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"Normally in a presidential election, we have anywhere from 68% to 73% turnout," Rodriguez told NPR. "We're expecting 80% turnout this year based on the voting numbers that have come in."

Among states that are reporting data, voters have requested 87 million mail ballots, according to McDonald, and roughly 41 million ballots have been returned by mail.

Democrats currently hold a roughly 2-to-1 advantage in returned mail-in ballots in states with party registration.

Despite a legacy of low turnout, college students — and young people in general — could be a decisive voting bloc in this election. Already, nearly 5 million Americans, ages 18 to 29, have cast early votes, a far higher number than at this point in 2016.

College students more than doubled their rate of voting between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, according to research from Tufts University.

In the 2016 presidential election, 48% of college students voted. Experts predict that percentage will grow this year. A poll on Monday from Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that 63% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they would "definitely" vote in the election. In 2016, that number was 47%.

The United States has surpassed yet another devastating milestone in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: 250,000 Americans have now died from the disease. That's more than twice the number of U.S. service members killed in World War I.

"Unfortunately, we are entering what I think will be the worst stretch that we have experienced so far," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "We're seeing hot spots all across the country and new highs for the number of cases and hospitalizations."

With cases spiking, more deaths will follow — but advances in medicine in recent months have improved the odds of surviving COVID-19.

The group of Trump campaign officials came carrying cellphone cameras and a determination to help the president’s re-election efforts in Philadelphia. But they were asked to leave the city’s newly opened satellite election offices on Tuesday after being told local election laws did not permit them to monitor voters coming to request and complete absentee ballots.

On social media and right-wing news sites and in the presidential debate on Tuesday night, President Trump and his campaign quickly suggested nefarious intent in the actions of local election officials, with the president claiming during the debate that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and urging his supporters everywhere to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”

The calls for his followers to monitor voting activity are clear. What’s less apparent is how the Trump campaign wants this to play out.

WASHINGTON — The bulk of the Affordable Care Act, the sprawling 2010 health care law that is President Barack Obama’s defining domestic legacy, appeared likely to survive its latest encounter with the Supreme Court in arguments on Tuesday.

“It does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the law in place,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made a similar point. “Congress left the rest of the law intact when it lowered the penalty to zero,” he said.

President Donald Trump has abdicated his leadership role on the pandemic as he pursues his undemocratic quest to overturn the election, but Americans could get the first real glimmer of hope that their lives will return to normal Thursday when a key advisory panel meets to discuss greenlighting the first Covid-19 vaccine.

On Wednesday, the US recorded the highest single day tally of more than 3,000 deaths -- and some communities continue to resist precautionary measures like mask mandates as a vocal few falsely claim that the pandemic does not exist.

Trump answered a question this week about why he wasn't including Biden aides in a vaccine summit by insisting the election still wasn't settled.

With government funding running out Friday night, lawmakers have to release a massive, $1.4 trillion package as soon as Tuesday if it has any chance of passing Congress and keeping agencies from shutting down by the weekend.

struggling Americans could once again be disappointed if there's no agreement and they're forced to wait even longer as lawmakers continue to haggle.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has invited Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to her office for a meeting on Covid and government funding. The meeting is scheduled to occur at 4 p.m. ET.

All three of the booster bandits I spoke with told me that they weren’t worried about taking anything from others who need it by boosting “early,” because the country has so many vaccines that it’s regularly throwing doses out. They have a point: While other countries are still struggling to access and distribute vaccines, the U.S. reportedly wasted at least 12.9 million doses just in June, July, and August. Doran said that vaccine waste “makes me sick,” and that “whoever wants them should have them instead of putting them in the trash.”

the moral dilemma of booster banditry is more complicated than that. For Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at NYU Langone Health, the details of each case matter. “Jumping the line at age 88 is not the same as running in to get a booster at age 33,” he told me. Still, he thinks that in many cases, overabundance really is enough to justify sneaking a booster, and the practice is a personal gamble with your health more than anything else.

Caplan’s right: As my colleague Katherine J. Wu has reported, very early data suggest that extra antibody production spurred by extra doses could cut down on infection and transmission, but by how much—and, more important, for how long—isn’t clear.

Fresh data from Israel is providing encouraging news about the effectiveness of coronavirus boosters in seniors. A study by the Israeli Health Ministry found that a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine provided four times as much protection against infection as two doses in people 60 and older.

The level of protection was five to six times higher against serious illness and hospitalization

Israel approved booster shots for people 60 and older late last month, and lowered the age of eligibility to 40 last week.

Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi was missing a thumb, dressed in a gown with gold fringes and hiding in a lavish home high in the hills of northwest Libya

son of the former Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

Then the Arab Spring came, and Seif instead joined the Qaddafi government’s brutal crackdown on the Libyan uprising. Soon after, he was captured by a rebel group and spent the following years in a kind of cave, cut off from the outside world.

The global death toll from COVID-19 topped 5 million on Monday, less than two years into a crisis that has not only devastated poor countries but also humbled wealthy ones with first-rate health care systems.

Together, the United States, the European Union, Britain and Brazil — all upper-middle- or high-income countries — account for one-eighth of the world’s population but nearly half of all reported deaths. The U.S. alone has recorded over 740,000 lives lost, more than any other nation.

Wealthier nations with longer life expectancies have larger proportions of older people, cancer survivors and nursing home residents, all of whom are especially vulnerable to COVID-19

An Israeli hospital on Monday began a study to test the safety and effectiveness of a fourth dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, as health officials continued to deliberate over rolling out fourth shots for vulnerable people nationwide.

their study was the first of its kind in the world and involved administering an additional shot to 150 medical personnel who had received a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at least four months ago.

The advisory panel acknowledged uncertainty over the effects of Omicron, but pointed to evidence of decreased immunity in people who were among the first to receive a third dose in August. Israeli data showed a doubling of the rate of infection from the Delta variant, then dominant, among the 60-plus age group within four or five months of the third shot.

One day after the Canadian province of Quebec announced it would financially penalize residents who are unvaccinated, the province's health minister said Wednesday first-time appointments spiked in the hours following the announcement.

The Quebec government says that while nearly 90% of eligible Quebecers have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, the unvaccinated remain a burden on the province's public health system.

Trudeau underscored that Canada has strict vaccine mandates in place for airline and train passengers, federal workers, and workplaces regulated by the federal government.

The world needs to address the root causes of vaccine hesitancy. We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by flooding skeptical communities with public service announcements or hectoring people to “believe in science.”

For the past five years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups abroad and interviewed residents of the Bronx to better understand vaccine avoidance.

We’ve found that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t. Instead, hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government offic

The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”

Here’s a chart showing how opinion among 18-to-29-year-olds has shifted on those issues, according to data that the Harvard Youth Poll crunched at my request:

numbers — which come from the Harvard Youth Poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released each spring — all suggest that today’s young voters are substantially more progressive on these issues than young voters were even five or 10 years ago. Sizable majorities now reject the idea that same-sex relationships are morally wrong (53 percent), support stricter gun laws (63 percent) and want government to provide basic necessities (62 percent).

support for government doing more to curb climate change soared to 57 percent in 2020 before subsiding to 50 percent this yea

The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States.

if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“The system was only progressing very slowly internally” but “the public wanted a product in their hands,” said John Bernal, a former Tesla test operator who worked in its Autopilot department. He was fired in February 2022 when the company alleged improper use of the technology after he had posted videos of Full Self-Driving in action

“Elon keeps tweeting, ‘Oh we’re almost there, we’re almost there,’” Bernal said. But “internally, we’re nowhere close, so now we have to work harder and harder and harder.” The team has also bled members in recent months, including senior executives.

China was the first country to experience the panic of Covid when it emerged from Wuhan in 2019. Then, for the past three years, the country largely suppressed the virus with a costly mix of mass testing, strict lockdowns and border closures. The government could have used the time to bolster its health system by stockpiling medicine and building more critical care units. It could have launched a major vaccination drive targeting the millions of vulnerable older adults who were reluctant to receive a jab or booster. China did little of that, however, plunging into crisis mode again like in the early days of Wuhan.

A Shanghai hospital predicted half of Shanghai’s 25 million residents would eventually be infected and warned its staff of a “tragic battle” in the coming weeks, according to a now-deleted statement the hospital posted last week on the social media platform WeChat.

“In this tragic battle, all of Shanghai will fall, and all the staff of the hospital will be infected! Our whole families will be infected! Our patients will all be infected!” the statement read. “We have no choice, and we cannot escape.”

President Biden has made Obamacare an even bigger deal, in a way that is improving life for millions of Americans.

The Biden administration just announced that 21 million people have enrolled for coverage through the A.C.A.’s health insurance marketplaces, up from around 12 million on the eve of the pandemic. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage that is standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, have gotten close.

And this gain, unlike some of the other good things happening, is all on Biden, who both restored aid to people seeking health coverage and enhanced a key aspect of the system.