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Sea level rise is going to be an ongoing problem for centuries to come, we will have to keep on adapting over and over again. It’s going to be a whole new expensive lifestyle, costing trillions of dollars.

Sea level has a very long memory, so even if we start cooling temperatures the seas will continue to rise.

About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters – the US, China, India, Russia and the European Union – according to the researchers. The US was a key architect of the Paris deal but this week Donald Trump formally triggered its exit from the agreement.

Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimetres is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we’ve observed over the entire 20th century,

The results reveal the daunting prospect of a near-endless advance of the seas, forcing countries to invest huge resources in defending key infrastructure or ceding certain areas to the tides. Many coastal cities around the world are already facing this challenge, with recent research finding that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 unless carbon emissions are drastically slashed.

the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed.

“People are going to become less inclined to live by the coast and there are going to be sea level rise refugees,” Clark said. “More severe cuts in emissions are certainly going to be required but the current Paris pledges aren’t enough to prevent the seas from rising for a long, long time.”

The effective barring of Roth from entering Hong Kong is not an isolated incident, happening days after a U.S. photographer covering the pro-democracy protests was also banned from entering the financial hub.

“I think it’s worth stressing that what happened to me pales in comparison to what is happening to the pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Hong Kong. They’re the ones who are facing tear gas, beatings and arrest, and I just had another 16 hour flight [back to New York],” Roth says. “But what it does reflect is a real worsening of the human rights situation in Hong Kong.”

At a press briefing on Monday after the incident involving Roth, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that “allowing or not allowing someone’s entry is China’s sovereign right,” adding that foreign NGOs were supporting “Hong Kong independence separatist activities.”

“The justification they put forward was laughable, and insulting to the people of Hong Kong,” says Roth. “They don’t need me to tell them to take to the streets — they are looking to defend their own human rights, their own political freedoms and their own rule of law.”

Roth says Beijing’s explanation for barring him shows how fearful the authorities are of demonstrations in the city, and is an attempt to persuade those in the mainland not to emulate the pro-democracy protests. “They simply cannot admit to people on the mainland that hundreds of thousands Chinese citizens would take to the street in opposition to the increasingly dictatorial rule that is coming from Beijing.”

The Chinese government has attempted to deter, track and deport journalists and foreign investigators from reporting on forced indoctrination and detention of at least a million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in China’s western province of Xinjiang, highlighted in Roth’s lead essay in the HRW report.

On Monday, Chinese state media reported that the semi-autonomous region of Tibet would introduce forthcoming regulations to “strengthen ethnic unity;” echoing language used in regulations introduced in Xinjiang four years ago.

Beyond the worrying crackdown within China’s own borders, HRW’s report highlights Beijing’s efforts to deter the international community from scrutinizing its human rights abuses, taking “full advantage of the corporate quest for profit to extend its censorship to critics abroad.”

And at the individual level, the export of censorship is reaching dissidents and even universities in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.; the report notes that students from China who wanted to join campus debates felt unable to do so for fear of being monitored or reported to Chinese authorities.

The export of the Chinese censorship system also permeates governments and international institutions, and has “transformed into an active assault on the international human rights system,”

China has also consistently worked with Russia at the U.N. Security Council to block efforts to investigate human rights abuses in Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela. “China worries that even enforcement of human rights standards someplace else will have a boomerang effect that will come back to haunt it,” says Roth.

Aside from China, the report also looks at several other concerning situations around around the world, including civilians at risk from indiscriminate bombing in Idlib province in Syria, the desperate humanitarian crisis resulting from Saudi-led coalition’s actions in Yemen, the refugee crisis emerging from Maduro’s grip on power in Venezuela, and Myanmar’s denial of the genocide of the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice. And while Roth is encouraged by a growing international response to China’s actions in Xinjiang, particularly from Muslim majority nations, there remains much more to be done. From a U.S. perspective, the report notes that strong rhetoric from officials condemning human rights violations in China is “often undercut by Trump’s praise of Xi Jinping and other friendly autocrats,” as well as the Trump-administration’s own policies in violation of human rights, including forced separation at the U.S.-Mexican border.

"If the US leaves, people across the region will think that despite his flowery rhetorical devices, Trump does not really have a strategy for the Middle East and at the end of the day will fold and go home," Gerges said.

Watling questioned what Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran was aiming to achieve. Iran's long-term strategy in Iraq, on the other hand, is paying off.

Much of Iran's power in Iraq comes through militia groups that have roots in the 1980s Iraq-Iran war. Recruiting fighters from Iraq wasn't that difficult. Iraq was a Shia-majority nation led for more than two decades by brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, born a Sunni. Iran, which has long pitched itself as the world's leader of Shia Muslims, took in Shia prisoners of war and refugees, and turned them into soldiers who would go back to Iraq to act in Tehran's interests, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Some became part of what is now known as the Badr Organization, the report said, both a militia group and an anti-US political party in Iraq today.

As Iran made steady headway in the Iraqi government and military, the US' objective in Iraq has changed so many times that it's become muddy and unfocused.

According to Watling, there are now around 113,000 salaried personnel in the powerful Tehran-backed Iraqi militia group. Of those, some 60,000 are actively deployable as fighters, and of those, 36,000 are directed by Iran.

Despite achieving the regime change the US was looking for, with the capture and execution of Saddam, the US left Iraq in 2011 with an unsteady government in place. It had no choice but to send troops back to put out fires with the spread of ISIS. Iran also took part in the fight against ISIS, but it continued with its drive to boost influence in Iraq.

Anti-government protesters galvanized by deep economic grievances that have accumulated over many years have found themselves facing off with Iranian-backed forces.

Hunger is stronger than fear.

Undocumented immigrants contribute more than $11 billion a year in state and local taxes. Immigrants are an essential part of our multiethnic, multicultural society.

But before the Biden administration can address the challenge of new migrant caravans heading north, it will have to deal with the tens of thousands of asylum seekers, mostly Central Americans, already stranded in Mexico along the U.S. border.

If he wants to be the anti-Trump president, Mr. Biden will have to resolve this situation promptly and humanely.

The administration has a long list of promises to fulfill in its first 100 days, from legalizing America’s approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants and protecting Dreamers to granting temporary protected status to the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in the United States who escaped Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

As long as there aren’t enough Covid-19 vaccines for everyone, it’s unlikely the Biden administration will allow a massive influx of refugees and asylum seekers into the country. These months of vaccine scarcity will hopefully provide the administration the time it needs to formulate and execute a new immigration policy that can address the crisis.

They’ll also have to deal with the unauthorized immigrants who have been in the United States for decades, waiting for their status to be regularized.

Good leaders are defined by how they treat the most vulnerable in their charge, not the wealthiest or most powerful. And immigrants are, by far, the most vulnerable.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli have talked about immigrants taking American jobs, blasted Democrat-run sanctuary cities, touted “America First” and warned of “evil people who seek to travel to the United States with the intent of harming and killing Americans.”

In Phoenix last week, Wolf warned that there would be a surge in migration and an “unimaginable public health crisis” at the southern border if Trump were to lose the election — a series of nakedly political statements that stunned many former officials.

“The rhetoric that’s come out of Wolf and Cuccinelli is appearing to be a propaganda arm of the White House,”

The arrests were part of “Operation OPTical Illusion,” a crackdown on the federal Optional Tactical Training program, which allows international students to work in their field of study while on a U.S. student visa.

Cuccinelli directly tied this immigration enforcement action to Trump’s agenda, saying the arrests “will open up those jobs for American workers” and emphasizing that this “has been a very high priority for this President.”

Earlier in October, ICE put up bold black and red billboards in several parts of Pennsylvania, featuring the faces of six immigrants and their charges of burglary, robbery, and assault in big lettering. The agency described them as “at-large immigration violators who may pose a public safety threat” and said the campaign was meant to “educate the public about the dangers of non-cooperation policies.

“DHS is showing us a textbook example of why we have a federal law against government officials using their positions to support a political campaign,”

The politically significant locations of these press conferences, and the presence of senior leadership, means each event has been covered by local news and circulated on social media, likely reaching their intended in-state audience and beyond.

“the Trump administration is building [a] new wall and doing so faster than ever before” and “the Trump admin is putting America first by protecting American workers.” On Thursday, Wolf posted an almost 2-minute video about news media raising questions about Trump’s promised border wall in what was effectively a campaign ad, with the message: “They said it couldn’t be done…They were wrong. 400 times and counting.”

“These billboards are clearly intended to fuel anti-immigrant fervor one month before the election,”

“Top DHS officials are acting more like campaign surrogates than public servants, and they need to be held accountable.”

“I am deeply disturbed that ICE is spending government dollars and putting lives at risk in furtherance of what is described as a political messaging campaign,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Pham in early October.

Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised concerns the agency has also been timing other law enforcement actions for political purposes. In September, ICE announced that 19 non-citizens in North Carolina had been charged with illegally voting in the 2016 election.

This time around, the ICE announcement about the charges — which came more than three years after the investigation started — were also “highly suspect, and likely to be politically driven,” says Helen Parsonage, an attorney who represents five of the non-citizens.

While Trump’s 2016 rallies were often filled with vivid accounts of immigrant crime, “build the wall” chants and infamous readings of a poem about a snake to illustrate the threat posed by immigrants and refugees, it’s a theme he’s rarely touched on in his 2020 rallies.

Later, after we end our call, it occurs to me that at 46 I have almost certainly touched the wall in my life, but have none of the eagerness to be finished that the expression suggests

There are 26 million refugees in the world and nearly 46 million internally displaced people. There is no patience left for this beautiful poem anymore, is what I think, shutting the book and replacing it on the shelf. Not in this burning, ravaged world.

I click a button, and now I am looking out the window of a moving train outside of Moscow. In Lausanne, under a blue sky, a boat arrives. A sea in Albania. A kangaroo doing not much in Tasmania. So much wind, so much laundry drying. So many open doors with the keys still in the lock. So many sleeping cats. So much waiting. I fall asleep with the window open, and when I wake, it is raining in Norway.

Support for Colombia has never depended on whether a Democrat or Republican was in the White House -- nor, for that matter, on the party affiliation of Colombia's presidents. It should stay that way.

At the end of the day, though, this isn't about individual politicians. It's about a partnership built between our two countries over decades -- a partnership that we both need now more than ever.

None of us wants to see our partnership suffer. That's because we know how much our countries can achieve when we work side by side. Today, Colombia is far safer and more prosperous than it was twenty years ago -- an accomplishment built on the backs of our brave Colombian partners and facilitated by across-the-aisle support here in the US. Colombia is once again facing a series of unprecedented challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic downturn, a spike in insecurity and the Venezuelan refugee and migrant crisis. Regardless of whether Biden wins the White House come November, we want nothing more than to sustain -- in fact, to increase -- our cooperation with Colombia to tackle these challenges together.

forces were digging trenches and standing firm.

phone and internet communication has been down.

Claims by all sides are hard to verify because

The conflict erupted on Nov. 4 and has killed hundreds, possibly thousands, and has sent more than 30,000 refugees into neighbouring Sudan. Rockets have been fired by rebels into neighbouring Amhara region and across the border into the nation of Eritrea.

Foreign nations have urged talks

Abiy accuses the Tigrayan leaders of revolting against central authority and starting the conflict by attacking federal troops in the town of Dansha on Nov. 4.

Abiy won a Nobel Peace Prize last year for ending a two-decade standoff with Eritrea

Alejandro Mayorkas, who was a deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, is the first Latino and immigrant nominated as DHS secretary

Mayorkas was born in Havana, Cuba, and his family fled as political refugees to Miami.

he worked on the development and implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and headed the department's response to the Ebola and Zika health crises.

Avril Haines is tapped to serve as director of national intelligence, and if confirmed, she would become the first woman to lead the intelligence community.

She previously was deputy national security adviser and deputy director of the CIA, the first woman to hold the position

Additionally, former Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the negotiations over the Paris climate accords, has been named as special presidential envoy for climate to sit on the National Security Council. It will be the first time the NSC has included a member solely devoted to the issue of climate change.

Jake Sullivan, another close Biden aide, has been announced for the position of national security adviser in the new administration.

Sullivan previously was the former vice president's national security adviser and worked at the State Department under Hillary Clinton.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield for the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The role would mark Thomas-Greenfield's return to public service after retiring from her 35-year career with the Foreign Service in 2017.

Biden is elevating the ambassadorship to a Cabinet-level position. The announcement also puts a Black woman in a highly visible role.

The staffing announcements come after reporting that Biden had selected longtime adviser Antony Blinken for the coveted secretary of state post. Blinken was deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.

Four of the six roles require Senate confirmation, with Sullivan's and Kerry's positions not needing such a vote.

"These individuals are equally as experienced and crisis-tested as they are innovative and imaginative," Biden said in a statement.

they also reflect the idea that we cannot meet the profound challenges of this new moment with old thinking and unchanged habits — or without diversity of background and perspective. It's why I've selected them."

And dozens of House Democrats are urging Biden to name their colleague, Rep. Deb Haaland, as interior secretary. She would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

Hence, my contention that the 2020 election is only “likely to be” our most crucial one ever.

Thus, it is largely due to the uncertainty of what would have happened if Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR had not been elected that it is difficult to compare and contrast the elections of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940 to the upcoming one in 2020

In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) was elected in the midst of the Great Depression and thereafter created New Deal Policies to counter its effects

And “likely” primarily because of our present climate condition. The environmental harm Trump has heretofore done is incalculable (valuable efforts to keep track of this appalling record can be found here and here), and a continuation of such policies in a second term would be highly likely

Of essence then is the vital importance of our climate crisis. To describe it adequately in a brief essay is almost impossible. But the opening words of David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) are a start: “It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale.

the recent words of writer Jonathan Franzenare alarmist, but not improbable: “If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”

Even the business-friendly Forbes Magazine opines thatTrump’s climate-change policies have been nightmarish—see its essay “Trump Ignores The Impacts of Climate Change at His Peril—And Ours.”

In April 2017, Bill McKibben--founder of 350.org, which has become a leading voice in the environmental movement--predicted that the effects of Trump’s policies “will be felt . . . over decades and centuries and millenniums. More ice will melt, and that will cut the planet’s reflectivity, amplifying the warming; more permafrost will thaw, and that will push more methane into the atmosphere, trapping yet more heat. The species that go extinct as a result of the warming won’t mostly die in the next four years, but they will die. The nations that will be submerged won’t sink beneath the waves on his watch, but they will sink.”

The next major battle, and perhaps the most important one of our lifetime, will be the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. Its results could mark a major turning point in our climate struggle.

Generation Z – the cohort born after 1996 – has the most at stake in the effort to save the environment. They’re often championed as Earth’s great hope, the young people whose optimism and activism will help reverse catastrophic climate change

ind it difficult to believe that the world will actually rise to the occasion.

If we continue on our current track, he predicts food shortages, global economic instability, refugee crises, populist reactionary movements: all the forces that are already plaguing humanity, intensified.

The doomist argument largely relies on an unsubstantiated premise around “unstoppable tipping point-like responses” and a “runaway greenhouse effect”

the existing approach to climate policy is not going to work,” writes Hickel, an economic anthropologist. “But that is absolutely no reason for doom. It just means we have to be smarter about how we tackle the problem.

Plenty of Gen Zers are still optimistic about the climate crisis and recognize an inherent fallacy within doomism.

individual action makes little difference, and unscrupulous corporations are at fault for climate change.

“If we do nothing, the worst is gonna happen,” he says. “If we at least do something, there might be a chance – maybe not now, but later down the line – for us to save as many people as we can.”

He and his supporters shouldn’t feel defeated after Super Tuesday. They should take a bow.

In the context of previous presidential elections, Biden isn’t so very moderate. Nor are Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg or other Democratic aspirants lumped in that category. They have carved out positions to the left of the party’s nominees over the past two decades, including the most recent three: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry.

And you know who gets the most credit for that? Sanders.

While Sanders’s fellow candidates didn’t parrot his vocabulary and denounce “oligarchs” and “oligarchy,” they spoke expansively about gross income inequality and the need to tackle it. That largely reflected how wealth had been concentrated over recent decades. But it owed something, too, to Sanders’s right and righteous demand that America have this conversation.

Biden’s proposed tax increases of about $3.4 trillion over a decade are more than double what Clinton was advocating in 2016, while Buttigieg’s were more than quadruple. How is that moderate?

Although there is scant evidence in recent elections that a Democrat running on Sanders’s platform can win anywhere but in decidedly blue districts and states, that platform colored the Democratic primary in a bold and indelible way. Candidates disrespected it at their peril.

Klobuchar asserted herself — and was frequently characterized as — a sort of common-sense centrist. But her actual positions and proposals told a different story. As my fellow Times Op-Ed columnist David Leonhardt recently wrote: “She wants to raise taxes on the rich, break up monopolies, vastly expand Medicare, fight climate change, admit more refugees, allow undocumented immigrants to become citizens, ban assault weapons and require universal background checks. A Klobuchar administration would probably be well to the left of the Obama administration.” It would be closer to Sanders territory.

“All the lead contenders are running on the most progressive agendas to ever dominate a Democratic primary,” wrote Vox’s Ezra Klein and Roge Karma late last year. They noted that this primary’s moderates would have been considered leftists in the recent past. “As a result,” they added, “if Biden or Buttigieg actually win the nomination, they will be running on the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in history.”

Biden was designated a moderate despite declaring that the Equality Act, which would offer sweeping federal protection against discrimination for L.G.B.T.Q. people, didn’t merely have his support; it would be his top legislative priority. He was designated a moderate despite being among the 10 candidates at a Democratic debate early on who all raised their hands when asked if they supported extending health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.

Sanders’s grilling was a long time coming. The wonder of most of the debates was how carefully his competitors tiptoed around him, acutely conscious of the moral force that he had come to wield in the party and the passion of his supporters, whom they didn’t want to alienate. He became the enemy that no Democrat wanted to have.

Biden’s backing extends well beyond corporations. His proposals demonstrate concern for those working families. And his goals echo Sanders’s goals, for one reason above all others. Sanders already won.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.

As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan

The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.

Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.

“It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”

in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.

the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.

Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.

The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.

It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.

Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”

When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.

If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.

In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.

That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.

the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.

It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.

t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.

In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.

Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.

Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.

The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.

A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach

Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”

A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.

A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.

Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics

It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.

Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.

This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.

Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.

Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks

More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide

So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.

The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism

An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.

During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization

More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found

Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives

And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.

“It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.

“A lot of people are arguing that these kinds of zoonotic pandemics [originating in other species] are expressive of biodiversity ecosystems coming under uncontrollable stress. “And so the question is whether in 100 years, people will look back and see this as being the first of a number of epidemics [caused by] humanity crashing into ecosystems that previously humans were not part of. “I suspect that they will, and I feel quite pessimistic about that.

Holland – who has written widely about the ancient world, Rome and the influence of Christianity – believes social movements in the west such as BLM are part of a cultural and moral upheaval that began in the 1960s, and which he sees as being as significant as the Protestant Reformation.

Describing herself as “a global historian who thinks in big waves”, Damodaran says what we are living through is “clearly a period of heightened uncertainty where the old ideologies no longer work” – naming liberalism, colonialism and the free market economy.

In specific local contexts around the world, she says, small- and large-scale tipping points are being reached, all of which add up to a global sense of crisis, the impact of which, particularly on the environment, is being felt even by those in more prosperous and comfortable societies.

“There is a price we are paying for intensive farming practices. Covid has not just suddenly sprung upon us. You just have to be a historian to understand this moment.”

But the problem is not new, she says: “There’s this hubris which comes out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, that humans in some senses can dominate nature” – and we should not claim to be surprised.

“Everything that is going on at the moment, it seems to me, all links together.”

History has seen great civilisations in China, India and across Eurasia, “but they’ve not caused these crises that we are living through now, and nor has the African world. “You know what happened? Roughly 500 years ago, these small, aggressive maritime powers on the shores of Europe went across the world with their technology and created their empires by sea.

Other societies may now be enthusiastic participants, but it was not they who created western industrial capitalism, he argues.

His most recent book is about China, and he argues that for all that country’s environmental problems, the scale of the climate crisis is well understood in Beijing given the risks to its society from food and water insecurity. “Everything comes back to the climate crisis, because everything is affected by it – the political order, social order, food, water, the migration of people. So we are in a very, very dangerous epoch.”

In that sense, is not history – and the significance or otherwise of this time – in our own hands? “It is totally in our hands,” says Wood

“And if you were going to be really hopeful, you’d say this is the moment when we are going to wake up and realise that our true interests on the planet are served by cooperating.

“These are things that are self-evident, there’s no denying them. What we will do about it is the imponderable.”

the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.

In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.

The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.

There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.

Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.

The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.

“This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”

“Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’

“The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”

But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.

Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.

As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?

“They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.

As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”

He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.

“For every death, there’s about 21 other infections,” she said modeling showed. So most of Philadelphia’s 50,000 people probably were infected. “They were either lucky that they didn’t develop disease or had mild disease compared to those that were unlucky and died.”Yellow fever is one of more than 200 known human viruses, according to the National Institutes of Health. They include those that cause HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rabies, the common cold and now the novel coronavirus.

In the late 1800s, scientists were just starting to realize that strange microbes smaller than bacteria were causing disorders in plants and animals. Bacteria, which had been discovered in the 1670s, had been associated with human illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and tuberculosis.

U.S. Army physician Walter Reed reported in 1900 that the leading suspect bacteria was not found in the blood of fever cases he studied in Cuba.There was an alien “parasite” at work, he believed.“At the time they didn’t even call it a virus,” Staples said. “They didn’t know really what a virus was.”

In 1900, Reed set up what he called an “experimental sanitary station” in Cuba, where yellow fever was prevalent. He named it Camp Lazear, for Jesse W. Lazear, a medical colleague who had died of the fever that year.

After extensive testing on volunteer patients who were infected, Reed confirmed that mosquitoes were the carrier and eliminated bacteria as a cause.

The yellow fever virus was isolated in 1927, and scientists soon came up with an effective vaccine, called 17D, a weakened form of the virus itself. It’s still in use, and a recent scholarly paper called it “one of the most outstanding human vaccines ever developed.”

But in Philadelphia in 1793, the only remedy would be something that killed mosquitoes.

He rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.

Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety.

Trump’s transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.

Take the poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90 percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58 think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36 percent who think blacks are.

He comprehends his audience all too well

Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten our cultural and ethnic character.

That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who say that blacks do

Another key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African Americans to succeed

The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes that Trump arouses white Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”

In 2016, Vox reports, Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per the raw exit polls)

Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson dismissed, as gently as possible, the crackpot allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy using rogue voting machines, he was savaged across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless quisling. Lesson learned.

fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial, religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump: The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.

Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”

This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.

In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes the growth of “a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”

“Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.”

As Republican strategists well appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.

In launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.

Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.

Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious “other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.

As Trevor Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times, Trump “is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”

Support for Trump’s wall is nearly unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support separating children from their parents when a family enters the country without permission.

Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest psychological illness: his imperishable narcissism; his ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and he cannot let go.

Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.

a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology more than lived experience.

This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites. After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?

Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth, did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the prescription for worker-friendly policies.

For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for the country.

Officials conducting rescue missions say the level of damage brings to mind Hurricane Mitch, which spurred a mass exodus from Central America to the United States more than two decades ago.

“The devastation is beyond compare,” said Adm. Craig S. Faller, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, which has been delivering aid to survivors of the storm. “When you think about Covid, plus the double punch of these two massive, major hurricanes back to back — there are some estimates of up to a decade just to recover.”

In Guatemala and Honduras, the authorities readily admit they cannot begin to address the misery wrought by the storms.

“Hunger, poverty and destruction do not have years to wait,” said President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, pleading for more foreign aid.

“We are facing an imminent health crisis,” said Sofía Letona, the director of Antigua to the Rescue, an aid group, “Not just because of Eta and Iota, but also because these communities are completely unprotected from a second wave of Covid.”

The boulders blanketing Quejá today are almost as tall as the electricity wires. The only road into the village is encased in mud so thick and wet that its residents leave holes in it the shape of legs.

People started leaving here for the United States only a few years ago, but Ms. Cal Sis is certain more will follow. “They are determined, now that they’ve lost almost everything,” she said.

Mr. Suc is now looking for anywhere else to go. He has no idea how he could make it to the United States, but he’s ready to try.“Yes, we’re thinking about migrating,” he said, eyeing the dwindling bag of corn he has left to feed his family. “Because, to give our children bread? We have nothing.”