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The revolt has many faces but one sentiment: a desire to upend power structures deemed irrelevant, corrupt or unrepresentative. 

Our political systems don’t have the tools to grapple with the existential threat of climate change, or to control international mega-corporations, or to cope with capital flight in search of lower taxes and labor costs. Social-media giants have become political forces, competing with the weakening liberal order. Facebook’s policy regarding posts on Covid-19 vaccines is much more important to the success or failure of mass inoculation than any government campaign.  

Amplified by online lies, discontent with the liberal order is mutating into an assault on rational discourse itself. With Covid, it means anti-vaxxers and denialists fighting against science. But it’s much wider than that. The energy of the revolt is harnessed by both old and new opponents of enlightenment values. It’s an uneasy coalition of politicians, charlatans, anarchists, fundamentalists, online communities, totalitarian ideologues, neo-Luddites and conspiracy theorists.

What kind of monster doesn’t support “anti-racism”? Who would put themselves on the other side of “social justice”? How could you be opposed to the notion of “racial equity”?

what began as a collective yen for racial equality—long overdue in our nation—has devolved into something dangerous that is actually undermining its own noble goals.

as high-minded as these ideas sound, they mark a shift away from the values they purport to represent—equality before the law; the consent of the governed; even democracy itself—and toward the opposite, with people ranked by immutable characteristics and ruled by a tiny elite.

Last Wednesday, the same day our nation’s Capitol was in the grips of an insurrection, the United States recorded 3,964 deaths from Covid-19, a record high. That day, Covid-19 claimed a life every 22 seconds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that this month the country will surpass more than 400,000 deaths from Covid.

On Jan. 20, I will begin leading the C.D.C., which was founded in 1946 to meet precisely the kinds of challenges posed by this pandemic.

I will do so by leading with facts, science and integrity — and being accountable for them, as the C.D.C. has done since its founding 75 years ago.

In nearly 28 years in Congress -- including six spent as chair of the US House Committee on Homeland Security -- I have never experienced a day quite like that which my colleagues and I endured last Wednesday. Having lived through 9/11 and other attacks, most Americans have little difficulty appreciating the threat of foreign terrorism and the need to vigilantly guard against it.

Given this unprecedented domestic assault, the lingering atmosphere of lawlessness and intimidation in our capital and the credible threat of additional violence directed at our national government and statehouses across the country in the days ahead, it would be an abdication of our most vital responsibility to the American people to further compromise their security and that of our republic in this moment.

The Cuban-born Mayorkas, 61, was among President-elect Joe Biden's first picks for his Cabinet in late November. He is not an unknown commodity, and he is one of the most knowledgeable homeland security experts in the country.

Both bread and wine are products of settled society. They represent the power to control nature and create civilization, converting the wild into the tamed, the raw into the cooked—and their transformation cannot be easily done alone.

civilization arose in different regions around the world thanks to the evolution of cooperation.

We concluded that these sites were the endpoints of ritually significant social events that were timed by the solstices and possibly other astronomical phenomena.

The “shock therapy” reforms that speedily pushed Poland and other countries in the region into capitalism have come in for criticism, but Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of Poland’s reforms, still believes they were the best option for the country in the circumstances. “If you move fast from a bad system to a better one, you release new forces for growth,

While communism left the region an economic basket case, it did also provide some of the seeds for growth: well-educated societies with low levels of inequality

Particularly in Poland, the transition led to a class of entrepreneurs like Grabski, rather than a small group of oligarchs. “We had the Solidarity movement in the factories and they were like a watchdog. So directors couldn’t go into shabby deals like in Russia,”

The world’s nations are on track to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas as can be burned in 2030 while restricting rise in the global temperature to 1.5C, analysis shows

The report is the first to compare countries’ stated plans for fossil fuel extraction with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which is to keep global heating well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and to aim for 1.5C.

Scientists have warned that even the difference between 1.5C and 2C of heating will expose hundreds of millions of people to significantly higher risks of extreme heatwaves, drought, floods and poverty.

“These companies were not bringing the investment that was expected, particularly to infrastructure,” Badstuber says. “To me, this is all leading up to a realisation that, actually, you need a large amount of capital investment in the system. That’s what TfL got, and that’s what TfL needed – and to me that’s what any large system needs.

Crucially, central government also committed to new funding.

Nearly two-thirds of all trips in London are now made on foot, bicycle or public transit. The goal is to increase that “modal share” to 80% by 2040

But Americans’ disgust should be aimed at governments and institutions, not at one another. Individuals are being asked to decide for themselves what chances they should take, but a century of research on human cognition shows that people are bad at assessing risk in complex situations. During a disease outbreak, vague guidance and ambivalent behavioral norms will lead to thoroughly flawed thinking. If a business is open but you would be foolish to visit it, that is a failure of leadership.

uddenly the burden is on individuals to engage in some of the most frustrating and confounding cost-benefit analyses of their life. Pandemic decision making implicates at least two complex cognitive tasks: moral reasoning and risk evaluation.

The cognitive-science canon is replete with uncanny predictions relevant to the coronavirus era.

The prospect that Trump will lose but try to remain in office has spooked analysts. The question on their mind is how many Americans would go along with such a blatant attack on democratic institutions.

A clear majority of Americans, including six out of every 10 Republicans, said they were confident that “votes for president in November will be counted fairly, accurately and securely.” But, crucially, confidence in the election is strongly conditional on its outcome.

Only one in three Americans who plan to vote for Trump said that if Joe Biden is declared the victor, that would be “because he receives more votes than Donald Trump.” More than two in five said it would be “because voting systems are rigged and voter fraud is committed.”

tightening presidential

crucial swing state

often divided almost exactly in half

Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed

“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.

President Trump’s campaign has far less money than advisers had once anticipated for the final stretch of the presidential election, as rosy revenue projections failed to materialize, leaving aides scrambling to address a severe financial disadvantage against Joseph R. Biden Jr. at the race’s most crucial juncture.

To close the budgetary shortfall, Mr. Trump has slashed millions of dollars in previously reserved television ads and detoured from the battleground states that will decide the election for a stop in California last weekend to refill his campaign coffers.

Mr. Trump’s TV ad spending has shrunk by $23 million since Sept. 20. In that same time period, Mr. Biden has expanded his reservations by $99 million.

The impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump largely focused on his actions leading up to the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. But there was a crucial period that day of nearly five hours — between the end of Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and a final tweet telling his followers to remember the day forever — that remains critical to his state of mind.

Mr. Trump’s intent to incite the mob and of his dereliction to stop the violence, even when he knew that the life of Vice President Mike Pence was in danger.

At 2:12 p.m., the same moment that the mob breached the building itself, Mr. Pence — who had defied the president by saying he planned to certify Mr. Biden’s victory — was rushed off the Senate floor. A minute later, the Senate session was recessed. Two minutes after that, at 2:15 p.m., groups of rioters began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”

For Trump, Fox News has two functions: With some exceptions, it largely functions as his “shameless propaganda outlet,” as Margaret Sullivan put it, aggressively inflating his successes and faithfully pushing his messages. When Fox occasionally departs from this role, Trump rages at it as a form of deep betrayal.

Yet for precisely this reason, Fox also functions as a kind of security blanket: It persuades Trump that he’s succeeding, which provides an effective reality distortion field against outside criticism.

Trump repeatedly failed to act to tame the spread, even though that would have helped him politically, due to a pathological refusal to admit earlier error and “overly rosy assessments and data" from Fox News:Another self-imposed hurdle for Trump has been his reliance on a positive feedback loop. Rather than sit for briefings by infectious-disease director Anthony S. Fauci and other medical experts, the president consumes much of his information about the virus from Fox News Channel and other conservative media sources, where his on-air boosters put a positive spin on developments.

What Mr. Trump’s stunning win and Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s extraordinary comeback in the 2020 primaries both demonstrate, they say, is the crucial importance of momentum-changing events, the mood of the electorate and the ingrained perceptions of the candidates. Tactics like well-produced campaign ads, high-profile endorsements and clever one-liners at debates often matter far less, as Mrs. Clinton found.

To call Mr. Trump’s political organization four years ago bare-bones would be an insult to other bare-bones campaigns. Mr. Trump cycled through campaign managers, ran his campaign from a spare floor in Trump Tower and approached social media like a guy watching TV at the end of a bar. But it all proved less important than the structural factors that shaped the 2016 election and ultimately favored him.

First, Mr. Trump ran in a crowded and fragmented Republican field and found a strong plurality of voters for his racial grievances and attacks on the political establishment.

The Pence article cheerily declared that “cases have stabilized,” with the daily average number of new cases only 20,000. Even that figure, as it happens, was five times the number in the European Union, which has a third more people than America does.

at this point Arizona, with seven million people, is reporting around as many new cases each day as the whole E.U., with 446 million people.

economists warned that while relaxing social distancing would lead to a brief period of job growth, these gains would be short-lived, that premature reopening would be self-defeating even in economic terms. They were also right.

The West Wing was mostly empty, cleared of aides who were sick or told to work from home, and staff in the White House residence were in full personal protective equipment.

Aides said the president’s voice was stronger after his return from the hospital Monday night, but at times he still sounded as if he was trying to catch air.

Four more White House officials tested positive, including Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, bringing to 14 the number of people carrying the virus at the White House or in the president’s close circle.

Protest is the foundational variable of the American experiment. Every pivot point in the history of our country is rooted in it.

Those unfamiliar with “no justice, no peace,” the oft-used mantra of the protest movement that arose in 2020, should first look to the lineage and legacy of nonviolent protest in the United States. Many forget that, in his later career, Dr. King wrestled deeply with the possibility of violence within emergent resistance movements.

Black and brown people have always protested for comprehensive systemic change and freedom for all Americans, even when they’ve been denied freedom themselves.

no fever, only slightly elevated blood pressure and a blood oxygen level in the healthy range.

But when reporters asked him for results of Mr. Trump’s chest X-rays and lung scans — crucial measures of how severely the president has been sickened by Covid-19 — Dr. Conley refused to answer, citing a federal law that restricts what doctors can share about patients.

it was premature to declare victory over an unpredictable, poorly understood virus that has killed more than 210,000 people in the United States.