was found in a healed femur. That that single, simple discovery meant that someone took the time to invest in healing someone else’s broken leg — without which they surely would have died

Western leaders, in other words, modelled toxic indifference for their societies. They gave people a license to be indifferent, by acting largely indifferent themselves.

Young people justify it by saying that “they need to have social lives” — as if they weren’t spending most of their social lives online before Covid, and the working class by saying they need to work. Both of those arguments are partially true. But it’s truer to say that these are groups which have become dangerously indifferent to preserving the value of the lives of the vulnerable.

The young and the working class are punching down, as American leftists would put it.

More formally, more accurately, Covid has made Western societies predatory ones. The young and working class are exploiting and abusing those more powerless than them

Neither group seems to consider the possibility much that society needs to come together to defeat the pandemic, once and for all, and the only way that can be done is to put the vulnerable first.

America treating Covid indifferently is no surprise, after all — it’s a nation where kids are gunned down in schools, diabetics are simply left to die, people beg strangers online for money to pay for crippling healthcare costs

But it’s more surprising to see Europe turning predatory due to Covid, or having Covid expose its vulnerability to becoming predatory

I don’t mean to single the young and working class out. That is missing my point. What I am saying is that toxic indifference is trickling down in the West. From elites, like leaders, to the bourgeois — that’s been the case for the last few decades

Indifference is trickling down from the elite and the bourgeois, to the working class and the young.

we know where a society of indifference ends. It ends in America. In stupidity, ignorance, violence, hate, racism, brutality, and the poverty and despair which underlies it all.

The indifferent cannot act collectively, therefore they cannot invest, transform, change, unite, come together, and therefore they cannot live in a modern, functioning society, with an expansive, sophisticated, supportive, generous social contract

So what about climate change? Mass extinction? Ecological collapse? The massive waves of depression and ruin those will unleash — in the next decade? How can societies that can’t unite, act wisely, behave responsibly to fight Covid come together to do much about even larger catastrophes?

Covid reveals the decivilizing of the West. As I mentioned, Margaret Mead said the fundamental test of civilization is the healed femur: that someone took the time and effort to heal someone else. It is the absence of indifference and the presence of care, in other words

What made the West special, once upon a time, was not its brutality, but its idea of civilization, as the elevation and nourishment of every life, with dignity, purpose, belonging, truth, justice, and, more crucially, the idea that freedom was a society that was able to act in a civilised way.

freedom became free-dumb: the idea that my right to be abusive, exploitative, ignorant, violent, selfish — to carry a gun to Starbucks or deny you healthcare and retirement — came to prevail

If the pattern of the West’s decaying attitudes, the spread of the foolish American idea of free-dumb as “freedom,” is what Covid has revealed — I punch down, on the person below me, I exploit and abuse the person even lower than me in the socioeconomic hierarchy, because that is what I must do to survive, or at least what I have been taught to do to feel good and worthy — then the simple fact is that the West has little future

Their failure teaches us something. Civilization matters. When a society gives up on the idea of being civilized, it collapses harder and faster than its most learned wise men often imagine. That is because no society can withstand a tidal wave of stupidity and violence. Is that where the West is headed?

In a simpler way, maybe the simplest, what I am talking about is a lack of simple human goodness. That is what Mead’s Femur points to — the presence of goodness — and it is what is missing in America and Britain. They are now societies with a massive, gaping, jaw-dropping lack of human goodness, and Covid is just the latest example. But that deficit spells real trouble — it isn’t some kind of abstract moral concern.

Covid is a cold wind, and it shows that the flame is flickering. If anything, it shows us the future of civilization — in Mead’s sense, as the absence of violence, and the presence of decency, dignity, care, nourishment, equality, of human goodness realized — may lie in the East.

Traditionally, presidential elections provide clarity on how a party sees its political future.

Today, with both presidential candidates content to make the race a referendum on Mr. Trump, questions about him have overshadowed the debates raging within both parties over how to govern a country in the midst of a national crisis.

If Mr. Biden wins, progressive Democrats are preparing to break their election-season truce, laying plans to push for liberals in key government posts, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as Treasury secretary. If Mr. Biden loses, progressives will argue that he failed to embrace a liberal enough platform.

Four years ago, Mr. Trump mounted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, winning the support of the party’s base with a message that shredded mainstream conservative ideology on issues like fiscal responsibility, foreign policy and trade.

“Nothing focuses the mind like a big election loss,” said Mr. Flake, who was one of many Republicans to retire in 2018 and who has endorsed Mr. Biden for president. “The bigger the better when it comes to the president.”

Rather than engage women or voters of color, the president expanded Republican margins with white, working-class voters, said Mr. Fleischer, a former press secretary for Mr. Bush who has come to embrace Mr. Trump after leaving his ballot blank in 2016.

Mr. Hawley argued that Republicans should embrace the populist energy of their voters by pursuing the breakup of big technology companies, voicing skepticism of free trade and making colleges more accountable for their high tuition costs.“If the party is going to have a future, it’s got to become the party of working people,” he said.

Democrats face their own divides over whether to use the moment of national crisis to push for far-reaching structural changes on issues like health care, economic inequality and climate change.

In Texas, a rising number of young, liberal politicians believe they can finally turn the conservative state blue by embracing a progressive platform.

“I didn’t know at the time how much I really disagreed with Bush on some things,” Mr. Wurst said. “Look at what Mr. Trump has gotten done. I don’t like his tone, but sometimes you have to look at results.”

No matter who wins, Democrats will be split between younger progressives and a moderate old guard. And a Republican Party redefined in President Trump’s image will start weighing where it goes next.

both parties appear destined for an ideological wilderness in the months ahead as each tries to sort out its identities and priorities.

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he questions facing partisans on both sides are sweeping, and remain largely unresolved despite more than a year of a tumultuous presidential campaign.

The party is headed toward a reckoning, whatever happens in November, because you still have large segments of the party establishment that are not at all reconciled with the president’s victory in 2016,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who is frequently mentioned as a possible 2024 contender. “These people are still very powerful in the Republican Party, and I think we’ll have a real fight for the future.”

Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus and an ally of Senator Bernie Sanders, said those plans were the “floor, not the ceiling” of what the liberal wing of the party plans to demand should Mr. Biden win.

“Both sides have been content to make this election about a personality,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and an author of a book about the conservative populist coalition that fueled Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. “Therefore, we’ve not had a lot of light shown on the ideological realignment that’s occurred in the country.”

Texas may provide a preview of these debates. As Democrats continue to make gains in the state and as the coronavirus rages there, moderate Republicans have tried to steer the state closer to the center while conservatives have tried to push Texas further right.

Mr. Hawley argued that Republicans should embrace the populist energy of their voters by pursuing the breakup of big technology companies, voicing skepticism of free trade and making colleges more accountable for their high tuition costs.

Yet in an increasingly polarized country, that center may be shifting.

After months of claiming that any election outcome other than a victory for him would have to have been “rigged,” the president used his final days on the campaign trail to cast doubt on the very process of tabulating the count, suggesting without any evidence that any votes counted after Tuesday, no matter how legal, must be suspect.

Both sides expect Mr. Trump and his allies to try again to disqualify late-arriving ballots in the emerging center of the legal fight, Pennsylvania, after the state’s high court rejected a previous attempt and the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

“This is the most blatant, open attempt at mass disenfranchisement of voters that I’ve ever witnessed,” said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has litigated several major cases this year.

The Republican efforts moved to an even more aggressive footing on Sunday, after Mr. Trump made clear his intention to challenge an unfavorable outcome through a focus in particular on the mail-in vote, which both sides expect will favor Mr. Biden.

On Monday night, in an extraordinary moment that encapsulated the tenor of his presidency, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that the Supreme Court’s Pennsylvania decision would “allow rampant and unchecked cheating” and “undermine our entire systems of laws” and “induce violence in the streets,” drawing a warning on the platform that it was misleading.

Mr. Trump has spent the past few years appointing conservative judges, an effort that has affected the balance on several appellate panels that will be critical in swing-state voting fights while giving the Supreme Court a new, 6-to-3 conservative tilt.And he has another wild card in Mr. Barr.

This summer, Mr. Barr made a string of exaggerated claims about the problems with mail-in voting and opened the door to sending in federal authorities to stop voter fraud threats.

That situation has led Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a Democrat, to issue guidance that election officials should segregate any ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. Tuesday.“We made a careful decision to segregate those ballots in part to stave off possible future legal challenges from Donald Trump and his enablers,” Mr. Shapiro said.

“They’ll be fanned out across Pennsylvania, on Election Day, and prepared for whatever challenges to possibly come beginning at 8:01 when the polls close,” he said.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.

But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.

Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.