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Some things are true even though President Trump says them.Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right.

remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.

Some students don’t have a computer or don’t have Wi-Fi, Taylor said. Kids regularly miss classes because they have to babysit, or run errands, or earn money for their struggling families.

The legislative committee sent subpoenas to 17 individuals and three institutions. None was immediately named.

A New Jersey Senate committee is also investigating whether Christie's top advisers orchestrated or covered up lane closures near the bridge for political purposes.Two Christie appointees to the Port Authority, which operates the bridge and other bi-state transportation entities, have already resigned in the wake of the uproar over the abrupt reduction from three access lanes to one onto the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 9.

Christie, who said he had no prior knowledge of the lane closures, said last week that he would cooperate "with all appropriate inquiries to ensure this breach of trust does not happen again."David Wildstein and Bill Baroni, who claimed the closure was part of a traffic study, have already resigned from the Port Authority.

Rod explains why he is not a Republican

When I was in college, and first became a conservative, it was the liberals who had a reputation as rigid, doctrinaire, snide, and off-putting. I’m generalizing, but in those days, liberals were the ones who were far more likely to be brittle, who weren’t willing to look around and adjust their prescriptions to changing circumstances, who seemed disconnected from the world as it was. It seemed to me that liberals had emotional and ideological touchstones in a bygone political and cultural era, and they dealt with changing times by insisting on greater ideological purity in the ranks. Whatever else 1980s liberalism wasn’t, it wasn’t attractive. It seemed outdated and exhausted, both in terms of substantive policies and in terms of the way it presented itself to the public.

there is no creative ferment on the Right, no breathing space, few places where new ideas can emerge. All the energy on the Right seems aimed at hunting down the heretics within. That, and making life as hard as possible for the opposition, not because they have something better in mind, but as an end in itself. 

crudely written email threat to members of the Los Angeles Board of Education prompted officials to close all 900 schools in the nation’s second-largest school system Tuesday, sending parents from San Pedro to Pacoima scrambling to find day care — while New York law enforcement dismissed a nearly identical threat from the same sender as an obvious hoax

The unprecedented districtwide shutdown reflected the tense atmosphere over possible terrorist attacks less than two weeks after two Islamic radicals opened fire at a workplace party in San Bernardino, killing 14.

L.A. Unified School District Supt. Ramon Cortines said he made the decision to order the school closures because he couldn’t take a chance with the system’s 640,000 students.By evening, school officials said they had inspected all campuses and that the FBI had discredited the threat.

In the cacophony of opinions, few observers and participants seem bothered by the lack of a coherent, thought-out strategy for disposing of the Confederacy's visible traces while preserving evidence of this vitally important chapter of our past.

the task at hand is to purge the imagery in a way that guards against amnesia, while also transforming the statues from celebratory monuments to objective evidence.

in Germany. Over the last 70 years, the country has accepted a simple truth: Out of sight hardly means out of mind. The removal of the relics of a hateful social order is not in itself cause for celebration. It is the aftermath that matters.

With 532 new cases on Wednesday, there are now at least 1,871 cases of coronavirus in New York City and 11 deaths, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office confirmed to CNN.Health officials and government leaders have encouraged Americans to avoid populous places and large group gatherings to mitigate the spread of the virus. In one of the more drastic measures, San Francisco is demanding that residents shelter in place during the pandemic.

Ridership on the city's subway system was down 3.7 million on Tuesday, compared with the same day last year when more than 5.5 million people rode the subway, the MTA New York City Transit said in a tweet.

Times Square, normally teeming with vehicle and foot traffic, was lit up as ever but nearly uninhabited Monday as bars and restaurants became take-out only and public spaces like theaters and gyms shuttered.

With the spread of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, these supposedly self-contained paradises have been exposed for what they always were: roiling metal containers, trapping us with our worst fears (and with our fellow humans) — places where the illusion of endless, effortless pleasure hides the disturbing ways that we are all entangled.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cruise ships are cans of contamination because they crowd travelers from diverse regions into “semi-enclosed environments,” which “can facilitate the spread of person-to-person, foodborne, or waterborne diseases.”

These outbreaks are further sustained by crew members who stay on board to work, rarely getting a chance to rest or get well.

Numbers alone cannot capture the scope of the losses that have mounted in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Data sets are crude tools for plumbing the depth of human suffering, or the immensity of our collective grief.

The following charts — which address changes in international arrivals, emissions, air travel, the cruise industry and car travel — offer a broad overview of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic within the travel industry and beyond.

Before the pandemic, tourism accounted for one out of every 10 jobs around the world. In many places, though, travel plays an even greater role in the local economy.

The reason I’m flagging the strength of New Zealand’s “comeback” (to borrow a word currently on high rotation in this country) is to highlight a basic fact. The simple point to make is there is no durable economic recovery from the coronavirus unless people are confident that the risks of Covid-19 are contained.

Bloomberg put the dynamic succinctly in its news report of the growth rebound this week: “New Zealanders have gone on a spending spree since the nation eliminated community transmission of Covid-19 in May and then successfully contained sporadic outbreaks.”

But tracking back to the fundamentally fraught nature of this exercise, the risk of flogging the “comeback” too hard is people think the pandemic is over, and a sanctioned complacency creeps in.

The effectiveness of coronavirus measures in preventing flu transmission has left doctors in South Africa with a riddle: Why did they stop flu in its tracks while South Africa ended up in the top five countries globally for coronavirus cases, which now stand at nearly 600,000?

The answer lies in fundamental differences between the two viruses,

“It seems quite clear that the coronavirus is simply much, much more contagious than the flu,” she said. “This isn’t a fluke — this is proof that simple containment measures, when broadly followed, are effective against influenza transmission, but not enough for coronavirus.”

The first part of this plan should recognize that schools should not open in person until cases of the virus in the surrounding areas are low.

Putting a precise number on this is difficult, but at a minimum places that have locked down except for essential services should not open schools

First, there needs to be what I’d call a micro plan: What happens when a single student or teacher in a classroom tests positive? Of course the affected person will need to remain home until cleared for a return to school. But what about the rest of the classroom, the rest of the floor, the rest of the school?

An end to the Covid-19 pandemic may be in sight with more good news on vaccine candidates, but for now "this will get worse," a top US official said Wednesday.

"We have had one million cases documented over the past week, our rate of rise is higher than it even was in the summer, we have hospitalizations going up 25% week over week,"

"There are so many more cases that we have, that deaths are going up."

China’s top leaders believe that confining residents to their homes during outbreaks is the most effective way to keep death rates low and avoid overwhelming the country’s healthcare system.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a public forum in November that China would have had about 260 million Covid-19 cases and more than three million deaths if it had adopted looser restrictions similar to those in the U.S. and U.K.

China has reported fewer than 260,000 cases and less than 5,000 deaths, compared with 80 million confirmed cases and nearly a million deaths in the U.S.

Biden’s comments came after he met with executives of companies that manufacture infant formula, who told the president they knew the shortage would be severe in February after the closure of an Abbott plant in Michigan. Biden suggested he was not informed until April.

The disconnect between the industry’s alertness to the looming crisis and the administration’s lack of awareness was hinted at during the panel discussion itself. Biden asked one panelist directly if his company had been surprised by the “profound effect immediately” of the Abbott closure.“No, sir, we were aware of the general impact that this would have,” said Robert Cleveland, a senior vice president at Reckitt. “From the moment that that recall was announced, we reached out immediately to retail partners like Target and Walmart to tell them this is what we think will happen.”

“We have been doing this whole-of-government approach since the recall,” she said at the White House daily press briefing after Biden met with the executives. “We have been working on this for months, for months. We have been taking this incredibly seriously.”When pressed why Biden himself said he was unaware of the “whole-of-government approach,” Jean-Pierre said that Biden “has multiple issues, crises at the moment” and that administration officials often respond to problems before the president is aware.

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.

Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case

For the conservative rank-and-file, this should be instructive. If I'd have told them three years ago that during the 2012 election cycle, they could have a staffer at the Washington Post who would invariably write favorably and sympathetically about the Republican nominee, they'd have celebrated. As it turned out, there were some unintended consequences that they suffered -- a dearth of fair-minded coverage during the primaries, a nominee marginally more prone to believing his own bullshit every time it was echoed back to him in the Washington Post, a rank-and-file given information so unreliable that they could no longer assess reality... and for what? A perch at a center-left newspaper doesn't help conservatives persuade anyone of anything if the person holding it is widely perceived as a disingenuous mouthpiece for her favored candidate. What happens is that conservatives themselves are increasingly the only ones who are misled.

, rich and poor neighborhoods like these house a growing proportion of Americans, up to 31 percent compared with 15 percent in 1970, according to a recent study by Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. Meanwhile, iconic middle-income suburbs are shrinking in numbers and prospects.

another truth about suburban places: their tendency to sustain and reinforce inequality. Bradbury and Azusa have maintained their spots in the top and bottom tiers of the Los Angeles suburbs for decades. The sociologist John Logan described this “stratifying” feature long ago, noting that localities held on to social advantages and disadvantages over time. Patterns are established, and successive waves of pressure — fiscal, political, social — tend to keep things moving in the same direction.

Some of this is obvious. High property values support high-achieving schools, which in turn increase property values and personal wealth. Racial redlining holds property values down, limiting investment in schools and preventing families from building equity, disadvantages that pass to the next generation like a negative inheritance. The point is not simply that rich and poor people live in different places through a kind of class sorting in the marketplace. The places themselves help to create wealth and poverty. Because of this power of places to fix inequity over time, current patterns are likely to outlive their residents.

Since 1999, The Grove restaurant, with its warm, woodsy interior and comfort food, has marketed itself as “San Francisco’s living room.”

the landlords raised the annual rent to $246,816, or roughly $20,000 a month, for the 1,500 square foot ground floor space. That is 50 percent higher than what The Grove’s owners paid five years ago. They said the only way they could possibly keep pace would be to drastically raise prices.

Regulars complain that The Grove’s planned closure is just the latest confirmation that the tech boom is making San Francisco unlivable, and pricing long-time businesses and residents out of the market. As start-ups and established tech companies like Google, Facebook and Square poach one another’s engineers with high salaries, rents are, on average, up almost 8 percent from a year ago, to $2,768 for an apartment in a large complex,

When Finnish Teachers Work in America’s Public Schools

Kristiina Chartouni, a veteran Finnish educator who began teaching American high-school students this autumn, said in an email. “I am supposedly doing what I love, but I don't recognize this profession as the one that I fell in love with in Finland.”

In Tennessee, Chartouni has encountered a different teaching environment from the one she was used to in her Nordic homeland—one in which she feels like she’s “under a microscope.”