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Insurance premiums could spike as much as 40 percent next year, a new analysis warns, as employers and insurers confront the projected tens of billions of dollars in additional costs of treating coronavirus patients.

Mr. Lee’s organization estimated the total cost to the commercial insurance market, which represents the coverage currently offered to 170 million workers and individuals through private health plans.

Depending on how many people need care, insurers, employers and individuals could face anywhere from $34 billion to $251 billion in additional expenses from the testing and treatment of Covid-1

We Americans have always fancied ourselves practical, can-do people who put old feuds aside when faced with a big collective problem.

Instead, Trump championed the extremists who continued their marches on several state capitals over the weekend demanding an abrupt and reckless end to the temporary shutdowns that have slowed the virus’s spread

This tradition acknowledges that we often have multiple goals. In the coronavirus crisis, this means beating the pandemic and getting the economy humming again.

There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it.

The comparison, she added, also “misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy.”“This is not about the personality of an individual and his or her flaws,” she said. “This is about men who organized a system of government to maintain a system of slavery and to destroy the American union.”

Mr. Trump’s comments failed to recognize the difference between history and memory, which is always shifting.When you alter monuments, “you’re not changing history,” he said. “You’re changing how we remember history.”

The American Legion Department of Ohio has suspended the charter of a post in the city of Hudson after a Memorial Day incident in which the keynote speaker's microphone was turned off during part of his speech that touched on Black people's historic role in creating the national holiday, the state organization said in a news release.

The Legion said upon its demand, an officer for Lee-Bishop Post 464 resigned as a post officer and the American Legion has demanded that he resign his membership altogether. The state organization said it has suspended the post's charter "pending permanent closure."

According to the release, an investigation by the American Legion found that the actions taken at the Memorial Day ceremony in Hudson were "pre-meditated and planned."

A network of far-right agitators across the country spent weeks organizing and raising money for a mass action to overturn President Trump’s election loss.

Keith Lee, an Air Force veteran and former police detective, spent the morning of Jan. 6 casing the entrances to the Capitol.

Much is still unknown about the planning and financing of the storming of the Capitol, aiming to challenge Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat. What is clear is that it was driven, in part, by a largely ad hoc network of low-budget agitators, including far-right militants, Christian conservatives and ardent adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Mr. Lee is all three. And the sheer breadth of the movement he joined suggests it may be far more difficult to confront than a single organization.

halting the Justice Department's plans to reinstate the death penalt

"The public interest is not served by executing individuals before they have had the opportunity to avail themselves of legitimate procedures to challenge the legality of their executions,"

of replacing a three-drug lethal injection previously used in federal executions with a single drug, pentobarbital

Donald Trump backed away from further military confrontation with Iran on Wednesday after days of escalating tensions, saying Tehran appeared to be standing down following missile attacks on two Iraqi bases hosting US and coalition troops.

Trump delivered remarks in the Grand Foyer of the White House, hours after Iran declared the attack to be retaliation for the US drone strike last week that killed the senior Iranian Gen Qassem Suleimani.

“Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world,” Trump said, reading from teleprompters. “No American or Iraqi lives were lost because of the precautions taken, the dispersal of forces, and an early warning system that worked very well.”

Law enforcement authorities are increasingly worried, not just about what they have already seen, but also about what has been threatened, especially online.

Vehicles with Trump flags halted traffic on Sunday on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge between Tarrytown and Nyack, N.Y. Another pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond.

In Graham, N.C., a get-out-the vote rally on Saturday ended with police using pepper spray on some participants, including young children, and making numerous arrests. Organizers of the rally called it flagrant voter suppression.

Courts usually don’t let cats argue cases. But here was Rod Ponton, a county attorney in Presidio County, Texas, unable to figure out how to turn off the cat filter on his Zoom call during a hearing on Tuesday in Texas’ 394th Judicial District Court.

The result was a video immediately hailed across the internet as an instant classic,

“If I can make the country chuckle for a moment in these difficult times they’re going through, I’m happy to let them do that at my expense,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon.

Ever since Park Geun-hye, a former president, was sent to prison for corruption and abuse of power in 2017 her supporters had been staging noisy protests in the middle of South Korea’s capital, calling for her release.

Even after mass rallies were banned in a bid to stem the spread of covid-19, lone protesters with megaphones or speakers mounted on vans continued to make the rounds of the square.

December 24th Moon Jae-in, Ms Park’s successor as president, announced he would pardon her and set her free on New Year’s Eve.

SEOUL, South Korea — The government of President Moon Jae-in said on Friday that it would pardon former President Park Geun-hye, who is serving a 20-year prison term after she was convicted on bribery and other criminal charges.

Ms. Park, 69, who became the first democratically elected South Korean leader to be removed from office through parliamentary impeachment,

will be freed on Dec. 31 to promote “reconciliation and consolidate national power to help overcome the national crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with Oluale Kossola (renamed Cudjo Lewis), but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they were only released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that came out in May of 2018.

Hurston’s book tells the story of Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin. A member of the Yoruba people, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe invaded his village, captured him along with others, and marched them to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.

in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo.

Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS division—the only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II

hasn’t been told before in English

three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion

The announcement about the tour operator, Kenneth Bae, an American born in South Korea, could complicate Washington’s diplomatic balancing act

South Korean human rights advocates have described Mr. Bae as a devout Christian who not only ran tours to North Korea, but was also interested in helping orphans in the Communist country.

In 2009, North Korea arrested two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who it said had entered illegally and committed “hostile acts.” They were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor

South Koreans have been riveted for weeks by a scandal involving the president and a shadowy adviser accused of being a “shaman fortuneteller” by opposition politicians.

“Ms. Choi effectively told the president to do this and do that,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Lee as saying. “There was nothing the president could decide alone.” Ms. Park’s office did not comment on the report.

Dubbed the Frisco Five, they accuse Greg Suhr of heading a racist force following the shootings by officers of three men from ethnic minority groups.

They said their cause would be better served by "staying and fighting" than by "starving and dying".

They remain in hospital where they were admitted on Friday to be monitored.

As a young child in the capital of North Korea, Sungju Lee lived a pampered life. But by the time he was a teenager, he was starving and fighting for survival in a street gang.

"I saw beggars - kids my age - and I was shocked," he says.

"I asked my father, 'Are we in North Korea?' Because when I was in Pyongyang, I was taught that North Korea was one of the richest countries in the world."

She was afraid of being alone and prone to anxiety, a diminutive 66-year-old woman with a poor sense of direction, hiking the Appalachian Trail by herself, who wandered into terrain so wild, it is used for military training. She waited nearly a month in the Maine woods for help that never came

Her last entry reflected a strikingly graceful acceptance of what was coming.

“When you find my body, please call my husband George and my daughter Kerry,”