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The National Weather Service described the conditions as “the strongest since the 2017 wine country fires and potentially a historic event given the strength and duration of the winds”.

The Kincade fire broke out late on Wednesday night and has so far destroyed nearly 50 structures.

Meanwhile, millions across the state will have their power cut again as California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), said it would shut off electricity for the third time in as many weeks. PG&E said it would begin blackouts in the afternoon for about 940,000 homes and businesses in 36 counties for 48 hours or longer throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, wine country and Sierra foothills. An estimated 2.35 million people are due to be affected, thousands more than previously predicted.

The tumultuous Kincade fire spread to 25,455 acres in the wine-growing region of Sonoma county, with meteorologists warning of severe, windy conditions beginning Saturday night that could see gusts of up to 80mph. The entire communities of Healdsburg and Windsor were ordered to evacuate.

The Tick fire is currently 25% contained, while the Kincade fire is 10% contained.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has declared a local emergency to assist with battling the blazes, and thousands of firefighters have been deployed to both locations.

The power shutoff in Geyserville created a dangerous challenge when it came time to evacuate residents as the blaze crept nearer. Typically during evacuations, local authorities deploy reverse 911 calls to alert individual residents. With the power out, evacuees reported being awakened in the early hours by frantic knocks on their front doors.

Though nine wildfires are currently burning throughout the state, none have reached the level of death and destruction witnessed in the past few years. Nevertheless fears remain, especially among those who lived through the devastation of the previous fires. The Kincade fire was starting to skirt along the path of the 2015 Valley fire, which killed four people and burned through more than 76,000 acres.

The harsh fire weather conditions have spread beyond the state, kicking up flames in parts of Baja California, just across the border from San Diego in Mexico.

How plastic descends to the deep ocean is, for the most part, a mystery. Because of its low density, most commercial plastic floats. It needs help to get below the surface. Plastic can become attached to ocean detritus that sinks, or fragment under the sun or waves, or find its way into something’s stomach.

The huge amounts of plastic on the ocean surface were what originally sparked public and scientific interest in the plastic problem. In this way, they acted like a buoy, pointing the way to something much larger beneath the surface. The deep ocean is, as Choy puts it, “the world’s largest habitat”. We’re just beginning the accounting of how much of our plastic has ended up there.

“Germany, one of the strongest and most successful industry nations in the world, is taking huge steps toward leaving the fossil fuel era,” Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said at a news conference in Berlin.

Environmental organizations criticized the government plan for being too slow and for not expanding renewable energy sources quickly enough. “The majority of the necessary reductions are being pushed to the end of the 2020s,” said Christoph Bals, policy director for the environmental group Germanwatch.

Renewable energy is getting cheaper. Private investors are shying away from new projects. There is far greater awareness of the deadly particulate matter pollution that comes out of coal-fired power plants.Editors’ PicksA Meticulous Account of Trump’s Tenure Reads Like a Comic Horror StoryTech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.Olivia Palermo Got a Lot Out of That InternshipAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyYet coal remains ascendant in some parts of the world, in part because it has been the go-to fuel for so long, it employs millions of people globally, and because the industry often enjoys robust political backing.

Eastern European countries, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, still rely heavily on coal. The European Union this week created a €100 billion fund to aid their transition to cleaner fuels.

The Asia-Pacific is where coal continues to grow. China, which consumes half of the world’s coal, continues to build more coal plants at home and abroad. According to the International Energy Agency, China’s domestic coal demand is projected to keep growing for at least the next two years, before it levels off. China’s coal expansion puts its own climate targets at risk

And even as it reels from wildfires made more intense by climate change, Australia, one of the world’s biggest coal exporters, is digging for more, encouraged in part by the growing Asian market. Among the most contentious projects is a new $2 billion coal mine in the country’s northeast.

With the Senate runoffs approaching on Tuesday, Asian-American political operatives from across the country have joined local groups in Georgia to try to ensure that the tens of thousands of Asian-Americans who voted for the first time in the general election will vote again this week.

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the virus, among other things, made progressive organizers and Democratic candidates optimistic that Asian-American voters would flock to them. In some cases, it did motivate people.

Over the last two decades, as their numbers grew, Asian-Americans as a whole moved left politically and slowly amassed enough power to help decide some tightly contested House races in districts where they had clustered

Now, as Mr. Biden forms his administration, Asian-American congressional leaders and many of their colleagues are already chafing at what could be a cabinet without a single Asian-American secretary for the first time in decades.

At the presidential level, Asian-Americans cast a record number of ballots in battleground states where Joseph R. Biden Jr. notched narrow victories. But a New York Times analysis showed that in immigrant neighborhoods across the country, Asian-American and Latino voters shifted to the right

For the first time, three Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders sought a major party’s nomination for president. One, Ms. Harris, is set to be vice president; another, the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, has been privately telling New York City leaders that he intends to run for mayor this year.

When analysts get a complete picture of the 2020 electorate, he said, the data will probably show that the total number of ballots cast by Asian-Americans nearly doubled.

Despite the modest increase in support for Mr. Trump, roughly two-thirds of Asian-American voters backed Mr. Biden — a fact often cited by the Asian-American officials who have urged the president-elect to pick a cabinet secretary from their community.

Roughly 30 percent of Asian-American voters do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans, and many are settling in the suburban swing districts that are the focus of both parties.It is a demographic and political reality that has been playing out in parts of Southern California for years. Randall Avila, the executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County, said he had found that many Asian-American voters — and potential candidates he had worked to recruit — approached Republican ideas with an open mind.

The real victory, experts on the Latino and Asian-American vote agreed, would be for voters of color to be pursued with the same vigor as white voters, who are routinely grouped into subcategories based on where they live, or their income or education level.“Democrats need to stop obsessing about white rural voters and white suburban moms,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.

One place they may demonstrate their growing political power is in Georgia this week. Neil Makhija leads an Indian-American political organization that is running a $2.5 million campaign to turn out A.A.P.I. voters in the state’s Senate runoffs. He sees the significant increase in Asian-American voter participation in November as a success — and a lesson.“What we’re going to try to do is take some of what we’ve learned,” he said, “and really go all in.”

The president took a different tone on Wednesday than this summer, when he called overwhelmingly peaceful protesters for racial justice "thugs," "agitators" and "looters." He tweeted "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." He threatened protesters outside the White House with "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons."

But when the Capitol was stormed Wednesday, Trump told the extremists threatening to execute Democrats and target journalists and BLM activists "we love you, you're very special ... but you have to go home." Prior to the mob storming the Capitol, he'd told the rally of his supporters to "fight like hell."

"It just exaggerated the contradictions to me around how the state and how police respond to Black and Indigenous and Latinx and Asian and Pacific Islander folks when we protest," she said. "Versus how they responded to gun-toting white supremacists that were coming into the Capitol."

Black and brown people protesting for social justice are seen as criminals; a mostly white mob attacking the Capitol are seen as demonstrators.

Residents were warned of possible landslides, massive flooding, storm surges of up to 5 meters (16 feet) and powerful winds that can blow away shanties. But after hitting a mountain range and repeatedly slamming into coastal provinces, the typhoon gradually weakened, although it remained potentially deadly as it blew out into the South China Sea, forecasters said.

One of the most powerful typhoons in the world this year, Goni evoked memories of Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattened entire villages, swept ships inland and displaced more than 5 million in the central Philippines in November 2013.

In a Manila gymnasium that was turned into an emergency shelter, COVID-19 outbreaks were an added worry of displaced residents. The Philippines has had more than 383,000 cases of the virus, the second-most in Southeast Asia behind Indonesia.

The Philippines is lashed by about 20 typhoons and storms each year. It’s also located on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are common, making it one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries.

Over the past four years, the Trump administration had constructed 371 miles of border barriers, as of Oct 16. And it is on pace to reach 400 miles next week. However, all but 16 miles of the new barriers replace or reinforce existing structures.

Alan Sanchez, 57, a defense contractor from Maricopa, Ariz., conceded that the president did not get it done. But he said he did what he could.

The yearslong Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act came to a head unsuccessfully and dramatically in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when Senator John McCain of Arizona cast the decisive vote against the effort.

His campaign boasts that he has flipped the balance of three federal appeals courts and shifted nine appeals courts to the right. His nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the weeks before the election could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and the government’s regulatory power. Confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and Democrats framed it as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans.

The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the new barriers have reduced the personnel needed to staff certain sectors, and reduced unauthorized immigration. In Mr. Trump’s first year in office, illegal border crossings did decline to the lowest point since the 1970s, but then increased to the highest point in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year before decreasing again this year during the pandemic.

The 2017 tax cuts are one of the biggest legislative achievements of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, and one celebrated by his supporters.

Some critics, however, have noted that the final tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law was far smaller than what he promised as a candidate. The Tax Policy Center, run by the Brookings Institution, estimated that it was only one-quarter the size of the plan Mr. Trump campaigned on four years ago

Mr. Trump said he would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, for example. His final bill brought it down to 21 percent.Those nuances, however, have been left out of his rallies, where Mr. Trump has been telling his supporters (falsely) that he succeeded in passing the “biggest tax cut in history.”

While most Americans got a tax cut, high earners received 60 percent of the total tax savings.

He vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it entirely, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and raise tariffs.He has delivered on those promises.

Though some experts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have been economically beneficial — with the conservative Tax Foundation estimating that the tariffs have brought in revenue, but reduced wages, gross domestic product and job growth — supporters have been delighted.

Modi has courted the US administration by inviting Ivanka Trump to India, inviting Trump himself to an Indian-American "Howdy Modi" rally in Houston and, most spectacularly, ensuring the US president received the largest possible audience during his visit to India with events that included a 100,000-strong rally in Gujarat.

Senior Indian officials say relations between the leaders of major countries are driven overwhelmingly by national interests and only marginally by personalities. They point to Modi's excellent working relationship with Obama, whom Modi invited to be chief guest at India's Republic Day parade.

Modi is best known for his religion-infused nationalism, but he is also a fervent proponent of climate action andr has massively expanded his country's welfare programs.

If Biden wins, the Indian government can be expected to re-engage on climate issues, an easing of immigration restrictions and a resumption of less rancorous trade talks.

Democrats have criticized these policies as human rights abuses that are biased against Muslims; Indian officials argue that these are a misunderstanding of what the legislation sought to accomplish.

Indians, great admirers of the US and its technological capabilities, have been bewildered at how the nation has blundered its way through the pandemic.

When it became clear India's rickety healthcare system and unruly federal structure were failing to contain the virus, Modi agreed to impose one of the severest economic lockdowns in the world.

Trump, in turn, has compared the US's record on testing favorably to that of India's and claimed India and other countries are not giving proper counts of their Covid fatality numbers.

There is also considerable vicarious pride in the choice of an Indian-American, Sen. Kamala Harris, as Biden's running mate. One noticeable characteristic of the present campaign is the degree to which both candidates have gone to woo the Indian-American community. That the US is home to what is perceived by Indians as their most successful diaspora is just one more -- and arguably the most lasting -- reason that India and the US will remain close, irrespective of election results in either country.

So why would adversaries like Iran do more deals when the US could just walk out again?

The European Union is beginning to envision a world not guaranteed by US power. And Russia will make mischief wherever it can.

A Biden presidency might offer more strategic stability and less disruption -- and a steadier hand on the nuclear trigger. But don't expect dominant global leadership in a splintering world.

SARS doesn’t explain the success of every country that has handled covid-19 well, but it reveals an important aspect of the story.

Consider, on the other hand, countries that have handled covid-19 badly. Anthropologist Martha Lincoln, writing in Nature, points out that several of these countries tend to think of themselves as exceptional in some way. She notes that the United States, Britain, Brazil and Chile all have strong national narratives that see themselves as separate, distinct and better than others.

That sense of being special makes a country unlikely to adopt the standard attitude of any business when confronting a challenge — to look for best practices.

Bill Gates recently wrote that he has always approached problem-solving by starting with two fundamental questions: “Who has dealt with this problem well? And what can we learn from them?

And yet the United States is remarkably uninterested in how other countries approach similar challenges.

Dozens of advanced countries have health-care systems that deliver better results at half the cost of America’s. Most have a fraction of our homicide rates. Many much poorer countries have better infrastructure, which they build at far lower cost. They ensure that money does not dominate their elections. Not only do we not learn from them, we barely bother to look.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Jeremy Konyndyk argues that “American exceptionalism — the notion that the United States is unique among nations and that the American way is invariably the best — has blinded the country’s leaders (and many of its citizens) to potentially lifesaving lessons from other countries.

He quotes the eminent U.S. historian Eric Foner, who once explained that American exceptionalism translates into “hubris and closed-mindedness, and . . . ignorance about the rest of the world. Since the United States is so exceptional, there is no point in learning about other societies.” Konyndyk concludes: “That mentality is now costing American lives.”

It marked a major victory in the eyes of human rights advocates in the country who have been fighting to hold American service members accountable for violence against Filipina women — which they see as a byproduct of the U.S. military’s 120-year presence

With the Pemberton conviction, it seemed that justice was finally moving in the right direction.

But on Sept. 13, Pemberton was put aboard a U.S. military cargo plane and flown out of the Philippines, a free man. A week earlier, President Rodrigo Duterte made the bombshell announcement that he had granted Pemberton an absolute pardon, nullifying the Marine’s sentence after less than six years served.

After the guilty verdict was announced, the judge ordered Pemberton to start serving his sentence at New Bilibid Prison, the largest detention facility in the Philippines, where more than 26,000 convicted men sleep in crowded cell blocks, disease festers and temperatures can reach over 100 degrees in the summer. But that detention order was revised just hours later

the presidential pardon came just hours after Duterte’s own administration filed a motion to block a court order that would have freed the Marine on other grounds.

the recent developments have seen the case deteriorate into an apparent tool for political leverage rather than justice

“This should give us a lesson that the U.S. has no respect for our sovereignty,” Virginia Lacsa Suarez, the attorney for the Laude family, told The New York Times in response to the court order to release Pemberton that was issued even before the pardon. “It shows that the U.S. looks down on us, that the U.S. does not even respect our laws.

From the beginning, the United States maintained an influence over the Pemberton case, despite the Philippines’ jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. service members. In 2014, Pemberton was first questioned by the United States Naval Criminal Investigative Service instead of Philippine police, and he was initially held onboard his ship, the U.S.S. Peleliu, anchored in Subic Bay, and then under U.S. guard at a Philippine military base, instead of in a Philippine jail. After he was arrested, the Marine Corps hired an attorney to represent him and paid all his legal fees, which had exceeded $550,000 by this fall

The pardon is the final chapter of a polarizing, high-profile case that has cost the U.S. Marine Corps more than half a million dollars and provoked debate over decades-old defense treaties between the two countries.

brought back bitter memories for Filipinos of another case in which a U.S. Marine was accused of rape. In 2006, Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith received a 40-year prison sentence for raping Suzette Nicolas

The agreement grants the United States considerable privileges toward determining where convicted American personnel will be detained, and Pemberton remained in a private air-conditioned cell fashioned from a shipping container at Camp Aguinaldo, a Philippine military base where he was monitored by two guards from the Philippine Bureau of Corrections and a steady rotation of U.S. service members. Pemberton’s rank remained unchanged and he continued receiving his monthly salary of about $2,300, totaling more than $160,000 since the killing.

Smith was held briefly in a Philippine jail, but after the United States canceled a joint military exercise in the Philippines, he was handed over to the U.S. Embassy. Smith remained at the embassy for more than two years, until Nicolas unexpectedly recanted her accusation and Smith was acquitted and returned home.

Duterte was always likely to take a pragmatic approach to Pemberton’s release. “He’s willing to engage with us, but it’s not his first preference in most situations,” Schaus says. “But when an opportunity presents itself to advance his priorities in a way that is palatable to him, he’s willing to entertain it

From the get-go, it was fishy,

Garcia-Flores had submitted a motion under the Philippines’ Good Conduct Time Allowance law, and Judge Roline Ginez-Jabalde, the same official who convicted Pemberton in 2015, ruled that the Marine was free to go, on the grounds that he had already served almost six years and had earned four years off his sentence for good behavior while in custody.

“A crime happened, and Pemberton paid for it under the Philippine law without any special privileges,” Garcia-Flores says. “If people think that he’s being given some special treatment, they are wrong.”

Suarez immediately moved to oppose Pemberton’s release, and so did the Department of Justice, arguing that only the Bureau of Corrections, not the Philippine courts, had the authority to determine whether Pemberton deserved time off his sentence for good conduct

Duterte met with Secretary of Justice Menardo Guevarra to discuss his constitutional right to grant an absolute pardon. At 4:51 p.m. the same day, Duterte’s secretary of foreign affairs, Teodoro Locsin Jr., announced the pardon in a tweet. “If there is a time when you are called upon to be fair, be fair,” Dutuerte said later in a televised address.

The news drew protests as the president’s critics took to social media and the streets, organizing demonstrations in Manila to voice their anger at Duterte’s decision. Many members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community thought the president was sending a signal that the Philippine government doesn’t believe that the lives of transgender women are important.

Beyond the question of whether the pardon was an anti-trans reaction by Duterte, it may have also been a strategic move to gain an advantage in relations with the United States

In February, Duterte gave notice that he was terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement, a move that many interpreted as a response to the U.S. State Department revoking the visa of Senator Ronald dela Rosa, the former National Police chief widely regarded as the architect of the administration’s notoriously violent war on drugs. Then in June, Duterte confirmed that he wouldn’t be canceling the agreement for at least another six months, and in July, dela Rosa announced that the United States would be reinstating his visa.

Despite Duterte’s outwardly critical stance toward the United States, relations between the two countries remain strong.

It’s the latest in more than $1.5 billion in arms that Duterte’s administration has moved to purchase from the United States this year, despite calls from Human Rights Watch for Congress to block the sales, citing the Philippine armed forces’ lengthy history of military and human rights abuses

“In both cases, there are many forces trying to undermine the testimonies of the victims, or the witnesses or their families,

necessary precautions in countries where the United States wants to maintain a strategic presence — including the Philippines, a key player in responding to China’s rising power in the western Pacific.

The Visiting Forces Agreement ensures that the two countries have a predetermined process to be followed if a service member is arrested and charged with a crime, when tensions are likely to be high.

Upon leaving the Philippines on Sunday, Pemberton was brought to Camp Smith in Hawaii. “The Marine Corps is taking appropriate administrative action,” Perrine said. He was unable to indicate whether Pemberton will be demoted, or if he will be given a less-than-honorable discharge.

Donald Trump’s presidency is so polarizing and such a catastrophe that a plurality or outright majority of Americans now oppose much of whatever he supports. The mood of the public is the most progressive it’s been in nearly 70 years. During the Trump era, the nation has moved to the left on a whole series of issues, including those that matter most to evangelical Trump supporters.

he Trump presidency, which has produced few significant legislative or governing achievements, has inflicted gaping wounds on the Republican Party, conservative causes, and the evangelical movement.

The greatest cost of the Trump years to evangelical Christianity isn’t in the political sphere, but rather in what Christians refer to as bearing witness—showing how their lives have been transformed by their faith

Much of the evangelical movement, in aligning itself with Donald Trump, has shown itself to be graceless and joyless, seized by fear, hypocritical, censorious, and filled with grievances.

it’s true of enough of them, and certainly of the political leadership of the white evangelical movement, to have done deep injury to their public witness.

One pastor of a large church on the Pacific Coast told me: “There are many reasons why young people are turning away from the Church, but my observation is, Trump has vastly accelerated that trend. He’s put it into hyperdrive.”

He added, “Yes, Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.”

I spent much of that year as an industry spokesman, my last after 20 years in the business, spreading AHIP’s “information” to journalists and lawmakers to create the impression that our health-care system was far superior to Canada’s, which we wanted people to believe was on the verge of collapse.

The campaign worked. Stories began to appear in the press that cast the Canadian system in a negative light. And when Democrats began writing what would become the Affordable Care Act in early 2009, they gave no serious consideration to a publicly financed system like Canada’s.

Today, the respective responses of Canada and the United States to the coronavirus pandemic prove just how false the ideas I helped spread were.

There are more than three times as many coronavirus infections per capita in the United States, and the mortality rate is twice the rate in Canada.

The most effective myth we perpetuated — the industry trots it out whenever major reform is proposed — is that Canadians and people in other single-payer countries have to endure long waits for needed care.

While it’s true that Canadians sometimes have to wait weeks or months for elective procedures (knee replacements are often cited), the truth is that they do not have to wait at all for the vast majority of medical services.

And, contrary to another myth I used to peddle — that Canadian doctors are flocking to the United States — there are more doctors per 1,000 people in Canada than here. Canadians see their doctors an average of 6.8 times a year, compared with just four times a year in this country.

Most important, no one in Canada is turned away from doctors because of a lack of funds, and Canadians can get tested and treated for the coronavirus without fear of receiving a budget-busting medical bill.

In America, exorbitant bills are a defining feature of our health-care system. Despite the assurances from President Trump and members of Congress that covid-19 patients will not be charged for testing or treatment, they are on the hook for big bills, according to numerous reports.

That is not the case in Canada, where there are no co-pays, deductibles or coinsurance for covered benefits. Care is free at the point of service. And those laid off in Canada don’t face the worry of losing their health insurance. In the United States, by contrast, more than 40 million have lost their jobs during this pandemic, and millions of them — along with their families — also lost their coverage.

Then there’s quality of care. By numerous measures, it is better in Canada. Some examples: Canada has far lower rates than the United States of hospitalizations from preventable causes like diabetes (almost twice as common here) and hypertension (more than eight times as common).

And even though Canada spends less than half what we do per capita on health care, life expectancy there is 82 years, compared with 78.6 years in the United States.

Of the many regrets I have about what I once did for a living, one of the biggest is slandering Canada’s health-care system. If the United States had undertaken a different kind of reform in 2009 (or anytime since), one that didn’t rely on private insurance companies that have every incentive to limit what they pay for, we’d be a healthier country today.

Living without insurance dramatically increases your chances of dying unnecessarily. Over the past 13 years, tens of thousands of Americans have probably died prematurely because, unlike our neighbors to the north, they either had no coverage or were so inadequately insured that they couldn’t afford the care they needed. I live with that horror, and my role in it, every day.

here were more specific reasons to be skeptical of those claims. We didn’t know, for example, who conducted that 2004 survey or anything about the sample size or methodology — or even what criteria were used to determine who qualified as a “business leader.” We didn’t know if the assertion about imaging equipment was based on reliable data or was an opinion. You could easily turn up comparable complaints about outdated equipment at U.S. hospitals.

Another bullet point, from the same book, quoted the CEO of the Canadian Association of Radiologists as saying that “the radiology equipment in Canada is so bad that ‘without immediate action radiologists will no longer be able to guarantee the reliability and quality of examinations.’ ”

Here’s an example from one AHIP brief in the binder: “A May 2004 poll found that 87% of Canada’s business leaders would support seeking health care outside the government system if they had a pressing medical concern.” The source was a 2004 book by Sally Pipes, president of the industry-supported Pacific Research Institute,

We enlisted APCO Worldwide, a giant PR firm. Agents there worked with AHIP to put together a binder of laminated talking points for company flacks like me to use in news releases and statements to reporters.

Clearly my colleagues and I would need a robust defense. On a task force for the industry’s biggest trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), we talked about how we might make health-care systems in Canada, France, Britain and even Cuba look just as bad as ours.

That summer, Michael Moore was preparing to release his latest documentary, “Sicko,” contrasting American health care with that in other rich countries. (Naturally, we looked terrible.) I spent months meeting secretly with my counterparts at other big insurers to plot our assault on the film, which contained many anecdotes about patients who had been denied coverage for important treatments.

I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently.

trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean

there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm.

six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.

The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless

These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.”

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out

Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirit

While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV.

It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.

“Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

Now it’s being given new life by the response to the coronavirus, which is being cast as a pretext for some sort of one-worlder takeover — with Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci held up as potential masterminds, “test and trace” as a scheme for permanent surveillance.

Instead of leading to some sort of globalist consolidation, the rule of the coronavirus is unraveling internationalism everywhere you look.

The virus has exposed global entities as either weak and politically compromised, in the case of the World Health Organization, or all-but-irrelevant, in the case of the United Nations

It has restored or hardened borders, impeded migration, devolved power from the international to national and the national to local

And it has spurred renewed great power rivalry, with “Chimerica” dissolving and a trans-Pacific Cold War looming.

Yes, some forms of test-and-trace may increase tech-industry surveillance power. But in every other respect, the trends and institutions that provoke new world order paranoia are likely to emerge from this crisis battered, discredited or permanently weakened.

The same counterpoint applies to the narrower, less apocalyptic suggestion that the pandemic lockdowns are an expression of late-stage liberal cosmopolitanism, of the liberal technocrat’s obsession with physical health and state control

In reality, late-stage liberalism is obsessed with health and state supervision for the purposes of personal liberation, pleasure-seeking, tourism and commerce. So a period of lockdown and closed borders is not the apotheosis of liberal cosmopolitanism, but its temporary negation

The truth is simple and grim. If we don't stop the epidemic, we will face many more deaths and a long and deep depression.

The recent news stories on vaccines have the hallmarks of hype, the kind of stories typically followed by long delays and disappointments. That's not a forecast, just an urgent point that we should not leave the rescue of the republic to unproven vaccines still in the early stages of development.

Thousands more preventable deaths lie ahead unless and until we start focusing as a nation on ending the epidemic.

In this coming week, Congress should return immediately -- online if necessary -- to consider this issue and this issue alone. By the end of the week, Congress should vote for legislation to finance and otherwise support the urgent and immediate scale-up of nationwide contact tracing and safe workplace practices.

On February 13, 1819, Rep. James Tallmadge of New York added a rider to the Missouri Statehood bill that came to consume Congress for almost a year and would ultimately shape the legal history of slavery and constitutional history of the state for the next 45 years. Missouri, Tallmadge suggested, should be admitted to the union only if it outlawed slavery.

In 1820 the threat to the union was allayed, or at least delayed, with the Missouri Compromise, one of the most notorious compromises in the history of the United States: Slavery would be allowed in Missouri. In exchange for Missouri’s admission as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state.

n addition to sanctioning slavery, the Missouri Constitution of 1820 directed the legislature of the new state “to prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in this State, under any pretext whatsoever.”

The provision reflected the particular sort of white supremacy that was characteristic of much of the growing population of the state of Missouri and the city of St. Louis. It was consonant with the politics of the American Colonization Society, which had emerged on the East Coast in 1817, and which sought the ethnic cleansing of the North through the removal of free black people to Africa.

Many of these white men were migrants from Virginia, where representation in the state legislature had, like representation in the U.S. Congress, been apportioned on the basis of population rather than suffrage — the three-fifths compromise, most notorious of them all, which provided an enduring political subsidy to slaveholders, who were able to increase their political representation in proportion (3/5) to the number of human beings they owned.

In Missouri things would be different and only “free white male inhabitants” would be counted: The state, under its 1820 Constitution, would be ruled by and for white men rather than slaveholders.

In order for Missouri to be admitted to the union, the state constitution had to be sent back to Washington and approved by the United States Congress. At stake was the question of negro exclusion. Article IV, Section 2 of the United States Constitution provides that “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” Termed the principle of “interstate comity,” in practice this clause means (and was in 1820 taken to mean) that individual states are not allowed to discriminate against the citizens of other states.

The Missouri Constitution of 1820’s deliberate exclusion of the free black citizens of other states declared that when it came to free people of color, the state of Missouri was a territory apart.

Under the constitution of 1820, free black people in Missouri were denizens, not citizens. Much like Indians, they fell under the law of the state without the ability to invoke its provided protections. Under an 1835 law, free black children were legally required to be apprenticed to white families. An 1843 revision to the state code restricted the immigration of all free blacks unless they could demonstrate they were citizens of another state — a near impossibility for most, because states did not issue proof-of-citizenship documents.

Rethinking the history of the coming of the Civil War from the West, from the standpoint of imperial expansion, demands we reconsider the racist legacy of the victory of the United States of America over the Confederate States. It helps explain just how deeply ingrained anti-blackness is in American life then, and now.

It also was used by Nazi doctors in human malaria experiments in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.German scientist Claus Schilling, an expert in tropical diseases, infected hundreds of patients with malaria by exposing them to parasite-carrying mosquitoes.He then treated them with quinine and other drugs to see how they reacted.“Thirty or forty died from the malaria itself,” Franz Blaha, a physician and Czech inmate at Dachau, testified after the war. “Three hundred to four hundred died later … because of the physical condition resulting from the malaria attacks. In addition there were deaths resulting from poisoning due to overdoses.”

At that time, malaria was mostly treated with the quinine-like synthetic Atabrine, a medicine designed by German chemists in the early 1930s.

But Atabrine, like quinine, had side effects, including gastritis, hallucinations and psychosis, Masterson wrote. Plus, it turned the skin of GIs and Marines yellow.“The most hair-raising [side effects] were rashes that … progressed grotesquely, with skin falling off in sheets, creating open sores that attracted flies,” Masterson wrote. Other side effects included “erratic mood swings, violent anger, and deep depression …[along with] the standard diarrhea, vomiting, and cramps.”Then came the rumor the drug caused impotence.During the fight for the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, Marines rejected Atabrine. Their officers had to watch them take the pills and make sure the pills were swallowed. But the Marines would later spit them out.Thousands got sick. “For every battle casualty, ten men lay sick with malaria,” Masterson wrote.

Other bizarre remedies hadn’t worked, Duran-Reynals, the quinine historian, reported.One ancient cure went: “Take the urine of the patient and mix it with some flour to make … seventy-seven small cakes … Proceed before sunrise to an anthill and throw the cakes therein. As soon as the insects have devoured the cakes the fever vanishes.”

“A tree grows which they call ‘the fever tree’ … whose bark, of the color of cinnamon, made into powder … and given as a beverage, cures the fevers … it has produced miraculous results,” he reported.“Thus … did Father Calancha announce to the world that a cure had been found for the most widespread disease of the time,” Duran-Reynals wrote.

In the 1670s, despite the hidebound medical establishment, a young English pharmacist, Robert Talbor, became an expert in treating fevers. He had moved to the southeast coast of England, where fevers were “epidemical."By trial and error, he came up with a secret formula — “my particular … medicine,” he called it. He would reveal only that it was “a preparation of four vegetables,” and he warned people about using the “Jesuits’ Powder.”

The whole virtue of the pills consisted in the quinine alone.

Wilson was raised in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy who made his name through the publication of his popular sermon arguing for the Biblical sanction of slavery.

Wilson’s father enrolled him at another Presbyterian, Southern-friendly college in Princeton, New Jersey which, unlike Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, or Brown, refused to admit African-Americans. Two thirds of Princeton’s students came from the former Confederacy, but Wilson was confronted with non-Southerners for the first time, an experience that bolstered his reactionary politics and Southern identity. He took up the secessionist side in debates with classmates, and nearly came to blows with some Northern students during the contested 1876 election.

He condemned Reconstruction — the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South — and said allowing Blacks to vote was a “carnival of public crime.”

The mass slaughter of Black people by white terrorists in Hamburg, Vicksburg, Colfax, New Orleans and other cities went unmentioned, as did attacks occurring in dozens of South Carolina towns right under Wilson’s nose the whole time he was coming of age.

“A History of the American People,” a poorly written and shoddily researched five-volume, illustrated tome published in 1902.

It furthered the white supremacist arguments in “Division and Reunion,” calling freed slaves “dupes” and the KKK a group formed “for the mere pleasure of association [and] private amusement” whose members accidentally discovered they could create “comic fear” in the Blacks they descended on. Immigrants were a problem because they were no longer “of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe” but contained “multitudes of men of the lowest classes from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” and Chinese people, “with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life,” who seemed “hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits” and who provoked understandable mass killings by white mobs.

Wilson won the 1912 election with less than 42 percent of the vote, becoming the first Deep Southerner to hold the presidency.

It’s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson’s presidency that sealed the victory. Wilson presided over the segregation of the federal government, with Black civil servants directed to use only certain bathrooms and to eat their lunches there too so as to not sully the cafeterias

The president famously ejected Black civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter from the Oval Office for having temerity to tell him that his delegation came to him not as “wards” but as “full-fledged American citizens” demanding equality of citizenship.

Threatened with bankruptcy, Dixon turned to his old friend to intervene. Wilson screened the film in the White House for his Cabinet, and the following day Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White — whose statues in Louisiana and the U.S. Capitol are also subject of current protests — agreed to show it to the other justices and congressional leaders because he himself had been in the Klan and loved the film’s message. These tacit endorsements from the highest levels of power turned the tide and the film went on to be a massive financial success and was until very recently celebrated as a great work of art.

his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. He promoted the principles of democracy and national self-determination, but only for European nations and Anglo-Saxon settler countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Czechs, Romanians, and Serbs deserved their own national states, African, Arab, Indian, and Pacific Island peoples did not

Japan, an allied power in the war, introduced a measure to include the principle of racial equality in the League’s mandate. Wilson opposed it because it would have compelled the U.S. to ensure equal treatment to Japanese, Haitian, or Liberian citizens in hotels, restaurants, and transport across the Jim Crow South. The measure passed anyway, 11-5, but Wilson, who chaired the proceedings, unilaterally and arbitrarily declared the measure had failed because it was not unanimous