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But the Europeans say they will discuss the Trump administration’s concerns only after the bloc receives a permanent, unconditional exemption from the tariffs. They regard the tariffs as illegal under global rules.“We will not negotiate under threat,” the commission said in the statement Tuesday.

“There is huge frustration with the way the administration is doing business,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director in London for Eurasia Group, a consultancy.

Economists say the biggest danger to the global economy is not so much the tariffs as the insecurity they sow among business managers trying to plan where to buy or sell products that contain steel or aluminum. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Big metals consumers like auto manufacturers and construction firms have been stockpiling supplies, girding for a disruptive trade war. “As a result, there is a visible surge in steel prices in the U.S., which negatively affects manufacturing and many other sectors,” said Max Finne, assistant professor of operations management at the University of Warwick in Britain.Mr. Trump’s provocative approach has fueled anxiety in Europe that the long-awaited economic recovery is losing momentum. The threat of a trade war adds to a list of risks that are making businesses less willing to invest and create jobs, including the imminent end of European Central Bank stimulus, Britain’s planned exit from the bloc and political deadlock in Italy.

The European Union regards the planned tariffs on steel and aluminum as a violation of international treaties and has already complained to the World Trade Organization, normally the arbiter of trade disputes. The complaint lays the groundwork for the bloc to impose retaliatory tariffs on a long list of American products — including bluejeans, bourbon and Harley-Davidson motorcycles — as early as mid-June.

The Obama administration pursued such an agreement for years, but it was largely moribund even before Mr. Trump took office, in part because of popular opposition in Germany.

Europe would be happy to cooperate with the United States to press China on issues such as protection of intellectual property. But in the current climate it seems unlikely that the European Union and United States are capable of joining forces.“The way Trump is going about it may not be the most effective, but he’s put it on the agenda. There is some sympathy for that,” Mr. Rahman said. “But it’s very difficult. The process seems completely broken.”

they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.

The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.

“Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”

alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.

What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.

Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research

While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.

“Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since

Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,

In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?

But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.

Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”

which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”

these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.

in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.

Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.

It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’

ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.

objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”

The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.

Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it

While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”

These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.

For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations

the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?

But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.

enewable power last year surged to 36 percent of the country's electricity use, according to the Agora Energiewende think tank. But while renewables grew in the power sector, they didn't make major strides in transport or heating, so they account for just over 13 percent of energy use.

Souring opinions on diesel engines further weigh on emissions. Diesel cars emit less greenhouse gases than those powered by gasoline, which is why the country's politicians and car industry saw diesel as a panacea to deal with global warming.

For years Germany was one of the world's energy transformation leaders. It was German cash that helped finance the technology revolution that has turned solar and wind into viable technologies that now generate increasingly cheap power

An average four-person household has to pay more than double for power in 2017 compared to 2000,"

The powerful German business lobby BDI is also unhappy, saying in a recent report that high electricity costs, delays in boosting the energy efficiency of buildings, and a “lack of vision” on transport are "worrying German industry.”

Greenhouse gas emissions in Germany have stagnated for three years in a row, rather than falling. That's largely to do with rising pollution caused by transportation, as well as a failure to reduce emissions in the buildings sector as energy consumption went up thanks to the economic recovery.

Germany is also set to fall short of its national climate target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020. The new coalition government effectively abandoned that goal, instead focusing on meeting its 2030 target of reducing emissions by 55 percent. Germany is also expected to miss its emissions reduction target for sectors such as transport and buildings.

But the Dieselgate scandal hammered the reputation of diesel cars, and there is growing concern about the smog that diesel generates. As cities consider banning older diesel cars, sales have fallen off a cliff. The share of diesel-fueled passenger cars in Germany was 39 percent last year, down from about 46 percent in 2016, 

"Germany missed bringing electric cars on to roads,

"In order to have an energy transition, you have to build up renewable energies, but then you also have to reduce coal, step-by-step,” Kemfert said. "That happened too late in Germany.

A lot of Germany's renewable power, especially powerful offshore wind, is generated in the north of the country. The difficulty is getting that electricity to industrial regions in the south like Bavaria.

For years Germany annoyed neighbors like the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland by sending surges of electricity through their networks. They've now taken short-term measures to reduce the disruptions until the necessary transmission links are built.

domestic opposition is making it difficult for Germany to build its own north-south and other new interconnectors. The project has faced delays as people battle the idea of ugly high-voltage power lines besmirching pretty landscapes. Now much of the interconnector is due to run underground, ramping up costs.

Volkswagen's recent pledge to spend €20 billion on battery contracts and to begin making electric cars at 16 sites worldwide shows the car industry is taking steps to shift its business model — which could help secure a long-term drop in Germany's transport emissions.

Proponents of a swift coal exit, however, shouldn't hold their breath. Altmaier also said that ending coal power won't "happen suddenly and abruptly, but step-by-step over several decades."

If the worst-case scenario comes true, are there still things we can do to minimise the pandemic’s impact?Absolutely. We can mobilise more health officials and keep engaging the public, implementing sensible travel controls and ensuring that frontline health workers have ready access to diagnostic tests and are vigilant – that they don’t send anyone who may have been exposed home without testing them, for example

Was an epidemic like that of Covid-19 inevitable?From a biological standpoint an outbreak of a novel pathogen was inevitable, but this one happened in the worst place at the worst time. Wuhan is a big city and a crossroads,

is in people’s minds – even though the risk of another one is real. I’ve written about a hypothetical situation in which a new and dangerous pathogen emerges, a vaccine is developed, and you still get a pandemic, because large numbers of millennials refuse the vaccine. In the US, 20% of millennials believe that vaccines cause autism.

You have said that time and trust are critical to good epidemic management. What do you mean?The delay between the frontline health workers noticing something unusual, in the form of an emerging disease, and that information travelling up the line to central decision-makers is critical. To illustrate that, a 2018 simulation that the Gates Foundation conducted of a flu pandemic estimated that there would be 28,000 after one month, 10 million after three months, and 33 million after six months. The virus used in that simulation was more contagious and deadly than Covid-19 – though they are both respiratory viruses – but the example shows how all epidemics grow exponentially. So if you can catch an epidemic in the first few weeks, it makes all the difference.

The problem is bad information. As my students often remind me, news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free.

y (GHS) Index – that scores countries on six dimensions: prevention, detection, response, health system, risk environment and compliance with international standards. No country scores perfectly on all six. China has detected and responded to this epidemic pretty well, though its health system is now stretched beyond capacity, but it is weak on prevention

How well is the US prepared?The US ranks high on the GHS index, but is still unprepared for a severe pandemic, should one happen. Malfunctioning coronavirus tests have frustrated public health labs and delayed outbreak monitoring. Supplies of masks, suits and other protective material for health workers are running low in the midst of a moderately severe flu season.

Since the creation of a much-needed public health emergency preparedness fund in the aftermath of 9/11, its budget and the public health functions it supports have been steadily reduced. This is the mentality that left the world vulnerable to the devastating 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa – that is, close the fire department and cancel the fire insurance as nobody’s house or factory has burned down lately. It’s time we learned that the bugs never stop mutating and crossing over to humans.

What exactly should we be doing faster?Fewer than one in three countries are close to being prepared to confront an epidemic, which leaves the vast majority of the world’s population vulnerable.

No new voters are permitted to join the caucus after the first alignment. But in at least 70 precincts, more than 4 percent of the total, there are more tabulated total votes on final alignment than on first alignment.

The Iowa Democratic Party has corrected some errors, but the errors became far more frequent on Wednesday as the count dragged on.

The Iowa Democratic Party quickly corrected these errors, and they are not included in our overall count of discrepancies in more than 100 precincts. The party has not yet addressed other irregularities reported to it or circulating on social media. In another case, The Times alerted the party to an error at 6 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday that remained in the data released several hours later.

Even if the appropriate candidate is deemed the winner, the irregularities in the results are likely to do little to restore public confidence in the Iowa caucuses.

to have responded promptly and sufficiently would have meant jettisoning an entire structure of political thought developed in these countries over the past half century.

Politics is best understood as public relations for particular interests. The interests come first; politics is the means by which they are justified and promoted

On the left, the dominant interest groups can be very large – everyone who uses public services, for instance

On the right they tend to be much smaller. In the US, the UK and Australia, they are very small indeed: mostly multimillionaires and a very particular group of companies: those whose profits depend on the cavalier treatment of people and planet

I’ve seen how the tobacco companies covertly funded an infrastructure of persuasion to deny the impacts of smoking. This infrastructure was then used, often by the same professional lobbyists, to pour doubt on climate science and attack researchers and environmental campaigners.

these companies funded rightwing thinktanks and university professors to launch attacks on public health policy in general and create a new narrative of risk, tested on focus groups and honed in the media

They reframed responsible government as the “nanny state”, the “health police” and “elf ’n’ safety zealots”. They dismissed scientific findings and predictions as “unfounded fears”, “risk aversion” and “scaremongering”.

Public protections were recast as “red tape”, “interference” and “state control”. Government itself was presented as a mortal threat to our freedom.

The groups these corporations helped to fund – thinktanks and policy units, lobbyists and political action committees – were then used by other interests: private health companies hoping to break up the NHS, pesticide manufacturers seeking to strike down regulatory controls, junk food manufacturers resisting advertising restrictions, billionaires seeking to avoid tax

Between them, these groups refined the justifying ideology for fragmenting and privatising public services, shrinking the state and crippling its ability to govern.

Now, in these three nations, this infrastructure is the government. No 10 Downing Street has been filled with people from groups strongly associated with attacks on regulation and state interventio

Modern politics is impossible to understand without grasping the pollution paradox. The greater the risk to public health and wellbeing a company presents, the more money it must spend on politics – to ensure it isn’t regulated out of existence. Political spending comes to be dominated by the dirtiest companies

The theory on which this form of government is founded can seem plausible and logically consistent. Then reality hits, and we find ourselves in the worst place from which to respond to crisis, with governments that have an ingrained disregard for public safety and a reflexive resort to denial

It is what we see today, as the Trump, Johnson and Morrison governments flounder in the face of this pandemic. They are called upon to govern, but they know only that government is the enemy.

Only days after dismissing the coronavirus threat as a distraction, he's now assumed the title of a resolute war time president fighting an "invisible enemy" while promising to rally the nation behind him in pursuit of "total victory."

“I am disappointed,” Mori said. “But to be on course with a certain direction is a sigh of relief.” He added: “This could be a good pretext for us to go forward and we can prepare for an even better Olympic and Paralympic Games than what we have planned for this year.”That could include adjusting the dates to avoid the hottest weeks of the summer, a criticism Olympic organizers faced before the coronavirus threat developed into a pandemic.

Bach said the situation became untenable in recent days as the World Health Organization detailed the acceleration of the virus in Africa for Olympic leaders. That forced the I.O.C. to shift its focus from whether Japan could be safe at the start of the Games to what was happening immediately in various countries and continents.

The decision quickly gained the support of national Olympic committees from around the world. In a statement, Andy Anson, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, said a postponement was the only decision his organization could support. “It would have been unthinkable for us to continue to prepare for an Olympic Games at a time the nation and the world no less is enduring great hardship,” Anson said.

At a time when Japan’s economy is already stumbling, the delay of the Olympics could deal a serious blow. In a report early this month, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. projected that a cancellation of the Games would erase 1.4 percent of Japan’s economic output.Advertisement

Until now, the Olympics had not been canceled or postponed since World War II. Tokyo was supposed to host the Summer Games in 1940 but had to bow out after it went to war with China. The Games were then awarded to Helsinki, but were canceled after the outbreak of the war in Europe. Helsinki ultimately hosted the 1952 Summer Games, and Tokyo held them in 1964.

US coal companies had already lost 90% of their value, he noted, but banks were also at risk. “Just like in any other major structural change, those banks overexposed to the sunset sectors will suffer accordingly,” he told the Guardian.

“Some [assets] will go up, many will go down. The question is whether the transition is smooth or is it something that is delayed and then happens very abruptly. That is an open question,” he said. “The longer the adjustment is delayed in the real economy, the greater the risk that there is a sharp adjustment.”

Far from damaging the global economy, climate action bolsters economic growth, according to Carney. “There is a need for [action] to achieve net zero emissions, but actually it comes at a time when there is a need for a big increase in investment globally to accelerate the pace of global growth, to help get global interest rates up, to get us out of this low-growth, low-interest-rate trap we are in.”

“Certainly the UK financial system is one of the most sophisticated at managing this risk. The UK can extend that lead, for the good of the UK, for the good of the world,” he said. “A number of the industrial solutions draw on the strengths of UK innovation, from the use of artificial intelligence in energy systems through to potentially advanced materials like graphene. There is a big upside for the UK economy.”

Reacting to the Guardian’s revelations about fossil fuel companies, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK Labour party, said: “Labour will delist companies that fail to meet environmental criteria from the [London Stock Exchange], and reform the finance sector to make it part of the solution to climate change instead of lending to companies that are part of the problem.”

“I left the EPA because of the proposals to roll back legislation that will have direct impacts on local communities,” he said. “Ten months in, they have yet to move forward any action to help communities be healthier. People in Puerto Rico are drinking toxic water. Unfortunately, so far, I’ve been proved right in my decision to leave. I wanted them to prove me wrong.”

The Trump administration has targeted dozens of regulations it says have stymied economic growth. It has moved to axe an Obama-era plan to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants, delayed new standards to cut toxic fumes from vehicles and dropped a proposed ban on a pesticide linked to developmental delays in children.

But Ali said there was little evidence the agency is focused on vulnerable communities, claiming it is a “particular slap in the face” that the EPA wants to cut funding for anti-lead programs given that the largely black city of Flint, Michigan, continues to suffer from lead-tainted water, three years after the scandal was exposed.

“I became an environmentalist, I have to be candid with you, not because of the effects of global warming some time in the future,” said Booker, a former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, at a time when the city was experiencing its own problems with lead contamination of drinking water. “I became an environmentalist because I saw horrific examples of environmental injustice and how it was hurting my community in every single way.”

One in three Latinos live in areas that violate federal standards for ozone, a pollutant that causes smog and is linked to an array of health problems. The thousands of abandoned mines that dot the western US have left a legacy of soil and water contamination that blights native American tribes, such as the Navajo nation.

Nearly seven in 10 African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant, compared with 56% of whites. Once the coal is burned, its ash, which can damage the nervous system and cause cancers if ingested or inhaled, is dumped in about 1,400 sites around the US – 70% of which are situated in low-income communities.

Did they want the hookup culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never.

“I would never come down on the hookup culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.”

at this university, and even more so at other, more prestigious universities they studied, they found the opposite: women who were managing their romantic lives like savvy headhunters. “The ambitious women calculate that having a relationship would be like a four-credit class, and they don’t always have time for it, so instead they opt for a lighter hookup,”

The sexual culture may be more coarse these days, but young women are more than adequately equipped to handle it, because unlike the women in earlier ages, they have more-important things on their minds, such as good grades and intern­ships and job interviews and a financial future of their own.

The most patient and thorough research about the hookup culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relation­ships that don’t get in the way of future success.

what emerged from four years of research was the sense that hooking up was part of a larger romantic strategy, part of what Armstrong came to think of as a “sexual career.” For an upwardly mobile, ambitious young woman, hookups were a way to dip into relationships without disrupting her self-development or schoolwork. Hookups functioned as a “delay tactic,” Armstrong writes, because the immediate priority, for the privileged women at least, was setting themselves up for a career.

The women still had to deal with the old-fashioned burden of protecting their personal reputations, but in the long view, what they really wanted to protect was their future professional reputations. “Rather than struggling to get into relationships,” Armstrong reported, women “had to work to avoid them.”

Many did not want a relationship to steal time away from their friendships or studying.

Most of the women considered success stories by their dormmates had a revelation and revised their plan, setting themselves on what was universally considered the path to success. “Now I’m like, I don’t even need to be getting married yet [or] have kids,” one of the less privileged women told the researchers in her senior year.

One of the great crime stories of the past 20 years, meanwhile, is the dramatic decline of rape and sexual assault. Between 1993 and 2008, the rate of those crimes against females dropped by 70 percent nationally.

The hookup culture opened her horizons. She could study and work and date, and live on temporary intimacy. She could find her way to professional success, and then get married.

Does this mean that in the interim years, women are living a depraved, libertine existence, contributing to the breakdown of social order? Hardly. In fact, women have vastly more control over their actions and appetites than we have been led to believe

You could even say that what defines this era is an unusual amount of sexual control and planning

She is up to about 20,000 responses—the largest sample to date. In her survey, college seniors report an average of 7.9 hookups over four years, but a median of only five. (“Hookups” do not necessarily involve sex; students are instructed to use whatever definition their friends use.)

Researchers guess that about a quarter of college kids skip out on the hookup culture altogether, while a similar number participate with gusto—about 10 hookups or more (the lax­titutes?).

For the majority in the middle, the hookup culture is a place to visit freshman year, or whenever you feel like it, or after you’ve been through a breakup

Most important, hookups haven’t wrecked the capacity for intimacy. In England’s survey, 74 percent of women and about an equal number of men say they’ve had a relationship in college that lasted at least six months.

Equal numbers of men and women—about half—report to England that they enjoyed their latest hookup “very much.”

About 66 percent of women say they wanted their most recent hookup to turn into something more, but 58 percent of men say the same—not a vast difference

Almost all of the college women Armstrong and Hamilton interviewed assumed they would get married, and were looking forward to it. In England’s survey, about 90 percent of the college kids, male and female, have said they want to get married.

Zoom out, and you see that for most women, the hookup culture is like an island they visit, mostly during their college years and even then only when they are bored or experimenting or don’t know any better. But it is not a place where they drown.

We’ve landed in an era that has produced a new breed of female sexual creature, one who acknowledges the eternal vulnerability of women but, rather than cave in or trap herself in the bell jar, instead looks that vulnerability square in the face and then manipulates it in unexpected, and sometimes hilarious, ways

The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself. The only option is what Hannah’s friends always tell her—stop doing what feels awful, and figure out what doesn’t.

Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them.

The statement by the former president came shortly before President Joe Biden publicly commented on the shooting

The attack, which came days after another shooting rampage in Georgia that left eight dead, has renewed calls from lawmakers for federal gun control reform. close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-row bx-row-image bx-row-image-d

During his time in the White House, Obama urged Congress to take up gun control legislation following several mass shootings around the country, though no significant congressional action was ever taken.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday called the shooting "absolutely tragic," but ignored a question about the future of gun control during a swearing-in ceremony for William Burns as CIA director.

Earlier this month, the House passed H.R. 8 that would expand background checks on all commercial gun sales and H.R. 1146 to try and close what's known as the "Charleston Loophole," which allows some firearms to be transferred by licensed gun dealers before the required background checks are completed.

“Social Security staff is working day and night with Treasury and IRS representatives to ensure that the electronic file of Social Security and SSI recipients is complete, accurate, and ready to be used to issue payments,” the spokesperson said. 

Most Americans receive the payments based on their tax returns, but people who don’t owe federal income taxes aren’t required to file returns. In the previous two rounds of payments, the IRS used payment information on file with Social Security to send checks to retirement or disability beneficiaries who are non-filers. 

Herold asked for a three-month delay before a preliminary hearing, noting the need to assess her client as well as the pending arrival of evidence and records from the ongoing investigation into the shooting — a discovery process she predicted will be "voluminous."

District Judge Thomas Mulvahill agreed to Herold's request after Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty noted that his office will file additional charges against Alissa "in the next couple weeks." While Dougherty did not object to the delay for a mental health assessment, he asked for a shorter time frame, of a month and a half.

The judge did not set a bond for the suspect, meaning he will stay in jail as the case moves to the next steps. Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse after the hearing, Dougherty was asked if he believes a "fair" jury can be convened in Boulder.

Explaining the attempted murder charge Alissa is facing, the prosecutor said the charge refers to a police officer whom the suspect fired at but did not injure. Dougherty also noted that in Colorado, homicide cases commonly take at least a year to be tried to completion.

The case will be assigned to Chief Judge Ingrid Bakke; rather than set a date for the next hearing in the case, Mulvahill told the attorneys from both sides to be in touch with Bakke about the next proceeding.

The suspect is from Arvada, a suburb between Denver and Boulder. Before this week, Alissa had a criminal record that included a guilty plea to a misdemeanor assault charge in 2018. He paid a fine to resolve that case, according to court records.

Alissa surrendered to police after suffering a gunshot wound to his leg. That injury, a "through-and-through" wound, was treated at a hospital before Alissa was taken to the Boulder County Jail. He was taken into custody after removing most of his clothing – jeans, a long-sleeve shirt and a tactical vest – and walking backward toward police, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Along with Alissa's clothes, police recovered "a rifle (possible AR-15)" and a semiautomatic handgun, the court document states.The arrest warrant affidavit for Alissa said he purchased a gun less than a week before the King Soopers shooting, citing official databases that show he bought a Ruger AR-556 on March 16.

The weapon used in the shooting is legally classified as a "pistol" in the U.S., but many people would likely consider it to be a rifle — and the affidavit repeatedly refers to it as one. The gun has the same lower receiver, the shell-like piece that houses the trigger, as AR-15 rifles that have been used in many other mass shootings in the United States.

The proposed change was meant to reflect the growing importance of U.S. exports in global energy markets.

The changes also were due to affect contracts known as cash BFOE, which reflect the forward price of crude that doesn’t yet have a specific loading date. Making sellers responsible for freight costs in the cash BFOE market would have transformed a pillar of the North Sea’s vast and complex crude-oil market, analysts said.

The proposed changes initially sparked a big rise in the price of swaps that traders use to hedge positions in the physical market, as they sought to factor in the price of freight.

Platts signaled Wednesday that West Texas Intermediate will still be added to its Brent calculations at some point in the future.

At the time, Watson was investigating the secretary of state's office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's audit of more than 15,000 signatures in Cobb County, outside Atlanta. Results of the audit found no evidence of fraudulent mail-in ballots and Biden was declared winner of Georgia in the election.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campai

"I hope you are going back two years as opposed to checking one against the other," Trump can be heard saying on the call. "Because that would just be a signature check that didn't mean anything."

"But if you go back two years, and if you can get to Fulton, you are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable," the then-President said. "The dishonesty that we've heard from. But Fulton is the mother lode."

Investigators in both probes are interested in Trump's call to Watson, according to sources familiar with the probes.

One is the January phone call where Trump pushed Raffensperger to "find" votes to overturn the election results after his loss to Biden. The other involves the call Trump made on December 23 to Watson.

"If Mr. Raffensperger didn't want to receive calls about the election, he shouldn't have run for secretary of state," Miller said in the statement.

Ship owners and operators have some options, but none of them are particularly good ones. The adage that time is money couldn't be more true in the shipping business. For the vessels already backed up in the canal, if the waterway isn't clear for transit soon, a decision will need to be made about whether to continue waiting or go to Plan B.

To get an idea just what a shortcut could be lost, commodity analysts Kpler said that for a vessel averaging 12 knots (14 mph), Suez to Amsterdam, takes 13 days via the canal. Around the Cape of Good Hope, it takes 41 days.

The situation could become clearer in the next week, Karatzas said, but if the Ever Given looks likely to require a massive operation to break free, shippers will have to make some tough and potentially costly decisions. The same goes for vessels that haven't yet left port, although the cost in time and money for them wouldn't be as great.

Another possible option is to go through the Panama Canal by way of the Pacific. But many of the largest commercial vessels today, such as the 1,300-foot Ever Given, are too big to fit through the Panama Canal.

Jonathan Roach, a container market analyst for Braemar ACM Shipbroking, said in a recent letter to clients that the route via the Cape of Good Hope was the most likely detour, even for vessels that can fit through the Panama Canal.Last year, due to a combination of excess capacity and falling fuel prices, some shippers did just that — opting to go the Africa route to avoid the Suez Canal transit fees.

There is one more possibility, but it too has severe limitations. A shorter route through the Arctic known alternately as the Northeast Passage, or the Northern Sea Route, or NSR, is being touted by Russia.

The number of vessels using the NSR has increased to several hundred each year, thanks in part to global warming that has reduced polar ice. However, traffic there still amounts to a mere fraction of what passes through the Suez.

The Northern Sea Route is still not considered practical by most shipping companies. For example, in 2018, Maersk, the world's largest container line, sent one of its ships via the NSR, but the company emphasized it doesn't see the route "as an alternative to our usual routes" and that the voyage was merely "a trial to explore an unknown route for container shipping and to collect scientific data."

Lastly, it's worth noting that a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal is not unprecedented. The waterway was closed for eight years, beginning in 1967, after war broke out between Egypt and Israel. As a result, ships were forced to divert around the tip of Africa.

Global supply chains, already significantly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, could be further stressed by a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal, said Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy with the National Retail Federation.

The greatest impact would be felt in the European market, which relies most on transfers through the canal, but given the interconnected nature of global manufacturing and commerce, there's likely also to be a knock-on effect for the United States.

Bisceglie said it's time for companies to consider "having more disparate [supply hubs] instead of having all our eggs on one cargo ship." Maersk told NPR on Friday that it was too early to commit to rerouting any of its massive global container fleet. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company said in a statement, that while "out of our control, we apologize for the inconvenience this incident may cause to your business and for critical shipments."

Like much else about the situation, it depends on how long it goes on. A weeklong delay for a few hundred ships at the Suez might have only a negligible impact for consumers, but a prolonged delay could increase the cost of shipping, complicate manufacturing and ultimately drive up prices.

That's $80,000 a day in fuel and an extra 10 days travel time — both to and from Asia. "So, you're looking at the best part of a million dollars with your operating costs. So it's a million dollars out and a million dollars back," he said.

In his letter to clients, Roach also noted problems at the Suez Canal could disrupt the flow of containers. A trade imbalance between Europe and Asia means that filled containers going west return mostly empty to ports in the east to be refilled. "If empty stocks dwindle in Asia, there is the short-term possibility of an increase" in prices, Roach wrote.

Overall, though, Joanna Konings, a senior economist at ING, told Bloomberg that she's "relatively sanguine" about the impact on trade. But she doesn't rule out "an inflationary shock that could come right to the consumer."

Shipping rates for petroleum products have nearly doubled since the Ever Given's grounding on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Although oil prices may also be feeling some upward pressure in the wake of the Ever Given incident, their increase so far has been blunted by news of further COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe that are likely to continue to depress demand.