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In public and in private, Trump presented himself as a key arbiter in deciding whether the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 planes would be able to keep flying, according to White House and administration officials

Rather than simply being briefed on the FAA’s findings in the days after the crash, Trump played an active role, participating in phone calls with Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg and other stakeholders, and offering his thoughts about the aviation industry. Asked by reporters about the decision to ground the plane, Trump left the impression that he had taken the lead, saying it was a “very tough decision.”

The disagreement offers a window into the broader dysfunction that can result when the highly technical realm of crash investigations is made political. After Trump jumped in, some of the signature features of his presidency washed over the process. The typically plodding, data-driven forensic work of figuring out what caused an airplane to fall from the sky has given way to attention-grabbing tweets, administration infighting and questions of government competence

Mr. Bolsonaro’s promise of change, any change, was enough to sweep him into office with 55 percent of the vote in October. The language of his inaugural address — “I come before the nation today, a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, the inversion of values, statism and political correctness” — was music to the ears of his reactionary base, investors and Mr. Trump, who shares his values and his bluster. The stock market soared to record highs and the Brazilian real strengthened against the dollar.

Mr. Bolsonaro has drawn liberally on the playbook of the likes of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. He has also been dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics” for his outrageous remarks and political base of evangelical Christians, moneyed elites, craven politicians and military hawks.

While his economy minister, Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago-educated neoliberal economist who taught economics in Chile during the Pinochet era, promised to reform Brazil’s unwieldy pension system, Mr. Bolsonaro made unscripted comments suggesting a minimum retirement age well below what his economic team was mulling.

There are ways in which the United States is a more just country than it was when we rocketed men onto the lunar surface

But as a commemoration of the moon landing, that kind of emphasis on our own era’s greater enlightenment falls fla

the appropriate response — which should be awe at what past Americans achieved, and regret that we have not matched such greatness since.

That’s the warning of a former violent extremist, Christian Picciolini, who joined a neo-Nazi movement 30 years ago and now tries to get people out of them

It’s no longer a lone-wolf-type situation, which is something we were pushing in the ’80s and ’90s. The ideology then was that there were no leaders, there was no centralized movement, individuals were empowered to act on their own. But the internet has really solidified this movement globally through all these forums online; they’re connected in the virtual world in ways that we often can’t be in the real world. I would say that the threat of a transnational, global white-supremacist terrorist movement is spreading.

Picciolini said that even if the U.S. could get a handle on its gun problem, terrorists can always find other ways. McVeigh had his car bomb, the September 11th hijackers had their airplanes, Islamic State attackers have suicide bombings, trucks, and knives. “I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots?” Picciolini said. “There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to think that we don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.”

With all the foresight of Napoleon invading Russia and all the caution of George Pickett charging the Union lines, Trump barreled ahead Tuesday with his plan to send Americans back to their workplaces — and, consequently, their airplanes, subways and restaurants — within 19 days, even as the rapidly spreading pandemic builds toward a peak.

“We’re opening up this incredible country,” he declared midday in the Rose Garden to Fox News interviewers, hours after the World Health Organization declared a “very large acceleration” of coronavirus infections in the United States, raising the prospect of this country becoming the pandemic’s new epicenter.

“I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” Trump declared. He went on to say he “wasn’t happy about” his public health experts’ recommendations, but he reluctantly accepted two weeks of restrictions because “we would have been unbelievably criticized for not doing it.”

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

“You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.

He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share

He quickly put some money to work

During his three years as president, Trump has regularly expressed confidence that he knows more than the experts. That confidence is matched only by the ignorance he actually displays about a vast array of topics.

Repeatedly, he has sent government officials scrambling on foolish missions, leading them to spend time and personal capital persuading him not to follow through on schemes that are invariably wasteful, ineffective, unrealistic or dangerous.

Consider, for example, some presidential guidance in 2017: Trump — who has no nautical, military or engineering experience — decided the electromagnetic catapults the Navy planned to install on aircraft carriers to launch airplanes into the sky were technically inferior to the steam catapults used in older-generation ships.

We are told that this is the era of the empowered consumer:

Better information means more competition, which means lower prices — all features, of course, of an open marketplace ostensibly presided over by a regulatory authority that, while distant, exists to protect our safety.

This vision is a lie. Air travel is the most concentrated version of an essentially authoritarian experience that can be found throughout today’s economy. We live, work, shop, and travel under a system of grossly asymmetric power relationships, in which consumers sign away most of their rights just by purchasing a ticket and companies deputize themselves to enforce contracts with hired goons.

As US Trade Representative-designate, Katherine Tai finds herself in an ironic situation: The most important country she will have to push to open its markets — a core component of USTR's mission — is the United States.

Instead of opening markets, the effect of the trade war has been to restrict market access, reduce economic opportunities and lower living standards

US businesses and consumers have suffered from higher prices and reduced choices for many imported items including solar panels, washing machines, steel, aluminum, olives, whiskey, wine, cheese, yogurt and airplanes, as well as tariffs on hundreds of different products from China.

the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.

Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive.

the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.

Having been introduced to the idea of wearing masks to protect themselves and others, some Americans are now considering a behavior scarcely seen in the United States but long a fixture in other cultures: routinely wearing a mask when displaying symptoms of a common cold or the flu, even in a future in which Covid-19 isn’t a primary concern.

“I will still feel a responsibility to protect others from my illness when I have a cold or bronchitis or something along those lines,” said Gwydion Suilebhan, a writer and arts administrator in Washington who said he also plans to continue wearing masks in situations like flying on airplanes.

Though masks proved effective in helping mitigate Covid-19 transmission, they now carry weight as symbols in the red state-blue state culture wars, with segments of the country seeing them as an affront to their freedoms and others considering them a demonstration of caring for others.

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials are vetting hundreds of potential airplane passengers and beefing up airport security as officials amplify warnings of violence before the presidential inauguration from extremists emboldened by the Capitol attack last week.

The extremists “remain a concern due to their ability to act with little to no warning, willingness to attack civilians and soft targets, and ability to inflict significant casualties with weapons that do not require specialized knowledge,” federal officials wrote in the bulletin obtained by The New York Times.

Commercial airlines have tracked an increase in passengers checking in firearms on their way to airports in the Washington area, according to a separate bulletin from the Justice Department.

One morning in May, I rolled out of bed to find that my hip flexors were at it again. Dragging my rolled-up yoga mat to the middle of the floor to arrange my body into the now-familiar contortion—one leg straight back, the other forward and bent against the floor, then switch—I tried to piece together what was going on. Like most Americans, I hadn’t been on an airplane since February. I had been sitting at home virtually all the time, a situation of relative comfort and incredible luck. But in the weeks that followed, I folded my body into pigeon pose again and again, with minimal returns. As I lost hip flexibility, I also gained other problems, which accumulated over the next several months—low-grade headaches, sore shoulders, a stiff neck, dry skin.Recommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullAfter the Pandemic, the Office Dress Code Should Never Come BackAmanda MullAmericans Got Tired of Looking Bad on ZoomAmanda MullRecommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullArticleRecirc_itemMedia__1z

And people aren’t just working in more challenging physical circumstances; they’re also spending more time doing it. “In the office, people work for eight or nine hours, but now they find themselves working 10 or 12 hours at home just because there’s no commute time,” Natalia Ruiz, a physical therapist at NYU Langone Orthopedic Center, told me of her patients. “Expectations of productivity have increased because you’re working from home.” In her practice, she’s seen more complaints of back and neck pain, but also more “repetitive strain” injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis in the hands and forearms, and pinched nerves in the elbows.

For people who aren’t of working age, the orthopedic concerns are a little different. Elderly people, who are at the highest risk from the virus itself, have also experienced some of the worst physical consequences of isolation. “The elderly are not taking their walks and are getting weaker in their legs,” Singh said. “They are losing confidence in their gait, which causes further weakness, and they enter a vicious cycle.” Many people have sharply reduced their exercise this year as gyms have closed, or they fear catching the coronavirus at those that have reopened, but for younger adults, who are generally more physically fit and less prone to injury, regaining some movement in creative ways is easier, and novel, unsupervised exercise is less risky (although Singh noted that he has seen some injuries from people who have used their new Pelotons vigorously but incorrectly).

too few Americans think about heat waves, which claim more lives globally than any other weather-related hazard, as a problem for which systematic, long-term preparation is warranted. To protect human life as temperatures soar, we need to conceive of what we might call heat season as a phenomenon distinct from summer—a part of the year that people in much of the country have traditionally viewed with great fondness.

Historically, wildfire season in the United States has begun in May and ended in October; however, wildfires raged well into December last year.

The annual Atlantic hurricane season formally begins June 1 and ends November 30. The emergence of Tropical Storm Ana on May 22 made 2021 the seventh consecutive year that a storm strong enough to be named formed off-season.

Mr. Parscale, President Trump’s former campaign manager, was angry after he was demoted last summer, and wanted out of politics. That didn’t last long. He is starting a new political data company.

Now he is turning to real estate and plans to buy houses and flip them, he said in an interview this month, something he said he was good at. He is also restarting his political consulting firm, Parscale Strategy, and trying to kick off a start-up called Nucleus, to process and analyze data for conservative politicians.

Once a midlevel marketing executive in San Antonio, Mr. Parscale rose to the president’s inner circle and was hailed, somewhat hyperbolically, as the tech genius whose social media savvy won Mr. Trump the 2016 election. Mr. Parscale became expert in making the Trump campaign messages — sometimes gut-churning and cruel, other times patriotic and nostalgic — go wildly viral, and his dark humor seemed in tune with Mr. Trump and his meme-making fan base.

The new findings from South Africa were far from conclusive: They came from a small clinical trial that enrolled fewer than 2,000 people. And they did not preclude what some scientists say is the likelihood that the vaccine protects against severe disease from the variant — a key indicator of whether the virus will overwhelm hospitals and kill people.

“It’s becoming increasingly apparent that we’re going to be stuck in this whack-a-mole reality, where we have variants that don’t respond to vaccines,” said Andrea Taylor, the assistant director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center. “We’ll try to tweak those vaccines to target new variants, but because the virus will still be able to spread in some populations in some parts of the world, other variants will pop up.”

AstraZeneca is working to produce a version of its vaccine that can protect against the variant from South Africa by the fall.Still, the findings rattled scientists, undercutting the notion that vaccines alone will stop the spread of the virus anytime soon. And they led to new, and more urgent, demands that richer countries donate doses to poorer countries that could become breeding grounds for mutations if the virus spreads unchecked.

In the 1990s, in an early repurposing experiment, he tested the effect of hydroxychloroquine on a frequently fatal condition known as Q fever, which is caused by an intracellular bacterium. Like viruses, intracellular bacteria multiply within the cells of their hosts; Raoult found that hydroxychloroquine, by reducing acidity within the host cells, slowed bacterial growth

He began treating Q fever with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and doxycycline and later used the same drugs for Whipple’s disease, another fatal condition caused by an intracellular bacterium. The combination is now considered to be a standard treatment for both diseases.

Chinese reports, however, appeared to confirm Raoult’s longstanding hopes for chloroquine. A deadly virus for which no treatment existed could evidently be stopped by an inexpensive, widely studied, pre-existing molecule, and one that Raoult knew well. A more heedful scientist might have surveyed the Chinese data and begun preparations for tests of his own. Raoult did this, but he also posted a brief, jubilant video on YouTube, under the title “Coronavirus: Game Over!”

In a new informal survey of 700 epidemiologists by The New York Times, half said they would not change their personal behavior until at least 70 percent of the population was vaccinated. Thirty percent said they would make some changes once they were vaccinated themselves.

A minority of the epidemiologists said that if highly effective vaccines were widely distributed, it would be safe for Americans to begin living more freely this summer: “I am optimistic that the encouraging vaccine results mean we’ll be back on track by or during summer 2021,

But most said that even with vaccines, it would probably take a year or more for many activities to safely restart, and that some parts of their lives may never return to the way they were.