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ederal health officials sounded the alarm Friday about a fast spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that is projected to become the dominant source of infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another wrenching surge of cases and deaths.

Only 76 cases of the variant have been identified so far in the U.S., but the actual number is believed to be higher and is expected to spiral upward in the next few weeks, officials said.

But spikes in cases threaten to cripple already overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes in many parts of the country. Some are at or near capacity. Others have faced troubling rates of infection among their staff, causing shortages and increasing patient loads.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration defended in federal court the Willow project, a huge oil drilling operation proposed on Alaska’s North Slope that was approved by the Trump administration and is being fought by environmentalists. Weeks earlier, it backed former President Donald J. Trump’s decision to grant oil and gas leases on federal land in Wyoming. Also this month, it declined to act when it had an opportunity to stop crude oil from continuing to flow through the bitterly contested, 2,700-mile Dakota Access pipeline, which lacks a federal permit.

The three decisions suggest the jagged road that Mr. Biden is following as he tries to balance his climate agenda against practical and political pressures.

As important, Mr. Biden is trying to avoid alienating a handful of moderate Republicans and Democrats from oil, gas and coal states who will decide the fate of his legislative agenda in Congress. Among them is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska for whom the Willow project is a top priority and who grilled Deb Haaland about it during Ms. Haaland’s confirmation hearing for interior secretary in February.Editors’ PicksSummertime … and the Sloganeering Is a Little AwkwardThe Murky World of Private Spies and the Damage They May Be DoingThey’ve Given $6 Million to the Arts. No One Knew Them, Until Now.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

“This is not China, this is United States of America, and we are a free country.”

Trump deserved to be deplatformed

It’s true that Trump can, any time he wants, hold a press conference or call into Fox News. But stripping him of access to social media tools available to most other people on earth has diminished him in a way that both impeachment and electoral defeat so far have not.Editors’ PicksJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sFor Pro Athlete Leading Social Justice Push, a Victory and UncertaintyWith ‘I Hate Men,’ a French Feminist Touches a NerveAdvertisementContinue reading the main story

Suzanne Muscara, 38, sent a threatening letter to the senator’s home in 2018 after becoming upset with her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice, the authorities said.

The woman, Suzanne Muscara, 38, of Burlington, Maine, who was convicted during a daylong trial in November of mailing a threatening communication, will also have to complete three years of supervised release after finishing her prison term, Judge Lance E. Walker of U.S. District Court in Maine ruled.

Ms. Collins depicting her as a stick figure with X’s for eyes. The word “AnthRAX!!!” and “HA HA HA!!!” were also written on the letter. (The Postal Service had been monitoring mail to the senator because of a piece of threatening mail that had been received at her home on Oct. 15.)

PLANO, Texas — Fighting for his political survival from the second floor of his campaign bus last week, Senator John Cornyn warned a small crowd of supporters that his party’s long-held dominance in this historically ruby-red state was at risk.

Asked whether Mr. Trump, the man who redefined Republicanism, was an asset to Mr. Cornyn’s re-election effort, the senator was suddenly short on words.“Absolutely,” he said, stone-faced.

Four years ago, Mr. Trump mounted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, winning the support of the party’s base with a message that shredded mainstream conservative ideology on issues like fiscal responsibility, foreign policy and trade.

he Bizarre 2020 Economy

17 months for employment to return to full health.

hree concepts: the level at which the economy is functioning, how fast it is improving, and whether that speed is accelerating or decelerating.

I learned that the Air Quality Index, which is used all over the world, goes from 1 to 500, with 1 being Vermont and 500 being Hades.

Here’s how Deb characterized the AQI rankings, in layman’s terms:Advertisement 1 to 50: “Good,” according to the AQI. On such days in Beijing, you look at the sky with an appreciation you’ve never had before. Life is good. 51 to 100: “Moderate.” The sky still looks OK, but stepping outside makes your eyes water. Something is a little off.

101 to 150: “Unhealthy for sensitive groups.” There’s a faint smell in the air. You find yourself sneezing more than usual. There’s gunk in your nose. You get ticked off easily. 151 to 200: “Unhealthy.” You step outside and find a metallic taste in your mouth. Buildings 50 feet away appear in a haze. You clear your throat a lot, as if you’ve been laughing. You’re not laughing.

Scientists in Iceland have produced an unprecedented snapshot of a nation’s genetic makeup, discovering a host of previously unknown gene mutations that may play roles in ailments as diverse as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and gallstones.

Decode, an Icelandic genetics firm owned by Amgen, described sequencing the genomes — the complete DNA — of 2,636 Icelanders, the largest collection ever analyzed in a single human population.

With this trove of genetic information, the scientists were able to accurately infer the genomes of more than 100,000 other Icelanders, or almost a third of the entire country

Should Biden Cancel Student Debt?Economics offers only part of the answer. The rest depends on whether you think higher education is an investment or a public good.

Whenever I think about student loan debt, one of the first things I think about — besides my own — is a 2018 essay by my colleague M.H. Miller. As one of the 45 million Americans who collectively owe $1.71 trillion for student loans, Mr. Miller wrote about what it is like to have debt — more than $100,000 worth in his case — become the organizing principle of your life, to be incapacitated by it, suspended, at age 30, “in a state of perpetual childishness.”

The economic injustice argument tends to invite a lot of debate about how best to tailor cancellation to those who are suffering most from the crisis, which isn’t always the same thing as who has the largest student loan balance. That’s because student debt, in dollar terms, is concentrated among people who make more money and tend to be much better able to make their monthly payments than borrowers who owe relatively small amounts.Here’s a chart from Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project that shows the spread:Editors’ PicksWhere Is Hollywood When Broadway Needs It?75 Artists, 7 Questions, One

Candidate Kennedy’s purpose was simply to express sympathy to Coretta Scott King over her husband’s plight. Many of his aides opposed the call as likely to lose votes in the South. But King was released from jail shortly afterwards, and reports of Kennedy’s concern energized African-Americans. Many historians feel it shifted crucial votes in Northern states away from Richard Nixon to give JFK his razor-thin victory.

They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences.Early in his administration, President Kennedy did not want to be seen as too eager to press for such moves as equal housing and voting protection for minorities, even though he saw such changes as inevitable. King was not invited to his inauguration or to an initial meeting of civil rights figures in the Oval Office

In June 1963, Kennedy unveiled sweeping civil rights legislation. Among other things, it promised the right to vote to all citizens with a grade-school education, and eliminated legal discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants.Kennedy remained hesitant to embrace the nation’s most prominent civil rights figure, however. In part this was due to allegations that a key King aide had communist ties, as well as the FBI’s notorious surveillance of King, which produced evidence of womanizing.The FBI’s file on King’s sex life was dauntingly thick, Berl L. Bernhard, staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights from 1958 to 1963, said in an oral history at the Kennedy Library.“I do think the president was aware of it, and I know [darn] well some people in the administration were aware of it,” Mr. Bernhard said.Kennedy himself had numerous affairs, of course. It’s unknown how he felt about the juxtaposition of his own recklessness with the King allegations.In the summer of 1963 the administration was worried about the upcoming March on Washington to highlight civil rights. Unable to stop the planning, the White House recruited white union and labor groups to participate, to counter criticism that whites were not interested in sweeping civil rights changes.

To the uninitiated, the Twitter message looks utterly banal and harmless: an image of a white van parked in a driveway under a flag-draped window, with pretty much the most straightforward description imaginable: "Image from #Rochester."

The subtext of this story is social class.

"Best explanation for my fellow Americans—a Congresswoman from Massachusetts sending a picture from South Carolina of a pickup truck with a shotgun rack sitting in front of a mobile home draped in the confederate (Stars and Bars) flag," one commenter offered. "Maybe add a car up on cinder blocks sitting in the yard."

Last month, some of President Obama’s top intelligence advisers met in Silicon Valley with Apple’s chief, Timothy D. Cook, and other technology leaders in what seemed to be a public rapprochement in their long-running dispute over the encryption safeguards built into their devices.

But behind the scenes, relations were tense, as lawyers for the Obama administration and Apple held closely guarded discussions for over two months about one particularly urgent case: The F.B.I. wanted Apple to help “unlock” an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, but Apple was resisting.

When the talks collapsed, a federal magistrate judge, at the Justice Department’s request, ordered Apple to bypass security functions on the phone.

A deep new study of the American electorate, “Hidden Tribes,” concludes that two out of three Americans are far more practical than that narrative suggests. Most do not see their lives through a political lens, and when they have political views the views are far less rigid than those of the highly politically engaged, ideologically orthodox tribes.

The study, an effort to understand the forces that drive political polarization, surveyed a representative group of 8,000 Americans. The nonpartisan organization that did it, More in Common, paints a picture of a society that is far more disengaged — and despairing over divisions — than it is divided. At its heart is a vast and often overlooked political middle that feels forgotten in the vitrio

It calls that group the Exhausted Majority, a group that represented two-thirds of the survey.

Scientists working with dolphins at a marine park near Paris have attempted to measure how the animals feel about aspects of their lives in captivity.

With colleagues at the University of Paris animal behaviour lab, she designed experiments to decode dolphin behaviour - essentially looking for physical postures that indicate how the animals were feeling.

The lifting of that ban was a huge relief for Birgitta Mercera, who runs the dolphinarium. She told the BBC that allowing the dolphins to breed, to raise their own offspring, was a critical part of what she suggested was a happy - though very different - life from that in the wild.

Ancient Egyptians and their modern counterparts share less in common than you might think.

decoded the genome of ancient Egyptians for the first time, with unexpected results.

preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East, Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans.

Pierre Bourdieu is helpful reading in the age of Trump. He was born in 1930, the son of a small-town postal worker. By the time he died in 2002, he had become perhaps the world’s most influential sociologist within the academy

His great subject was the struggle for power in society, especially cultural and social power. We all possess, he argued, certain forms of social capital. A person might have academic capital (the right degrees from the right schools), linguistic capital (a facility with words), cultural capital (knowledge of cuisine or music or some such) or symbolic capital (awards or markers of prestige). These are all forms of wealth you bring to the social marketplace.

In addition, and more important, we all possess and live within what Bourdieu called a habitus. A habitus is a body of conscious and tacit knowledge of how to travel through the world, which gives rise to mannerisms, tastes, opinions and conversational style

The first time California’s Department of Education published a draft of an ethnic studies “model curriculum” for high school students, in 2019, it managed the neat trick of omitting anti-Semitism while committing it.

There was also an approving mention of a Palestinian singer rapping that Israelis “use the press so they can manufacture” — the old refrain that lying Jews control the media.

One can still quarrel with the curriculum’s tendentiously racialized view of the American-Jewish experience. But at least the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist dog whistles have been taken out and the history of anti-Semitism has been put in.

It has, however, become a central issue for the Army, where fitness levels of recruits have come under greater scrutiny over the past two decades, precisely the same time that women have been seeking entry into elite combat units and advancement in leadership roles

Now, the Army is racing to approve significant changes to its legendary physical fitness test, the first revision since 1980, which will include offering soldiers an alternative to the leg tuck, a flash point for women, especially those who have given birth.At the same time, the new version of the test, which is required twice a year, does away with separate scoring curves based on gender and age. In its earliest rollout among 14,000 soldiers, 65 percent of a small set of women failed the new test, while 10 percent of men did.

The appropriate role of fitness in the modern Army — and the best way to evaluate it — has attracted the scrutiny of Congress, which has ordered the Army to conduct an independent review of its newest fitness test over concerns that it has made it harder for women to succeed.