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President Trump was forced to abandon his decision to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his private golf club after it became clear the move had alienated Republicans and swiftly become part of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to defend the decision during a news conference but caused a new controversy when he was asked about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president that sparked the impeachment inquiry. Mulvaney told reporters that Trump had held up nearly $400 million in aid to push the foreign government to investigate Democrats, comments that undercut Trump’s central defense in the inquiry. When a journalist followed up, saying that Mulvaney seemed to be describing a quid pro quo, Mulvaney said “we do that all the time with foreign policy.”

Trump blamed his G-7 reversal on critics, saying on Twitter that his decision to scrap plans for a summit at the Doral club was “based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility.”AD

On May 11, 1838, the Vicksburg Register in Mississippi carried an ad for a miracle drug to fight a disease ravaging the country. The potion worked safely without purging the bowels or upsetting the stomach. And it would break a fever within 48 hours.

Once known as the Jesuits’ Powder, and the “English remedy” after its early promoters, the drug’s key ingredient was quinine.Now President Trump is promoting a synthetic form of quinine — hydroxychloroquine — as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

The drug still is used to combat malaria and has been found to work on other ailments. But there’s scant evidence it can fight covid-19.

On Aug. 30, 1954, Bernice E. Eddy, a veteran scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., was checking a batch of a new polio vaccine for safety.Created by Jonas Salk, the vaccine was hailed as the miracle drug that would conquer the dreaded illness that killed and paralyzed children. Eddy’s job was to examine samples submitted by the companies planning to make it.As she checked a sample from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., she noticed that the vaccine designed to protect against the disease had instead given polio to a test monkey. Rather than containing killed virus to create immunity, the sample from Cutter contained live, infectious virus.

As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure.

Despite Eddy’s warnings, an estimated 120,000 children that year were injected with the Cutter vaccine

In summer 1793, a malignant visitation spread over the nation’s capital, carrying off young and old, poor and prosperous in agonizing ways.People collapsed in the streets untended and died horrible deaths at home, their skin turning yellow, their vomit dark with blood.

Families were wiped out. Handshaking stopped. Citizens avoided one another and covered their faces with cloth.Half the residents fled the city, including President George Washington. Schools were closed. Some roads outside town were guarded to keep refugees away.This was Philadelphia, the U.S. capital from 1790 to 1800. Wagons arriving from the city were burned as a precaution. Letters and newspapers from Philadelphia were handled with tongs.

During the worst of it, a hundred people were buried a day. Historian J.H. Powell’s classic 1949 account is entitled “Bring Out Your Dead,” after the calls of the roving burial teams.What was destroying them, scientists say, was the first virus found to cause human disease.

MOSCOW — When President Vladimir Putin threw open the gates for Russians to propose changes to the country's constitution, the rewrite frenzy was on — particularly among nationalists, social conservatives, chauvinists and militants, who all dream of a Russia even more strident and militaristic.Russia is revamping its liberal Boris Yeltsin-era constitution, and citizens and organizations have put forward more than 700 suggested amendments — many with a distinctly anti-liberal bent

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a historian and opposition politician, said many of the amendments were “crazy proposals” mainly from people who opposed the liberal, humanist constitution of 1993.ADBut it’s a road map of where Russia has moved under Putin, who ordered the constitutional redo last month as part of an apparent plan to keep his grip on power after term limits force him out of the presidency in 2024

“There’s nothing new. Both proposals guarantee nothing. But it’s using propaganda to increase the support of these amendments,” Ryzhkov said.ADVoters will be given a yes-or-no vote on the full text of the new constitution. So if they like the state commitment to social payments, they will get every other amendment, too.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will declare Thursday that it is “the policy of the United States” to protect people with preexisting conditions, while also suing to toss out current preexisting condition protections.

Trump plans to sign an executive order in North Carolina laying out the policy, according to White House officials. But even they concede it will have no legal effect.

At the same time, the White House has joined a lawsuit brought by 20 Republican-led states attempting to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act, which bans insurers from denying coverage or jacking up prices on people with preexisting health conditions. That case goes before the Supreme Court for oral arguments Nov. 10.

In an interview with The Washington Post, McLaughlin (R) said he rushed to Hillcrest Funeral Home about 15 minutes after “the first call” reporting that 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had crashed his pickup truck nearby. He found himself standing near an official he identified only as “the negotiator,” while frightened parents gathered outside the school and police waited well over an hour to storm the classroom.

He said he doesn’t believe the negotiator was aware there were children calling 911 and asking police to save them while the gunman was in the classroom. The mayor said he was not aware of those calls, nor did he hear shots fired from inside the school, across the street.

In the recent Texas primary for governor, he opted not to endorse the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, labeling him a “fraud” over his approach to the border and immigration. And he has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” multiple times to lambaste the Border Patrol’s release of migrants into the streets of Uvalde and lament that he cannot get a call back from the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

I want to make three arguments here. Imitation is not just some new minor ability. It changes everything. It enables a new kind of evolution. The first is that humans are unique because they are so good at imitation. When our ancestors began to imitate they let loose a new evolutionary process based not on genes but on a second replicator, memes. Genes and memes then coevolved, transforming us into better and better meme machines. The second is that one kind of copying can piggy-back on another: that is, one replicator (the information that is copied) can build on the products (vehicles or interactors) of another. This multilayered evolution has produced the amazing complexity of design we see all around us. The third is that now, in the early 21st century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though I have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next.

could any of our modern meme products take the step our hominid ancestors did long ago and begin a new kind of copying? Yes. They could and they are. Our computers, all linked up through the Internet, are beginning to carry out all three of the critical processes required for a new evolutionary process to take off.

This is a radically new kind of copying, varying and selecting, and means that a new evolutionary process is starting up. This copying is quite different from the way cells copy strands of DNA or humans copy memes. The information itself is also different, consisting of highly stable digital information stored and processed by machines rather than living cells. This, I submit, signals the emergence of temes and teme machines, the third replicator.

There were few signs at Friends that Jackson harbored any hatred, according to interviews with a dozen classmates, teachers and administrators. Most agreed to talk about Jackson only if they would not be identified because they did not want to be connected with his crime.

Jackson’s arrest made front-page news across the country. But prosecutors were surprised at how quickly the story faded.

Jackson belonged to a small group of more conservative students who stood out on campus, she said. “It was a really liberal school, so people shared a lot of assumptions,” she said. “He liked to challenge those.”

Republican lawmakers appeared unswayed by the new information, focusing on attacking the Democratic-led investigation in the House for not uncovering the evidence before sending the impeachment articles to the Senate.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said it is the responsibility of the House, not the Senate, to gather evidence and present a case for impeachment.

The chorus of Republicans unwilling to consider additional evidence served as an indication that Democrats will face an uphill climb in their attempts to further build a case against Trump as the Senate trial plays out. The impeachment charges center on the allegation that the president withheld military aid and a White House meeting to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

From the start of the boom in copying practices in the fourth century AD, Greek and Latin mythical and literary classics were the predominant texts copied up until about the sixth century, when Christian texts started to replace them due to the rise of the Christian religion

Here the “dark ages” of Greek and Latin literature descended upon ancient manuscripts, neglected on monasteries’ library shelves, not to be copied because of newfound disinterest in them as compared to Christian texts. This neglect caused the older manuscripts to decay faster than they normally would, because no one was particularly interested in their well-being. Some pagan manuscripts were even reused for writing new biblical copies down, because of the high cost of parchment. The old ink would either be washed or more commonly scraped off, and the new text written over, to create a “palimpsest”--literally Greek for “scraped again.”

This was the Carolingian Revival, when the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne reinvigorated the learning spirit in monasteries across the empire. He recruited major scholarly figures and poets from around the world to gather at his palace, which became a center for scholarship with its vast library of Charlemagne himself

In a chilling, existential, bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question: Did Manhattan Project scientists think there was even a minute possibility that detonating the first atomic bomb on the remote plains of New Mexico could destroy the world?

physicists knew it wouldn’t, long before the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, about 210 miles south of the secret Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory.

“This thing has been blown out of proportion over the years,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The question on the scientists’ minds before the test, he said, “wasn’t, ‘Is it going to blow up the world?’ It was, ‘Is it going to work at all?’”

The federal government has launched “Operation Warp Speed” to deliver a covid-19 vaccine by January, months ahead of standard vaccine timelines.The last time the government tried that, it was a total fiasco.

Gerald Ford was president. It was 1976.

Ford raced to come up with a response, consulting with Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the scientists behind the polio vaccine, and in late March he announced an audacious plan for the federal government to produce the vaccine and organize its distribution.

When the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged to each other “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” they were describing precisely why we set aside Memorial Day to honor all who have died in service to our nation.

Black military service had a direct relationship to “the achievement of the rights of citizenship,” Gates told me. “In Lincoln’s final speech, he tentatively floated the idea of Black male suffrage for the men who had played such a decisive role in the Union’s victory and for a small group of ‘very intelligent’ Black men. Some scholars argue that this statement led to Lincoln’s assassination, since John Wilkes Booth was in the audience and essentially said that this was the last straw.”

“A lot of people talk about patriotism these days,” Parker told me. “But what is patriotism? It’s a commitment to a set of founding values so complete that one is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

That’s how former President Jimmy Carter described the photos of him and his predecessor, Gerald Ford, sharing a limousine on the day of his inauguration. Carter had defeated Ford in the 1980 election, and the two men weren’t exactly friends.

“It was incredibly painful for Ford when he lost the election, but you did not let that stand in the way of conceding or doing a good transition because that was the right thing to do,” said David Hume Kennerly, who was Ford’s chief White House photographer and had a remote camera set up in the limo.

This tradition, of the incoming president riding to Capitol Hill with the outgoing president, goes all the way back to the 19th century — although then it was a horse-drawn carriage instead of a bulletproof limo.

The national media’s shortcomings have been all too obvious in recent years as Donald Trump has gleefully thrown the norms of traditional journalism into a tizzy.

Journalists have done a lot right — they have pointed out lies, dug out what’s really happening, skillfully explained and analyzed.

But on Wednesday — as televised impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives — journalists need to be on their game. The stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to fulfilling their core mission: informing citizens of what they really need to know.

Members of Congress, shaken and angry following a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Trump’s supporters, put a final stamp on President-elect Joe Biden’s victory early Thursday morning

Republicans had at one point planned to object to the electoral college votes in a series of states won by Biden, but after the storming of the Capitol, several GOP senators changed course, disputing only Arizona and Pennsylvania. Both challenges failed.

Shortly after Congress affirmed Biden’s win, Trump pledged an “an orderly transition.”

Chinese scholars and Communist Party cadres have a succinct way of describing the tectonic shifts taking place here: Deng Xiaoping made us rich, now Xi Jinping is making us strong.

Xi has devoted his seven years in power to strengthening the ruling Communist Party, and by extension the country. He has relentlessly quashed dissent, sidelined rivals and demanded absolute loyalty.After pledging to make the party “north, south, east and west,” he has ensured that it is paramount not just in policymaking but in the military, business, education and the law. 

Now, Xi is facing challenges on multiple fronts, and the Communist Party, riven with paranoia at the best of times, is seeing threats at every turn.ADHe has to contend not just with a slowing economy but also a protracted trade war with the United States that has entered a new confrontational phase with President Trump’s decision to impose more tariffs next month.

You write movingly in your book about your family relying on the social safety net, about difficult things you saw as a child — and how those influences shaped your path.We came to the U.S. with $40. My parents were both professionals in China who had difficulty finding employment here. They worked multiple jobs, but we still really struggled

We went through substantial periods of being dependent on some type of government service, whether food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, children’s health insurance. And I had an acute awareness as a child of what happens when people go without access to health care. I also had an acute awareness that people’s lives were not valued the same.

Do you remember when that understanding hit you?I saw a neighbor’s child die in front of me as a child. And watching someone die from an illness that I knew was preventable — because I had asthma — left an imprint on me. And he died not because of lack of medical care, but because his family — his grandmother — was too afraid for what would happen to their family, that they could be deported, if they called for help. And so that’s what motivated me to go into medicine. I felt very strongly about caring for the most vulnerable, who otherwise would have nowhere else to go for their care.

Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.

“True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”

His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”