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The jobless rate for people 25 and under jumped from 14.7 percent in January to 17.6 percent in August, its highest level since 2017.

But in Europe, the pandemic’s economic impact puts an entire generation at risk, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Graduates are facing unprecedented competition for even entry-level positions from a tsunami of newly laid-off workers.

“At the moment I will take anything I can get,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s been desperate.”

Many are resorting to internships, living with parents or returning to school to ride out the storm. Young workers without higher education risk sliding even further.

Ms. Davis recently took a four-week gig conducting surveys for a car company. It pays Britain’s minimum wage of £8.20 an hour.

The work leaves her with less time to push out job applications, and she wonders when she will get an opportunity to start a career in occupational psychology.

“I have energy, and I know how to roll up my sleeves at any sort of job,” Mr. Palumbo said. “But everything is stuck, and my hands are tied.”

To earn extra cash, she babysits occasionally and would tend bar at night if she could. But her current workload leaves her exhausted with little time to spare.

Democrats are hoping get-out-the-vote efforts among young people will result in a blue

Young voters cast 433,700 ballots in Florida and 331,900 ballots in North Carolina — two key battleground states in the presidential race — as of Oct. 23, according to CIRCLE. 

Texas, Florida and North Carolina are leading with most youth votes cast as of Oct. 23,

Carolina

wave and a Biden presidency, which could hinge on North Carolina.

Gen Z and millennial voters account for roughly 26% of votes cast so far in North Carolina and make up more than a third of its registered voters

"It’s these voters who typically are considered low turnout — maybe they’ll vote, maybe they won’t — and yet they are going to the polls early in huge numbers,

But record youth turnout could be diluted by higher turnout among all age groups, Andy Jackson of the conservative Civitas Institute told Fox News.

"The voting demographics are still skewing older, just not by as much," Jackson said. "If it’s a really close race, then it could help Democrats, but this is not enough to change the entire contour of the election."

Weber and Jackson agreed that winning North Carolina is key to President Trump's reelection.

"This is really a must-win state for Trump. Biden can lose this state and still be OK," Jackson said. "The Trump campaign has been putting more effort here because they have to."

Trump will hold a rally in Fayetteville, N.C., after stumping in Tampa, Fla., on Thursday. The Civitas Institute's latest poll shows Biden polling at 47% and Trump at 46% in North Carolina.

Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.

misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.

A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.

Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.

The implications here -- that he believes all women have or should have husbands and that workplaces are the province of men -- are so sexist and outmoded that they will likely alarm American women who have long become accustomed to inappropriate treatment from their commander in chief.

His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks

Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center

This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women

moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.

But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.

Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.

They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.

Mr. Walsh called polls showing the president trailing “a joke,” adding, “He will do nothing but gain in the areas he won last time.”

About one in four of the 1.3 million registered Democrats who have voted did not vote in 2016.

But that is partly because Mr. Trump has made mail-in ballots toxic to many of his supporters through his frequent (and unfounded) claims that mail voting is ripe for fraud.

Although it is impossible to know how a person voted, the voter file unlocks a trove of information, including a voter’s age, race, sex and history of past voting. In states without partisan registration, the firm models voters’ likely party preference based on other information.

The Biden campaign said that Mr. Trump’s share of voters has not grown even if he is turning out new supporters.

showed Mr. Biden with a seven-point lead over Mr. Trump. Pennsylvania’s districts were redrawn two years ago; Mr. Trump lost the equivalent of the new Seventh District to Mrs. Clinton by one percentage point.

Ms. Sanchez had to work last week during the final debate, but she plans to catch up with a recording. Depending on what she sees, she said, she will make up her mind about whether to cast a ballot or not.

If passed, the amendment would give Florida the highest minimum wage among Southern states and impact an estimated 2.5 million workers. 

There are seven other states already on track to hit $15 in the coming years, but those tend to be blue states with liberal labor policies.

Some proponents also say passage of Amendment 2 could help the push for a $15 wage floor at the federal level, especially if Democrats win the White House and control of the Senate.

“If $15 passes in Florida, it will send a clear message to the incoming [Biden] administration that raising the minimum wage is not just good policy but also good politics.”

But despite the general popularity of minimum wage hikes ― most have sailed through on the ballot in recent years ― the Florida proposal is by no means a sure thing.

“I think we feel good, but we need to turn out every single voter in the state,” said Stephanie Porta, the executive director of Organize Florida, a progressive group that supports the referendum.

Florida voters last approved a minimum wage increase in 2004, when they voted to raise it to $6.15 per hour. The current minimum wage is $8.56 thanks to inflation adjustments included in the 2004 referendum, but progressive advocates say that still falls far short of a living wage,

A single adult with no children would need to make more than $12 an hour to earn a living wage in Florida, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The increase to $15 would boost pay for about a quarter of the state’s workforce, according to the Florida Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

A third of Florida’s female workers would see a raise; 38% of women of color in the workforce would receive a pay increase, the institute says. 

Florida has a $3.02-per-hour “tip credit” for business owners. It’s what allows Johnson to pay a server $5.54 before gratuities, rather than $8.56, under the current minimum wage. That $3.02 credit would stay under the new law, but it would have less impact over time.

“Any restaurant that’s on the bubble right now, especially with COVID ― when they have those additional costs, I don’t know if they make it through,”

Much of the financial backing for the amendment has come from the law firm of John Morgan, a high-profile Florida attorney who represents workers in class-action lawsuits.

a 2005 study that found “no empirical evidence” that Florida’s last, more modest minimum wage increase caused employers to lay off workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has limited in-person organizing efforts, especially in the lower-income communities that would benefit most from the wage increase, and progressive groups and the Florida Democratic Party fell short of their voter registration targets.

We need to turn out every single voter in the state. Stephanie Porta, executive director of Organize Florida

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has endorsed raising the federal minimum wage to $15, and Democrats and progressives in Florida hope that support for Amendment 2 could boost his chances of defeating President Donald Trump in the crucial swing state.

In 2018, Florida voters said yes on a referendum to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions, a major progressive priority, even as Republicans Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott won narrow victories in the state’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, respectively. 

“I’m sure the legislature will try to screw with it,” Porta said. “They always try to go against the people ― that is their M.O. But we will be ready to fight.”

I believe that if all of us had caved, Trump would now be much closer to victory, not just at the polls, but over the Constitution itself. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe.

We all paid for our dissent, in various ways.

While some lost money, all lost friends. A few needed law enforcement to step in because of threats to their lives and to their families.

I spent decades studying repressive regimes, but I always did so with the swagger of a man who holds an American passport. Other people had to fight for their rights, not me. Now I was accused of legal wrongdoing for expressing my political views as a private citizen. For the first time in my life, I felt like a dissident.

The people I care most about in the world all told me the same thing: Fight.

That summer, I sat down with my wife and members of my family. Continuing to write about Trump could mean serious financial hardship. I had a lifetime contract with the Navy, but no contract is unbreakable. We were facing real risk, and I wanted to know their feelings.

As they did with all of us in the Never Trump camp, the president’s most fanatical supporters accused me of outright treason. They demanded my arrest. Some sent messages telling me that they looked forward to my official execution or other versions of my untimely death

If we’d been in it for our own enrichment, we’d have made the smart play and signed on with Trump, because that’s where the money was right from the start.

The experience of fighting taught the Never Trumpers how much the president had poisoned the Republican Party and long ago exposed the character of many of our former comrades. Some turned out to be as racist and authoritarian as Trump himself, while others merely confirmed that they were little more than vacuous opportunists who were capable of betraying the Constitution at will.

Whether it is Nikki Haley or Tom Cotton running for president or Fox’s prime-time lineup bolstering Trump’s underlings, for as long as I have a public platform, I will contend that these are people who betrayed the principles of our system of government for their own gain and that my fellow citizens should refuse to give them votes or ratings.

As Smiley said over his brandy, “if my past were still around today, you could say I’d failed.” But as the election approaches, I prefer to think about my time as a Never Trumper by recalling the old spy’s final words to those young students:“Never mind. What matters is that a long war is over. What matters is the hope.”

"They don't have a massive eraser pen. They've got to go through the rule-making process," said Allison Orris, a former Obama administration official and counsel with Manatt Health, a professional services firm. "They are going to have to think about what comes first, second and third and be realistic about timing."

Plus, the Biden administration may opt to keep and continue several Trump administration efforts, including shifting to value-based care, rather than paying doctors for every visit and procedure, and increasing access to telehealth,

The two administrations also share common views on some measures to lower drug pricing, including basing Medicare payments on the cost of prescription medications in other countries and importing drugs from abroad. But Trump officials have not actually put these proposals in place.

While Trump focused on dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Biden will emphasize expanding the law and access to health coverage.

The Trump administration took the historic step in early 2018 of allowing states to require certain Medicaid recipients to work in order to receive benefits. Eight states have received approval, seven have pending requests and four had their waivers set aside in court, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Biden's Health and Human Services secretary would be able to unwind the approvals, but it is a complicated task, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. The secretary would have to determine whether to withdraw permission for the entire waiver or just certain features.

Several of these waivers included other provisions that could make it harder for low-income Americans to retain Medicaid coverage, such as lockouts for non-payment of premiums.

One executive order Trump repeatedly points to is expanding short-term health plans, which typically have lower premiums, but provide less comprehensive coverage and don't have to adhere to the Affordable Care Act's protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

"The short-term plans have important symbolic significance because they restrict coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, which was a prominent political issue in the campaign," said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In its first year in office, the Trump administration slashed funds to promote Obamacare open enrollment and to assist consumers with selecting plans by 90% and 84%, respectively.

The Biden administration is expected to reverse all these measures to curtail Obamacare.

Biden has promised to revoke the Trump administration rule barring federally funded health care providers in the Title X family planning program from referring patients for abortions.

Biden has vowed to reverse the so-called Mexico City Policy, a ban on funding for foreign nonprofits that perform or promote abortions, which Trump reinstated and expanded during his tenure.

The Trump administration reinstated the measure -- which had previously impacted only family planning assistance -- in 2017 by presidential memorandum and extended it to all applicable US global health funding under the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance."

The Biden administration is also expected to reinstitute a directive that states cannot bar Medicaid funds from going to qualified providers that separately provide abortions, such as Planned Parenthood.

Trump also signed a bill in 2017 allowing states to withhold federal money from organizations that provide abortion services, including Planned Parenthood.

The Trump administration has been particularly hostile toward transgender Americans. Among its most criticized moves was an effort earlier this year to rollback an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination in health care against patients who are transgender.

Biden's LGBTQ policy plan also says he will work to expand funding for mental health services for LGBTQ Americans and that his administration plans to automatically enroll low-income LGBTQ people in the public option, once it's created, if they live in rural areas in states that didn't expand Medicaid.

"It was just an implication of, 'Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.' "

Graham had cast doubt on Georgia's signature-matching law in a conversation on Friday, and had also floated the possibility that biased poll workers could have counted ballots with inconsistent signatures.

There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and fraudulently altering a federal election vote tally is a federal crime.

Graham denied Raffensperger's claim on Monday, telling CNN that he had said he wanted to understand the process for verifying the signatures on mail-in ballots

Asked if he was trying to pressure the secretary of state to toss legal ballots, Graham said, "That's ridiculous."

"What I'm trying to find out was how do you verify signatures on mail-in ballots in these states that are the center of attention? So like when you mail in a ballot, you got to have some way to verify that the signature on the envelope actually matches the person who requested the ballot," Graham said

"So they expanded mail-in voting, and how you verify the signatures to me is the big issue

Raffensperger told Blitzer that Georgia's election systems already require signature matches when voters request mail ballots and when completed ballots are returned to election systems. He also said the online absentee portal has a photo ID.

"We feel confident the election officials did their job," he said.

On Friday, CNN projected that Biden will win Georgia and its 16 electoral votes. Unofficial results put Biden ahead of Trump by about 14,000 votes, or about 0.3 percentage point.

due to the tight margin, state officials decided to use the preplanned audit process to recount every ballot in the presidential race.

At least six small counties in Georgia have finished their presidential recounts without finding any discrepancies.

A seventh county, Floyd, reported that 2,600 uncounted ballots had been found during their recount -- the ballots hadn't been scanned when the county tallied its early vote. An investigation is underway but human error has been deemed responsible.

Experts say it would be nearly impossible for Trump to overcome his 14,000-vote deficit in a recount.

"We want to make sure this vote is very accurate. We understand the national importance of this, and we're in the process of doing it," he told Blitzer on Monday. "The counters will be done by the 18th and we will certify this by the 20th."

Raffensperger, among other things, defended the integrity of absentee ballots, signature verification, and the vote counting machines

Raffensperger responded that his team "secured and strengthened absentee ballots for the first time since 2005" by outlawing absentee ballot harvesting and also addressed the "disinformation about signature match," writing that "GBI trained elections officials match your signature twice before any vote is cast."

He also posted links to news articles debunking Trump's tweets, including one alleging the Dominion voting software used in Georgia for the presidential election "deleted" and "switched" millions of votes

Although there were many reasons Clinton didn't win in 2016, a key factor was that she did not energize enough Black, Latino and younger voters to show up to the polls and win her the White House.

In comments to CNN after the hearing, Wylie alleged that Black Americans were particular targets of Cambridge Analytica's "voter disengagement tactics," which he said were used to "discourage or demobilize certain types of people from voting," and that campaigns and political action committees requested voter suppression from Cambridge Analytica.

According to Channel 4, the Trump digital campaign targeted the "deterrence" voters with Facebook ads attacking Clinton, including a video that resurfaced the Democratic nominee's past "super predator" comments. The Trump campaign's tactic of "microtargeting" as described by the Channel 4 News report is legal, and used by other campaigns, political strategy firms and interest groups.

Black voters made up 12% of the electorate in 2016 and 89% voted for Clinton over Trump, according to exit polls.

"Since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook -- what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn't happen today," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN. "We have 35,000 people working to ensure the integrity of our platform, created a political ads library, and have protected more than 200 elections worldwide. We also have rules prohibiting voter suppression and are running the largest voter information campaign in American history."

: This is false. Biden said in an August interview with ABC that he would shut down the country if scientists told him it was necessary -

Addressing his opponent, Trump said, "I closed it, and you said, 'He's xenophobic. He's a racist and he's xenophobic,' because you didn't think I should have closed our country."

It's not clear Biden even knew about Trump's China travel restrictions when he called Trump xenophobic on the day the restrictions were unveiled

Trump claimed 308,000 "military people" died because Biden "couldn't provide them proper health care."

Trump seems to be referencing findings from a 2015 inspector general report that examined a backlog of healthcare applications at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The report found more than 307,000 records that remained pending in a VA enrollment system were for people who had already died, according to social security records.

the report did not reach conclusions about whether lack of health care caused those deaths,

“There’s a huge financial advantage to being first out of the gate,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an associate professor of emergency medicine and public health at Brown University. She was one of 60 public health officials and others in the medical community who signed a letter to Pfizer urging it not to rush its vaccine.

The F.D.A. has also told vaccine makers that they will need to track at least half of the patients’ safety data for two months before the agency will grant emergency access. That would push the earliest possible date into at least November.

Participants in Pfizer’s trial are given two doses of a vaccine 21 days apart, whereas those in Moderna’s wait 28 days in between. Pfizer begins looking for sick volunteers seven days after the second dose, whereas Moderna does so at 14 days. And Pfizer’s plan allows an outside review panel to look at early data after just 32 volunteers have become ill with Covid-19. Moderna’s plan doesn’t allow for a first peek until 53 cases.

Ultimately, Pfizer’s strategy may be about managing the public’s expectations, said Brandon Barford, a partner at Beacon Policy Advisors, a research firm. Pfizer could now explain any delay past October by “saying, ‘We’re being extra cautious.’ And you get kudos for it.”But if the opposite occurs, and Pfizer is seen to be pushing a vaccine before it is ready, the “potential fallout is enormous,” said Dr. Ranney, of Brown University. “We cannot afford to have a vaccine released for Covid-19 that is either unsafe or ineffective.”

Even in normal times, mass-vaccination campaigns involve many moving parts within a vast network of suppliers, transporters and middlemen.

Nine other candidates are also in the final stage of testing. If any of those win approval from the F.D.A., that will reduce the importance of Pfizer’s vaccine but also introduce new questions, such as which hospitals and people get the different vaccines.

Pfizer does not yet know where the government wants the vaccine sent or who will be first in line to receive it, said Ms. Alcorn, the supply-chain executive.

“We’re working very closely, in the U.S., in particular, with Operation Warp Speed to identify those distribution points,” Ms. Alcorn said, referring to the federal initiative to produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccines. “We don’t have them today.”

Representatives of UPS and FedEx said they had been planning to play a major role in distributing vaccines and were ready to go.Once the Pfizer coolers reach their destinations, hospitals or pharmacies will have a few choices of how to store the vaccine. The easiest option is using ultracold freezers, but not many sites have them. Otherwise, the facilities can stash the trays in conventional freezers for up to five days. Or they can keep the vials in the cooler for up to 15 days, so long as they replenish the dry ice and don’t open it more than twice a day.

Pfizer has said it expects to be able to produce 50 million doses this year.

“If you’re talking about 12.5 million people, you’re going to have to make some very tough-minded decisions about who this goes to,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research firm. “It’s a pretty small number of doses that are going to be distributed.”

One of the biggest early challenges may be distributing the vaccine in rural areas, which may not be able to administer doses quickly enough before they go bad. It isn’t clear how states with large rural populations are going to deal with this.

For all the difficulties of making and distributing the vaccine, public health experts said the hardest part of the process could soon be complete.

f Pfizer receives authorization for its vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks, as expected, the company in theory could vaccinate millions of Americans by the end of the year, taking advantage of months of planning and decades of experience

So it was cause for celebration this week when Pfizer announced that an early analysis showed its vaccine candidate was more than 90 percent effective.

The effort will hinge on collaboration among a network of companies, federal and state agencies, and on-the-ground health workers in the midst of a pandemic that is spreading faster than ever through the United States.

Before Pfizer can begin shipping its vaccine, federal and state governments must tell it where to send how many doses. McKesson, a major medical supplier, will have to provide hospitals and other distribution sites with the syringes, needles and other supplies necessary to administer the vaccine.

The vaccine, developed with the German company BioNTech, has to be stored at around minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit) until shortly before it is injected

If an analysis planned for next week confirms the vaccine’s safety, the company is likely to ask the F.D.A. this month for emergency authorization to distribute its vaccine. In that case, limited doses will most likely be shipped to large hospitals and pharmacies to be provided to health care workers and other vulnerable groups.

Then there is the thorny question of who will receive vaccines first. That will be up to state governments.

The chief executives of Pfizer and BioNTech have suggested that half of those may go to the United States. Since each person needs two doses, about 12.5 million Americans could be vaccinated.

People’s decreasing willingness to respond to polls

Some types of voters seem less willing to respond to polls than others, perhaps because they are less trusting of institutions, and these voters seem to lean Republican.

A much-hyped theory that Trump supporters lie to pollsters appears to be wrong or insignificant. Polls did not underestimate his support more in liberal areas, where supporting Mr. Trump can be less socially acceptable, than in conservative areas.

Although Literary Digest’s sample of 2.4 million respondents was enormous, it was not representative. The magazine’s circulation skewed toward affluent Americans, who were more hostile to Roosevelt and the New Deal than most voters. A less prominent pollster that year, George Gallup, had surveyed many fewer people — about 50,000 — but he had been careful to ensure they matched the country’s demographic mix. Mr. Gallup correctly predicted a Roosevelt win.

In 1948, the pollsters’ luck ran out. They continued to overestimate the Republican vote share, reporting throughout the campaign that President Harry Truman trailed his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. This time, the election was close enough that the polls pointed to the wrong winner, contributing to perhaps the most famous error in modern journalism, The Chicago Tribune’s banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Nearly every poll showed Hillary Clinton to be leading Mr. Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The leads were big enough that her campaign paid relatively little attention to those states. But she lost all three narrowly, giving Mr. Trump a stunning victory.

One factor was largely unsolvable: Late-deciding voters, accurately identified as undecided in polls, broke strongly for Mr. Trump.

The fallout from the crisis can be seen in a rising tide of litigation between landlords and tenants, even at some of New York’s most gilded addresses.

“It’s not easy, but we need to make sacrifices, and landlords need to make sacrifices,”

Commercial property sales have plummeted by nearly 50 percent through October, according to Rahul Jain, a deputy state comptroller.

The lack of workers is having a ripple effect on rents. Across Manhattan’s retail corridors, asking commercial rents have dropped nearly 13 percent from last year, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate firm.

New York City’s finances — money to pick up trash, repair parks and police streets — rely heavily on the health of the industry.

“The amazing thing to us is that in New York, they’re going after rent for times when we weren’t allowed to be open,” Mr. Berger said. “We have worked out deals with our landlords across the country except in New York City.”

“Anyone that thinks the way that people used the workplace in the past isn’t going to change postpandemic is fooling themselves,”

Roughly 140 million of Manhattan’s 400 million square feet of office space is considered to be of average quality or is in older and less luxurious buildings

The real estate group estimates that converting even just 10 percent of that office space to residential would create 14,000 apartments citywide, including as many as 10,000 in Manhattan — a significant amount in a city routinely short of enough housing, especially affordable homes.

Converting office buildings to homes would not only provide a potential financial lifeline to landlords, but would also benefit retailers, the real estate board argues, because the presence of office users during the day and apartment dwellers at night would increase foot traffic.

The proposal would require changes to zoning and density rules that would have to be approved by the City Council and the State Legislature and embraced by the mayor and governor.

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died last month, utterly rejected this account of faith and reason. 

The God of the Hebrew Bible, he believed, was never the God of the Academy to begin with. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is neither the unmoved mover nor the ground of being, but a historical God, who has put himself in dialogue and relationship with one people, the Jews.

little about him could be deduced by processes of reason. He is best known, rather, through the moral revolution heralded by Abrahamic faith: Judaism first, followed by Christianity and Islam.

De-Hellenization was thus no skin off the back of biblical faith, rightly understood. For, in this telling, the faith of the Jews, including Jesus, had always sat uneasily with the “faith” of Plato and Aristotle.

The synthesis between the two collapsed once its Greek metaphysical structure gave way to the battering ram of modern science.

The God of the Bible, Sacks contended, was lost in the bargain of Saint Paul’s ambition to spread his newfound faith to the Greco-Roman sphere. More to the point, God was lost in translation. The Greek language, with its left-to-right script, per Sacks, tends toward abstraction and universalization, whereas Hebrew is fundamentally a “right-brained” language, tending toward narrative and particularity.

The result was that the West received an abstract, theoretical version of a supremely narrativistic deity.

The Hebrew Bible, Sacks believed, has no “theory” of being itself, of natural law or of political regimes.

Sacks was, in truth, a pure anti-metaphysicist. In his 2011 book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, he declared: “We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists.”

he was thrilled by his atheist teachers’ demolition of the classical proofs for God, which he’d always considered a kind of cheap sleight of hand.

“Neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge.” All of these statements are a matter of “interpretation,” rather than of “explanation,” and all interpretations are beyond proof or falsification.

The quest for ultimate meaning, he argued, falls into the same territory as “ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics”—and “in none of these three disciplines can anything of consequence be proved.”

Ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics are great “repositories of human wisdom,” to be sure, but they simply don’t belong in “the same universe of discourse” as science.

If we distinguish the two discourses, neither need threaten the other: The one (science) explains the world by “taking things apart,” as Sacks put it; the other (religion) puts them back together via interpretation and moral formation.

For many Catholic intellectuals, not least Benedict XVI, restoring religion to its rightful place in human affairs involves undoing the philosophical mistakes of nominalism and of the Reformation, which the pope emeritus singled out for criticism in his much-misunderstood 2006 Regensburg Lecture.

We must dilate reason’s scope, Benedict thought, so that “reasoning” might again include more than merely observing phenomena and identifying their efficient material causes. Sacks did not think faith and reason could be reunited in this way.

But shouldn't we try? I seek ultimate meaning, yes, but I want that meaning to be true in a way that satisfies reason’s demands. And there lies the disagreement, I think, between “Regensburg Catholics,” if you will, and the various de-Hellenizing strands of contemporary religious thought.

despite rejecting almost in toto the Church’s account of faith and reason, Sacks nevertheless credited it for the fundamental humaneness of Western civilization.

More than that, the rabbi blamed the mass horrors of modernity on the narrow and arrogant rationalism that supplanted the old synthesis.

“Outside religion,” he wrote, there is no secure base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.

Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded. None has stood firm under pressure. That has been demonstrated four times in the modern world, when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of sanctities, lives are lost.

As a student of Jewish history, Sacks knew well that the old synthesis of faith and reason wasn’t always a guarantee against unreason when it came to the treatment of Jews within Christendom. Nevertheless, he was far more wary of the merciless abstractions of the post-Enlightenment era

Sacks, to be clear, was no counter-Enlightenment thinker. And he paid gracious tribute to the modern scientific enterprise as an almost-miraculous instance of human cooperation with divine creativity.

Nevertheless, he insisted, the Enlightenment ideology, with its tendency to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to all of life, “dehumanize[d] human beings.” Its universalist “reason” detested particularity, not least the stubborn particularity of the Jewish people

Moreover, it targeted for demolition, in the name of humanity and reason, “the local, the church, the neighborhood, the community, even the family, the things that make us different, attached.”

Sacks saw similar dangers at work in today’s market liberalism: “a loss of belief in the dignity and sanctity of life”; “the loss of the politics of covenant, the idea that society is a place where we undertake collective responsibility for the common good”; “a loss of morality”; “the loss of marriage”; and the loss of “the possibility of a meaningful life.” In short, the technocratic dystopia we are stumbling into.

Except, Sacks rightly insisted, we don’t have to, provided we can make room in our lives and societies for “the still-small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God”:

Sacks felt that divine voice couldn’t be definitively reasoned about, certainly not in the way that, say, Benedict XVI called for. Yet the rabbi’s own public presence—supremely learned yet humble and unfailingly charitable, even to his most vicious secularist opponents—was and will remain an enduring testament to the reasonableness of faith. 

SolarWinds has some 300,000 customers but says "fewer than 18,000" installed the version of its Orion products earlier this year that now appears to have been compromised.

The intruders were careful to cover their tracks, Gerstell said. "You couldn't tell that they came in, you couldn't tell that they left the back door open. You couldn't even tell necessarily when they came in, took a look around and when they left."

Many U.S. national security agencies made major efforts to prevent Russia from interfering in this year's election. But those same agencies seem to have been blindsided by news that hackers — suspected to be Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR — were digging around inside U.S. government systems, possibly since the spring.

Microsoft has now taken control of the domain name that hackers used to communicate with systems that were compromised by the Orion update, according to security expert Brian Krebs. The company's analysis, he added, should help reveal the scope of the affected companies and agencies.

"We believe this is nation-state activity at significant scale, aimed at both the government and private sector," the company said as it shared some details about what it called "the threat activity we've uncovered over the past weeks."

So far, some U.S. government departments and agencies have acknowledged they are investigating the breaches but have provided few details. The White House has been silent about the suspected Russian hack.

"This SolarWinds hack is very problematic, very troublesome, because it's not at all clear exactly how we should respond," Gerstell said. Part of the problem, he added, is that it's not clear what the hackers did after gaining access.

The intrusion could simply be a case of espionage, he said, of one government trying to understand what its adversary is doing.

The company said, "We have been advised that this incident was likely the result of a highly sophisticated, targeted, and manual supply chain attack by an outside nation state, but we have not independently verified the identity of the attacker."

The cybersecurity firm announced last week that a "highly sophisticated state-sponsored adversary" stole its "red team" tools, which are used to test security vulnerabilities in its customers' computer networks. FireEye's clients include government agencies.

The incident is the latest in what has become a long list of suspected Russian electronic incursions into other nations – particularly the U.S. – under President Vladimir Putin.

The agency said Sunday that it "is aware of active exploitation of SolarWinds Orion Platform software" that was released between March and June. The agency is urging any affected organizations to take steps to detect intrusions and to take countermeasures.

supply-chain attack

According to SolarWinds S.E.C. filings, the malware was on the software from March to June. The number of organizations that downloaded the corrupted update could be as many as 18,000, which includes most federal government unclassified networks and more than 425 Fortune 500 companies.

The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.

The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months.

While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which each year provides the Defense Department and other agencies the authority to perform its work, is caught up in partisan wrangling. Among other important provisions, the act would authorize the Department of Homeland Security to perform network hunting in federal networks.

The actual and perceived control of so many important networks could easily be used to undermine public and consumer trust in data, written communications and services.

hat should be done?On Dec. 13, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security — itself a victim — issued an emergency directive ordering federal civilian agencies to remove SolarWinds software from their networks.

It also is impractical. In 2017, the federal government was ordered to remove from its networks software from a Russian company, Kaspersky Lab, that was deemed too risky. It took over a year to get it off the networks.

The remediation effort alone will be staggering

Cyber threat hunters that are stealthier than the Russians must be unleashed on these networks to look for the hidden, persistent access controls.

The logical conclusion is that we must act as if the Russian government has control of all the networks it has penetrated

The response must be broader than patching networks. While all indicators point to the Russian government, the United States, and ideally its allies, must publicly and formally attribute responsibility for these hacks. If it is Russia, President Trump must make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable. The U.S. military and intelligence community must be placed on increased alert; all elements of national power must be placed on the table.

President Trump is on the verge of leaving behind a federal government, and perhaps a large number of major industries, compromised by the Russian government. He must use whatever leverage he can muster to protect the United States and severely punish the Russians.President-elect Joe Biden must begin his planning to take charge of this crisis. He has to assume that communications about this matter are being read by Russia, and assume that any government data or email could be falsified.

"Cities that have been built to date from scratch are more like real estate projects," Lore said in a promotional video for the project. "They don't start with people at the center. Because if you started with people at the center, you would immediately think, 'OK, what's the mission and what are the values?'

On Telosa's official website, Lore explains that he was inspired by American economist and social theorist Henry George. The investor cites capitalism's "significant flaws," attributing many of them to "the land ownership model that America was built on."

BIG's founder, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, is meanwhile quoted as saying that Telosa "embodies the social and environmental care of Scandinavian culture, and the freedom and opportunity of a more American culture."

It is not the first new city being planned by Ingels' firm, which famously installed a ski slope on top of a Copenhagen power plant and has co-designed Google's new headquarters in London and California. In January 2020, Japanese carmaker Toyota revealed that it had commissioned BIG to create a master plan for a new 2,000-person city in the foothills of Mount Fuji. Although significantly smaller than Telosa, the project, dubbed Woven City, promises autonomous vehicle testing, smart technology and robot-assisted living.

In India, Brazil and other countries, WhatsApp has become so important to the functioning of society that regulators should treat it as a “utility,” said Parminder Jeet Singh, executive director at IT for Change, a technology-focused nonprofit in Bengaluru, India.

Worldwide, 2.76 billion people on average used at least one Facebook product each day this June, according to the company’s statistics. WhatsApp is used to send more than 100 billion messages a day and has been downloaded nearly six billion times since 2014, when Facebook bought it, according to estimates from the data firm Sensor Tower.

The unease about a single corporation mediating so much human activity motivates much of the scrutiny surrounding Facebook.

In Latin America, Facebook’s apps can be lifelines in rural places where cellphone service has yet to arrive but the internet is available, and in poor communities where people cannot afford mobile data but can find a free internet connection.

Across Africa, Facebook’s apps are so popular that for many, they are the internet. WhatsApp, the continent’s most popular messaging app, is a one-stop shop to communicate with family, friends, colleagues, fellow worshipers and neighbors.

The use of WhatsApp has grown so much that at one point it accounted for nearly half of all internet traffic in Zimbabwe. During the outage on Monday, the chief government spokesman in Tanzania used Twitter to urge the public to “remain calm.”

In Mexico, many small-town newspapers cannot afford print editions, so they publish on Facebook instead. That has left local governments without a physical outlet to issue important announcements, so they, too, have taken to Facebook, said Adrián Pascoe, a political consultant.

“The way businesses work, it’s been a crazy change in the last 20 years,” Mr. David said. “Then, we had no community online. Now we are hyper-connected, but we rely on a few tech companies for everything. When WhatsApp or Facebook are down, we all go down.”