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“When he called me with this news two nights ago, he was waiting for customs officials to send him back to Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out,” Golsan said Friday at the symposium, according to the Eagle, a newspaper that covers the College Station area.

The university then sprang into action, the Eagle reported, with President Michael Young reaching out to law professor Fatma Marouf,

He confirmed his experience Saturday on Twitter: “I have been detained 10 hours at Houston Itl Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was ‘inexperienced.’”

It remains unclear what about Rousso was identified as suspect by immigration authorities.

Egypt — from which Rousso and his family were exiled in 1956, after a slew of anti-Semitic measures imposed by the administration of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz — was not among the seven nations in the travel ban, which had been suspended by the time he arrived in the United States.

France is a beneficiary of the U.S. visa waiver program, which permits French citizens to enter the United States without a visa. All that is required is an online ESTA application before departure.

“It seems like there’s much more rigidity and rigor in enforcing these immigration requirements and technicalities of every visa,” she told the Eagle.

“Thank you so much for your reactions,” Rousso posted Saturday evening on Twitter in response. “My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn't be defended as I was.”

“It is now necessary to deal with the utmost arbitrariness and incompetence on the other side of the Atlantic,” Rousso wrote Sunday in the French edition of the Huffington Post. “What I know, in loving this country forever, is that the United States is no longer quite the United States.”

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs.

In marshaling their financial resources chiefly behind Republican candidates, the donors are also serving as a kind of financial check on demographic forces that have been nudging the electorate toward support for the Democratic Party and its economic policies. Two-thirds of Americans support higher taxes on those earning $1 million or more a year, according to a June New York Times/CBS News poll, while six in 10 favor more government intervention to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly seven in 10 favor preserving Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are.

“The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want,” said Ruy Teixeira, a political and demographic expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Most of the families are clustered around just nine cities. Many are neighbors, living near one another in neighborhoods like Bel Air and Brentwood in Los Angeles; River Oaks, a Houston community popular with energy executives; or Indian Creek Village, a private island near Miami that has a private security force and just 35 homes lining an 18-hole golf course.

More than 50 members of these families have made the Forbes 400 list of the country’s top billionaires, marking a scale of wealth against which even a million-dollar political contribution can seem relatively small. The Chicago hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, for example, earns about $68.5 million a month after taxes, according to court filings made by his wife in their divorce. He has given a total of $300,000 to groups backing Republican presidential candidates. That is a huge sum on its face, yet is the equivalent of only $21.17 for a typical American household, according to Congressional Budget Office data on after-tax income.

The donor families’ wealth reflects, in part, the vast growth of the financial-services sector and the boom in oil and gas, which have helped transform the American economy in recent decades. They are also the beneficiaries of political and economic forces that are driving widening inequality: As the share of national wealth and income going to the middle class has shrunk, these families are among those whose share has grown.

The accumulation of wealth has been particularly rapid at the elite levels of Wall Street, where financiers who once managed other people’s capital now, increasingly, own it themselves. Since 1979, according to one study, the one-tenth of 1 percent of American taxpayers who work in finance have roughly quintupled their share of the country’s income. Sixty-four of the families made their wealth in finance, the largest single faction among the super-donors of 2016.

instead of working their way up to the executive suite at Goldman Sachs or Exxon, most of these donors set out on their own, establishing privately held firms controlled individually or with partners. In finance, they started hedge funds, or formed private equity and venture capital firms, benefiting from favorable tax treatment of debt and capital gains, and more recently from a rising stock market and low interest rates

In energy, some were latter-day wildcatters, early to capitalize on the new drilling technologies and high energy prices that made it economical to exploit shale formations in North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Others made fortunes supplying those wildcatters with pipelines, trucks and equipment for “fracking.”

The families who give do so, to some extent, because of personal, regional and professional ties to the candidates. Jeb Bush’s father made money in the oil business, while Mr. Bush himself earned millions of dollars on Wall Street. Some of the candidates most popular among ultrawealthy donors have also served in elected office in Florida and Texas, two states that are home to many of the affluent families on the list.

the giving, more broadly, reflects the political stakes this year for the families and businesses that have moved most aggressively to take advantage of Citizens United, particularly in the energy and finance industries.

The Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and even Mr. Bush have argued for tax and regulatory shifts that could subject many venture capital and private equity firms to higher levels of corporate or investment taxation. Hedge funds, which historically were lightly regulated, are bound by new rules with the Dodd-Frank regulations, which several Republican candidates have pledged to roll back and which Mrs. Clinton has pledged to defend.

And while the shale boom has generated new fortunes, it has also produced a glut of oil that is now driving down prices. Most in the industry favor lifting the 40-year-old ban on exporting oi

These two forms of inequality exist in modern America. They are related but different. Over the past few months, attention has shifted almost exclusively to Blue Inequality.

Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver’s licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.

Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.

In a statement on Monday night, Mr. Daleiden said: “The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”

The release of the videos last summer created a furor and gave new strength to the conservative drive to defund Planned Parenthood. The organization was forced to apologize for the casual tone that one of its officials had used to discuss a possible transfer of fetal tissue to what she believed was a legitimate medical company. But Planned Parenthood said the fees being discussed were to cover costs and were legal. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story

At this point, Rome had somewhere between 1 million and 2 million residents. For perspective, 2 million residents would make Rome bigger than every American city today except for New York, LA, Chicago, and Houston. And this was 1700 years ago!

nterestingly, Rome itself isn't built near potable water. According to Frischer, the Romans managed to support a modern-size metropolis using an absolutely massive system of aqueducts — literally "roads for water" that brought in clean stuff from nearby mountains and rivers.

The video shows the Colosseum as it would have looked at its full size, which is truly colossal. We also learn that the Colosseum wasn't what Romans called it (that name dates to later, in the Middle Ages). It was actually called the Flavian Amphitheater, built by the Emperor Vespasian in a bid to gain popularity after his mad predecessor, Nero, allowed huge portions of the city to burn down.

Bitter fighting over the law last summer propelled state senator Wendy Davis into the national spotlight, and she is now running for Texas governor on the Democratic ticket.

The last restriction under the law goes into effect Sept. 1. All clinics that provide abortions at that point must have upgraded their facilities to ambulatory surgery centers. Busby says many can't afford it and more will close.

"This would basically force all the clinics to become mini-hospitals," Busby said. "They have to have hallway widths a certain length, and a janitor's closet, male and female locker rooms, which is completely unnecessary — and a bunch of other regulations that are really not appropriate or do anything to increase the safety of one of the safest procedures in the country."

Supporters of the law said it would protect women by making abortion safer. At the time of the law's passage, The Texas Tribune quoted Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell saying, "There's nothing in this legislation that will close a clinic. ... That's up to the clinic. If they want to put profit over a person, that's up to them."

Busby said abortion is already one of the safest office-based medical procedures, with a complication rate of less than .05 percent.

Busby predicted that after September only six or eight places will be left in Texas to get an abortion, unless a lawsuit stops the new requirement from going into effect.

Whole Woman's Health is part of that lawsuit. The group previously had six reproductive health clinics in Texas but had to close two of them over the past year, Busby said.

It may have to close an additional three clinics that don't meet the new surgical center specifications, in Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio. It would be left with just one, in San Antonio, that meets the new requirements.

Busby noted there are now no clinics that provide abortions in all of East Texas or in the Rio Grande Valley. She said the one clinic left in El Paso could close soon.

In Houston, the newly built headquarters of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast does fulfill the ambulatory surgical center requirements, so it will remain open. But the status of smaller clinics remains unclear.

Sergeant Bergdahl has been the focus of attacks by Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign

Donald J. Trump, for one, has called the sergeant a “traitor” who should be executed, while Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has vowed to hold hearings if the sergeant is not punished.

No date has been set for Sergeant Bergdahl’s next court hearing, which will be held at Fort Bragg, the Army said. He is currently assigned to the Army’s Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, the site of his preliminary hearing in September.

In the interviews, he told the same story that he had described to the Army’s investigating officer, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, about why he left the outpost: He wanted to cause a crisis by hiking to another base 18 miles away that would allow him to have an audience with a senior Army commander where he could outline what he felt were serious leadership problems endangering his unit.

In the interviews, which were recorded by Mark Boal, the screenwriter and producer, Sergeant Bergdahl said that he realized within 20 minutes of leaving that he had done “something serious.”

General Abrams’s decision came just days after Sergeant Bergdahl was heard for the first time publicly explaining why he left his base, in taped interviews that were broadcast by the podcast “Serial” last week.

Sergeant Bergdahl told Mr. Boal that during his hike he had also decided to surveil Taliban fighters emplacing improvised explosive devices that could be used to kill American soldiers, and to turn that information over to commanders when he arrived at the other base. He said that he “was trying to prove to the world” that he was a top soldier, and that in some sense he even wanted to emulate someone like Jason Bourne, the spy-movie character.

Republicans have asserted that the swap would embolden the Taliban to kidnap other Americans and that it was done without the required notification of Congress. Some Republicans and members of Sergeant Bergdahl’s unit have also asserted that a half-dozen or more American troops died searching for him.

But in his testimony, General Dahl — who was recently promoted from major general to lieutenant general — said that no troops had died specifically searching for Sergeant Bergdahl and that no evidence was found to support claims that he intended to walk to China or India or that he was a Taliban sympathizer.

Meanwhile, a Syrian couple and their two small children arrived safely Monday night in Indianapolis

It said the family fled Syria three years ago and underwent two years of security checks before being allowed to enter the U.S.

But he said he welcomed them anyway because helping refugees "is an essential part of our identity as Catholic Christians."

But Pence indicated he wouldn't try to deny Medicaid, food stamps or other social services to any refugees who do arrive in Indiana.

Texas has taken in more refugees than any other state in the last five years, including about 250 Syrian refugees. But it also fought harder than any other state to stop the inflow of Syrian refugees after the attacks.

Three days before Bush’s death, Obama met with the former president at his home in Houston and “rekindled what was already a very warm friendship” in the words of a spokesman for Bush.

It’s hard to envision Trump even sitting in a room with Clinton, whom he has attacked as a corrupt abuser of women and a “hypocrite” or Obama, whom he labeled “bad (or sick) guy.” The two Democrats have been just as critical of Trump, branding him as a threat to American democracy. Trump’s relationship with George W. Bush has been similarly strained

He may be the last U.S. president who wasn’t despised by a big chunk of the American public. Some of that may have to do with the era in which Bush governed. He rose up through the Republican Party at a time when both parties were big tents, consisting of liberal and conservative wings, before Americans had sorted themselves out into warring ideological camps

“He was the epitome of preparation, process and due diligence,” said Peter Feaver, who served in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “He believed in the importance of establishment expertise.”

Bush’s desire to include Trump at his funeral suggests that the president didn’t want his final send-off to be about the current occupant of the Oval Office, but rather about his life, his presidency and his country.

or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.

the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.

Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution

Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.

One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”

Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.

The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.

As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.

At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote

Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.

“I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”

The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.

The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.

Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.

So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”

Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”

Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”

In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”

Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.

voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.

Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”

As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.

But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes

Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.

for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.

Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”

In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.

Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.

One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee

Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.

Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.

This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

Nationalism is antithetical to America’s founding creed (“All men are…”) and contrary to the principles of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy. As with all radical, racially based dogmas, it countenances, indeed promotes, ends-justify-the-means politics, seeks to discredit the free press, and traffics in lies both big and small.

I tend to think that the last explanation is the right one, but it hardly matters. What does matter is that Trump is normalizing a hateful political philosophy that is contrary to our deepest-held beliefs. He fuels divisions and anger, and in doing so, fails in his most sacred obligation — to defend the most diverse democracy the planet has ever known and to protect the institutions that secure our freedoms.

The third take on Trump’s nationalist lingo is the simplest: He knows exactly what it means, his base knows exactly what he means and he knows the strongest bond with followers is xenophobia.

Another explanation is the cynical one, advanced most clearly by the former (briefly) communications director Anthony Scaramucci. He insisted on CNN on Wednesday morning, “No, I’m not a nationalist. He’s not a nationalist. He’s saying he’s a nationalist because he wants you to be upset about it, but he’s really not a nationalist.” In other words, Trump supposedly is smart enough to know what “nationalist” means, but he is falsely associating himself with the term

One has us believe that Trump is an empty-headed dolt who has no idea what he is saying. He either ignored Bannon or forgot what he said. Like a child who doesn’t know what a “bad word” really means, he says it simply because it is socially forbidden (“we’re not supposed to use that word”)

So back to Trump. Three theories emerged to explain Trump’s nationalist utterance.

President Trump declared at a rally in Houston, “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned, it’s called a nationalist, and I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist.” No sooner had he uttered the words than the scramble to analyze Trump’s motives began.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC controlled by House Speaker Paul Ryan, offered mock congratulations to Laura Moser, the Bernie Sanders-aligned Democrat who advanced to a runoff for a Houston-area House seat held by Republican Rep. John Culberson. Ms. Moser had been attacked by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In the Seventh District, the top fundraiser—nonprofit executive Alex Triantaphyllis—came in fourth. In a Dallas House Democratic primary, the best fundraiser by far was a former Hillary Clinton aide, Ed Meier, who placed behind candidates who hadn’t raised even half the amount he had. He had more than $300,000 on hand as of Feb. 14 but failed to make the runoff.

They won runoff positions in all three of the most closely watched and competitive House Democratic primaries.

One of those women, Gina Oritz Jones, is an openly gay Filipino-American veteran of the Iraq war.

“summer low temperatures have been increasing far faster than daytime highs.”

in parts of Poland, France, Germany and the Czech Republic, temperature records were broken last month, according to Vox’s Umair Irfan.

“Historically, D.C. experienced a week’s worth of days where it felt like 100 degrees. By 2050, there could be almost six weeks (41 days) where the heat index rises to 100 degrees,” he writes. “By the end of the century, D.C. could be sweating through a solid two months and one week of days that feel like 100 degrees. This is all if the world takes no serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Lori Garver, the former deputy NASA administrator, argues that the space agency should refocus its efforts on a more terrestrial threat: a warming world. “Climate change — not Russia, much less China — is today’s existential threat,”

“It spans the developing-developed country divide. There aren’t that many issues that would unify in such a manner. And we all know the burden of climate change will fall on these kids’ shoulders when they are adults. They are acutely aware as well.”

Many brought handmade signs. “Think or Swim,” one read

A day after Tropical Storm Imelda swamped parts of southeast Texas, crowds in Houston chanted, “Our streets flood, so we flood the streets.”

Using the internet, young people are organizing across continents like no generation before them. And though their outsize demands for an end to fossil fuels mirror those of older environmentalists, their movement has captured the public imagination far more effectively.

At the Seattle headquarters of Amazon, hundreds of employees walked out, continuing pressure on company leaders to do more about climate change. Those workers won concessions this week, as Amazon vowed to be carbon neutral by 2040 and to order 100,000 electric delivery trucks.

But the workers demanded more action on Friday. They asked Amazon to stop providing cloud-computing support to fossil fuel companies and to stop giving donations to politicians, and groups, who have resisted efforts to take more action to halt climate change, holding signs that read “Amazon: Zero $$ for Political Climate Denial.”

At a time of fraying trust in authority figures, children — who by definition have no authority over anything — are increasingly driving the debate.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched through the streets of San Francisco, chanting, “Green New Deal, make it real,” and carrying signs that read “The sea is rising, so must we.”

“What’s unique about this is that young people are able to see their future is at risk today,”

The data also revealed that the death rate was higher among patients with cardiac injury versus those without: 42 of the patients with cardiac injury, or 51.2%, died versus 15 of those without, or 4.5%.

Also, acute inflammatory responses due to an infection can lead to reduced blood flow in patients with preexisting cardiovascular diseases, the researchers noted. They wrote that "based on these lines of evidence, we hypothesize that an intense inflammatory response superimposed on preexisting cardiovascular disease may precipitate cardiac injury."Investigating inflammation

"Even though they're not dying from that cardiac injury, something about that biomarker is providing some prognostic value beyond other risk factors that were controlled, so it could still be important in terms of identifying high-risk patients that enter the hospital with Covid-19," Gump said.

To better understand that mechanism, Madjid said that he has looked to flu viruses.

The finding's in Wednesday's JAMA Cardiology paper "make a lot of sense," Kevin Heffernan, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Syracuse University in New York, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email on Wednesday.

A separate study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2018 found a significant association between respiratory infections, especially influenza, and acute heart attack, he said.

Inflammation appears to be the mechanism that best explains the association between cardiac injury and Covid-19, said Dr. Mohammad Madjid, a cardiologist and assistant professor at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston.

"To date, many patients with COVID-19 are still hospitalized in China and other countries, such as Italy and Iran.

Therefore, we should be ready for the reemergence of COVID-19 or other coronaviruses."

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, the hardest hit state, said any easing of restrictions would require widespread testing to cover millions of workers first, while Mr. Trump said that “you don’t need full testing” but instead concentrated screening in th

New government projections presented to officials this week concluded that stay-at-home orders, school closures and social distancing have greatly reduced infections, but added that lifting them after only 30 days, as the president is considering, could result in a rash of new illnesses and fatalities that would rival doing nothing to counter the pandemic.

if the 30-day stay-at-home guideline is lifted, the death toll could reach 200,000, even if schools remain closed until summer, 25 percent of the country continues to work from home and some social distancing continues.

Using the demand for ventilators as a stand-in for serious coronavirus infection rates, the model foresees a modest bump immediately after stay-at-home orders are lifted and a major new increase in infections about 70 days after a shelter order is lifted, peaking after 120 days

These numbers fueling the projections may already be out of date. Forecasts accepted by the White House that once estimated at least 100,000 deaths in the United States have now been revised to about 60,000 thanks to aggressive social distancing.

Economists say that lifting restrictions, particularly on nonessential businesses, will restore a limited amount of activity to an economy that is currently in a free fall.

“It’s enough to say that if we were to stop at the national level May 1, we’re seeing a return to almost where we are now sometime in July,”

“As encouraging as they are, we have not reached the peak,” Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House pandemic coordinator, said of the latest figures. She noted that without universal testing, experts were seeing only the most serious cases. “Is this the tip of the iceberg, or is this half the iceberg or three-quarters of the iceberg that we’ve seen to date?”

Five administration officials said it was highly unlikely that Mr. Trump would extend the guidelines beyond April 30,

he would be more likely to find a way to announce some lifting of quarantine measures, even if it might not be a full flip-the-lightswitch reopening of the country.

Jacob Wintersteen, a real estate developer in Texas and the finance chairman for the Houston area for the state’s Republican Party, said businesses should have the right to operate if they see fit despite the risks. “People in front of my face are watching their businesses be destroyed by our choice of the cure,” he said.

The president’s economic advisers have been laying the groundwork for reopening the economy. Larry Kudlow, the chairman of the National Economic Council, said this week on the Fox Business Network that he could envision returning to work on a rolling basis within the next four to eight weeks. Mr. Mnuchin said on CNBC that it could happen as soon as May 1.

The government models show a rise in demand for ventilators 120 days after lifting stay-at-home restrictions that would be more severe than if the United States had never issued such orders in the first plac

ultimately, business leaders will not wait for health professionals or administration officials once new infections and deaths start to decrease and may simply reopen their firms.

Many experts caution that growth will be slow when it returns because people will be wary of resuming normal activities before the country has far more extensive testing.

A quick restart, though, could carry risks for the economy. If the government tells Americans to return to normal life and infections rise again, that could wipe out consumer optimism and lead to a longer, more damaging recession.

“Even after official restrictions are lifted, lots of people may be uncertain about jumping back into ordinary life. Companies may be uncertain about putting their workers at risk.”

“I’ve been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that’s my best-case scenario,” she said.

“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”

But she called Trump “the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.”

If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.

there is one part of the story she couldn’t have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States.

Having long followed Garrett’s work, I can attest that it’s not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting H.I.V. in Africa.

They’ll re-evaluate the importance of travel. They’ll reassess their use of mass transit. They’ll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They’ll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.

“I’ve heard from every C.D.C. in the world — the European C.D.C., the African C.D.C., China C.D.C. — and they say, ‘Normally our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the C.D.C.?

America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals’ access to health care.

But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone, to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?

Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. “The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns,” she said. “The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.”“That’s America?” I asked.“That’s America,” she said.

America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people, so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.