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US criticism of China has intensified over the past week. Over the weekend Politico published details of a 57-page Republican party attack memo,

After a series of controversial shipments, China’s government introduced strict rules last month which required all medical equipment and testing kits to be approved by the national medical products administration and registered before they were exported. However, after some suppliers reportedly complained it was too difficult to get the domestic license required, the rules were scaled back on the weekend, with exports now only needing to meet the importing country’s standard.

“Germany is looking at things, we are looking at things,” he said. “We are talking about a lot more money than Germany’s talking about.” “We haven’t determined the final amount yet,” Trump said. “It’s very substantial.”

China has reacted strongly, denying any coverup over the virus. An editorial in the state-backed Global Times on Monday said “China’s achievement in the fight against Covid-19 is way better than that of the US”.

“This is a life-and-death matter, so it would spare no effort to smear China and mobilise all possible public opinion forces to do so to cover its selfishness.”

“like Australia”

Several countries on Tuesday began to ease lockdown restrictions, including New Zealand and Australia, which have both had significant success in controlling the virus. New Zealand moved down to level 3 restrictions on midnight on Monday, allowing some businesses to reopen.

In other developments: More than 3,041,700 people have been diagnosed with Covid-19, according to the John Hopkins Tracker, and at least 211,167 have died. Argentina’s number of reported cases surpassed 4,000 on Monday, with 111 new cases bringing the total to 4,003 infected persons and 197 deaths so far. Japanese media reported that 300,000 coronavirus masks sent to pregnant women as part of a government handout have been found to be faulty. New Zealand has ended its strictest lockdown phase and entered Level 3, with 400,000 Kiwis returning to work, restaurants and cafes reopening for takeaway, and fishing, surfing and swimming now permitted. China has reported six new coronavirus cases (three domestic and three from overseas) and no deaths, according to the country’s National Health Commission. More than 2,200 Indonesians have died from Covid-19, but were not recorded, according to an investigation from Reuters. The official death toll from the virus in the country is 765. The director general of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said he is concerned about people missing vaccines for diseases such as polio and measles because of the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico’s president declared the country had “tamed” its coronavirus outbreak, despite widespread suspicions that Covid-19 cases are being undercounted. WhatsApp claims to have cut viral messages by 70% after introducing a limit on the number of people to whom users could forward messages. Afghanistan recorded its biggest one-day rise in cases, triggered by a continued surge of transmission in Kandahar. Sydney’s Bondi Beach has reopened again, after it was shut for being too crowded.

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehendin

when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt

If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee

Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities

He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.

Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished

The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones

Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded

further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,”

Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud.

it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.

What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse

The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.

Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.

The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting

The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before

what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness

Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin

Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.

Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.

The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.

Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexisten

Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded

It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?

In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.

But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.”

what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion

what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans

Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper­democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.

Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect.

Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

“I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events.

I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton

the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic

All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crac

like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape

And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance

The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.

Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that.

Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands

Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate suppor

e. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.

Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

Since Trump’s ascent to power, America’s standing in the world has experienced a virtual collapse. According to the Pew Research Center, international confidence in American leadership has declined significantly in the past year. This has been most acutely felt in the Asia-Pacific region, the new center of gravity in global geopolitics.

Among America’s Asian allies, such as South Korea and Japan, confidence in the American president’s ability to make the right judgment has dropped by as much as 71 percent and 54 percent, respectively

In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, it dropped by 41 percent. This is nothing short of a disaster for American soft power.

In contrast, Chinese President Xi Jinping, speaking at APEC, described globalization as an “irreversible historical trend.” He promoted a “multilateral trading regime and practice” to allow “developing members to benefit more from international trade and investment.” The statements echoed Xi’s high-profile speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, where he effectively presented China as the vanguard of the global economic order.

Those were not just empty words. China has forged ahead, winning over the region and the world with an all-consuming sense of purpose. Xi has helped established the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai-based New Development Bank as alternatives to the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as the Japan-dominated Asian Development Bank.  

When I graduated from college there was a finite number of career ladders in front of me: teacher, lawyer, doctor, business. Now college graduates enter a world with four million footstools. There are many more places to perch (a start-up, an NGO, a coffee shop, a consultancy) but few of the footstools pay a sustaining wage, seem connected with the others or lead to a clear ladder of rungs to climb upward.

People in their 20s seem to be compelled to bounce around more, popping up here and there, quantumlike, with different jobs, living arrangements and partners while hoping that all these diverse experiences magically add up to something.

Naturally enough, their descriptions of their lives are rife with uncertainty and anxiety

All the while social media makes the comparison game more intrusive than ever, and nearly everybody feels as if he or she is falling behind.

And how do we as a society prepare young people for this uncertain phase? We pump them full of vapid but haunting praise about how talented they are and how their future is limitless

we preach a gospel of autonomy that says all the answers to the deeper questions in life are found by getting in touch with your “true self,” whatever the heck that is.

Now I think that laissez-faire attitude trivializes the experiences of young adulthood and condescends to the people going through them.

telling people “30 is the new 20” is completely counterproductive.

colleges have to do much more to put certain questions on the table, to help students grapple with the coming decade of uncertainty: What does it mean to be an adult today? What are seven or 10 ways people have found purpose in life? How big should I dream or how realistic should I be? What are the criteria we should think about before shacking up? What is the cure for sadness? What do I want and what is truly worth wanting?

Before, there were social structures that could guide young adults as they gradually figured out the big questions of life. Now, those structures are gone. Young people are confronted by the existential questions right away. They’re going to feel lost if they have no sense of what they’re pointing toward, if they have no vision of the holy grails on the distant shore.

“Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle for an electoral coalition. … But it does not make for a natural organizing principle for a governing coalition.”

Alienation also breeds a zero-sum mind-set — it’s us or them — and with it a tribal clannishness and desire for exclusion.

on the right alienation can foster a desire for purity — to exclude the foreign — and on the left it can foster a desire for conformity — to squelch differing speakers and faiths.

a “state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.”

But going forward we need a better establishment, one attuned to Trump voters, those whose alienation grows out of genuine suffering.

it will be necessary to fight alienation with participation, to reform and devolve the welfare state so that recipients are not treated like passive wards of the state, but take an active role in their own self-government.

It’ll be necessary to revive a living elite patriotism. That means conducting oneself in office as if nation is more important than party; not using executive orders, filibusters and the nuclear option to grab what you can while you happen to be in the majority. It means setting up weekly encounters to help you respect and understand the fellow Americans who reside across the social chasms.

Finally, it’ll be necessary to fight alienation with moral realism

If you start with an awareness of human foibles, then you can proceed with what Levin calls pessimistic hopefulness — grateful for the institutions our ancestors left us, and filled with cheerful confidence that they can be reformed to solve present needs.

Netanyahu has said that Israel has carried out dozens of strikes to prevent weapons smuggling to the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah via Syria.

I asked him about his critics, and he said they fell into two camps.

The immediate reason for his retirement was less abstract, he said. He had become concerned with the plight of litigants who represented themselves in civil cases, often filing handwritten appeals. Their grievances were real, he said, but the legal system was treating them impatiently, dismissing their cases over technical matters.

“A lot of the people who say that are sincere,” he said. “That’s their conception of law. That’s fine.”

Some, he said, simply have a different view of the proper role of the judge. “There is a very strong formalist tradition in the law,” he said, summarizing it as: “Judges are simply applying rules, and the rules come from somewhere else, like the Constitution, and the Constitution is sacred. And statutes, unless they’re unconstitutional, are sacred also.”

He said he had less sympathy for the second camp. “There are others who are just, you know, reactionary beasts,” he said. “They’re reactionary beasts because they want to manipulate the statutes and the Constitution in their own way.”

low level of intelligence,” he said. “I gradually began to realize that this wasn’t right, what we were doing.”

Judge Posner said he hoped to work with groups concerned with prisoners’ rights, with a law school clinic and with law firms, to bring attention and aid to people too poor to afford lawyers.

In one of his final opinions, Judge Posner, writing for a three-judge panel, reinstated a lawsuit from a prisoner, Michael Davis, that had been dismissed on technical grounds.

“The basic thing is that most judges regard these people as kind of trash not worth the time of a federal judge,” he said.

“A lot of these kids have lost their homes and their school. It’s already so difficult,”

One of the most famous of these tribute teas was dragon-phoenix ball tea, which was commonly grown and presented to the royal family. 

During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) the first emperor, Zhu Yanzhang, formally abolished the tradition and government control of giving tribute tea. 

A variety of famous green teas were developed during this time, including Tiger Hill, Tianchi, Yangxian, Liu'an, Longjing and Tianmu green teas.

Lately Trump has been doing what comes naturally to him — dictating tweet-like statements, calling into conservative talk shows, and generally stirring up trouble. "I like this better than Twitter," he claimed on Newsmax. "Actually they did us a favor. This is better."

Trump has shown no courtesy to President Joe Biden since leaving the White House.

On the phone with one of his biggest sycophants, Newsmax's Greg Kelly, on Monday evening, Kelly speculated about Biden's mental faculties, prompting Trump to say "there's something" going on with Biden. Trump then questioned "whether or not he understands what he's signing" when bills cross his desk.

Trump is the first US president to lose re-election in nearly thirty years.

Trump, of course, proudly stands as the GOP antithesis of Bush 41. President 45, as some of his allies now call him, lest they identify him as "former," was uncharacteristically quiet upon leaving the White House. But he set up an office in Florida within days and began issuing statements that were widely picked up by the media — a cheap replacement for his account on Twitter, which banned him in the wake of the Capitol riot.

"The code of the presidents club is to get out of the way and let the new commander in chief have a year or two," CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.

Since then, he has gradually increased his visibility, with emails to members of the media from "45 Office" so far in March, twice as many as in February

"Trump's unique in that he wants to make a lot of racket and garner attention after leaving the White House,"

Trump said "people have seen some silence" from him, "but actually, if you take a look at what's happened over the last period of time, we're sending out releases. They're getting picked up much better than any tweet."

Trump also teased plans for "our own platform,"

Trump told Boothe that he now believes official statements to the public are "much more elegant than a tweet, and I think it gets picked up better. You're seeing that."

"Picked up" was the key phrase. The need for pickup — meaning attention from the American news media — is at the heart of Trump's post-presidential actions.

And he is continuing to push the incendiary claims that led up to the January 6 riot, about winning the 2020 election and Biden stealing it from him, despite pleas even from within his own party to stop lying.

Trump seemed self-aware about his media approach during a podcast taping with Lisa Boothe, which was released on Monday morning. Trump was Boothe's inaugural guest — which means the podcast does not yet have a high profile or a massive following. Trump said in a statement that she has been doing "an outstanding job" on Fox, so perhaps he wanted to give her new podcast a boost.

Brinkley likened Trump to "an active political hand grenade, ready to blow up the US political system any way he can.

Last week Trump called into Fox for a live interview with Maria Bartiromo. The next day his comments to Bartiromo were in heavy rotation on other right-wing networks and outlets.

To Kelly, he hedged about the possibility of a new social platform, saying that "something will happen with social media if I want it to happen."

Wen said she worries the US is on the "precipice" of a fourth surge

it is important the US continue taking precautions while vaccinating Americans.

"We need to hold out just a bit longer and give vaccines a chance to really get the upper hand in this," Fauci said. "I'll guarantee as we get into the late spring and the early summer, you're going to see a return to gradual degree of normality that everyone is hoping for, but we don't want to do it prematurely."

Last week, the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecast that 600,000 people would die by the start of July, and this week that number is up to 609,000.

More than 30.5 million people in the US have been infected with coronavirus and 553,120 people have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

For those who aren't fully vaccinated, the CDC advised they stick to their own household for egg hunts or enjoy these traditions outdoors while six feet apart, according to a series of tweets.

The CDC says it's still learning how vaccines protect against the coronavirus and advises that fully vaccinated people going out in public still wear masks and take precautions

Nearly 154 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered across the country, according to data from the CDC. Thirty percent of the US population -- about 99.6 million people -- has received at least one dose of vaccine, and nearly 17% -- about 56 million people -- have been fully vaccinated.

"Most likely the protection that the vaccine will provide will be years even. But we just don't know that."

"I do think there's a possibility that we may need to get a booster shot. Maybe booster shots that target new, emerging variants,"

Thursday was the first day all Connecticut residents 16-years-old and older were eligible to be vaccinated, Gov. Ned Lamont said during a press conference.

Residents made more than 100,000 vaccine appointments, Lamont said, and the state will likely have the supply to outstrip demand by late April.

"The first federal mobile vaccination units in the nation, arrived at the Maryland Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Reisterstown," the governor said Thursday. "In the coming days, these 32-foot trailers will be fanning out across the state."

The changes will amount to a new electoral process with “Hong Kong characteristics,” Wang Chen, a Politburo member who specializes in legal matters, said in a speech.

Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 on the promise that it would be accorded a high degree of autonomy for 50 years. But “Beijing’s full grip on power in Hong Kong may happen well before 2047,” said Diana Fu, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

The government promised economic growth of “over 6 percent,” a relatively modest target by the standards of China’s pre-pandemic expansion but a big turnabout from last year and a signal of its commitment to keeping the world’s second-largest economy humming.

The forecast indicates that China expects a strong rebound after the pandemic brought the country’s economy to a standstill for several months last year.

The spending increases over the past two decades, which have given China the world’s second-largest military budget today, have paid for a modernization and expansion program aimed at challenging American military dominance in the Pacific, especially in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.

Strengthening that message will be a major focus for Mr. Xi as he looks ahead to two important political events. In July, the party will celebrate the centenary of its founding.

As China’s rivalry over science and technology with the United States and other countries remains at a boil, Beijing is digging deep into its pockets in a bid for victory.

Just over a year after the coronavirus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, Beijing also pledged to increase resources to guard against emerging infectious diseases and biosafety risks.

The Communist Party’s latest five-year plan specifically calls for the construction of a “Polar Silk Road,” presumably aimed at helping China better capitalize on new energy sources and faster shipping routes in the Arctic.

China’s military budget is set to rise by around 6.9 percent this year, a slight increase from last year. As overall government spending is projected to decline slightly, the People’s Liberation Army is still being funded robustly.

As countries continue to grapple with the pandemic, the party has doubled down on the message that China’s political model of strong, centralized leadership is superior to the chaos of liberal democracies.

The government addressed concerns about China’s aging population and shrinking labor force by announcing pension reforms and gradual changes to the official retirement age

On Friday, the government announced plans to build a system to support “family development” and strengthen marriage and family counseling services.

“Fully implement the party’s basic policy on religious work,” read a draft of the five-year plan. “Continue to pursue the sinicization of China’s religions and actively guide religions so that they can be compatible with socialist society.”

But Democrats counter that the bill takes a holistic look at the entire American economy and how it was affected by the pandemic.

Senate Democrats agreed to lower the income cutoff at which payments phase out from $100,000 to $80,000 for individuals, and from $200,000 to $160,000 for couples filing jointly, following demands from moderate Democrats.

Progressive Democrats vigorously pursued including a minimum wage hike in this legislation, which would have gradually increased the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025.

Individuals earning up to $75,000 and couples earning up to $150,000 would receive the full direct payments of $1,400 per person. Individuals will also receive an additional $1,400 payment for each dependent claimed on their tax returns.

"The major pieces of the bill — payments to individuals, extended unemployment, money for states and localities, money for schools — all of those things were in the COVID package that passed last year that all the Republicans voted for. So they were OK then, but they're not OK now, and I frankly can't really figure out that argument."

Under the Senate version, federal unemployment insurance payments will remain at $300 per week — down from $400 per week

The bill includes $7.25 billion in new money for the small-business loan program known as PPP and would allow more nonprofits to apply, including those groups that engage in advocacy and some limited lobbying. It also allows larger nonprofits to be eligible.

There are over $128 billion in grants to state educational agencies, with 90% allocated to local educational agencies, plus $39 billion in grants to higher education institutions.

The bill includes $4.5 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, to help families with home heating and cooling costs.

The bill provides $37 million to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program for low-income seniors.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to receive $7.5 billion to track, administer and distribute COVID-19 vaccines. Another $46 billion would go toward diagnosing and tracing coronavirus infections, and $2 billion would go toward buying and distributing various testing supplies and personal protective equipment.

There is $25 billion for emergency rental assistance, including $5 billion for emergency housing vouchers for people experiencing homelessness, survivors of domestic violence and victims of human trafficking.

And on Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought that moment into clearer focus. The agency came out with its first set of guidance about what fully vaccinated people can now do.

My parents had a significant emotional burden lifted after they were vaccinated, because they are now approximately 95% protected against getting severely ill from Covid-19. But like the rest of the country, they are restless and want to do something with their newly vaccinated status. That is why they called me right after they saw the news report about new recommendations from the CDC to ask me what it all meant. I laid out the good news for them, and the caveats as well.

In a major step, the CDC said people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can safely visit with other fully vaccinated people in private settings without masks, without social distancing and without having to be outdoors.

Additionally, however, the CDC guidance now allows for fully vaccinated people to visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease. That last part is important.

This was starting to sound like it was going to work, and that my parents should be able to safely visit, even though my kids or wife haven't been vaccinated. They meet the age requirements and would be considered low risk, both in terms of health and their very limited exposures.

As I kept digging into the guidelines and speaking with members of the Biden administration's Covid-19 task force, it became increasingly clear that a visit was looking possible, but with a few strings attached.

And, perhaps most notably, fully vaccinated people are also still being discouraged from traveling, something that throws a monkey wrench into my fantasy of an imminent family reunion.

"I think the guidelines are in a good middle ground," she said. "We're starting to go back to normal now, but it's not going to be flipping a switch... We will make that journey towards normalcy, or at least a new normal, as more people get vaccinated."

At 10% vaccinations we have this guidance. At 20-30%, we will have new guidance," he said, noting that there's going to be a distinct shift in the messaging of what people can and cannot do -- moving away from more binary messaging to one that describes activities as a range of low, medium and high risk.

Even as Walensky delivered the hopeful new guidance, she also noted the country still stands at a seven-day average of about 59,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day -- a rate that has leveled off somewhat, instead of continuing to steadily decline. And there are close to 2,000 deaths per day. So, she and other experts warn, any easing of restrictions is going to have to be gradual.

So where does that leave my family reunion plan? Unless my parents make the long drive to see us, we are going to hold off on a visit for now. With more than 2 million people getting vaccinated a day, however, another 20% of the country could be vaccinated by the end of the month. And, that will probably lead to a further relaxing of CDC guidelines and maybe allow my parents a plane ride instead, which means a possible visit to celebrate their wedding anniversary this spring!

All told, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels dropped by 2.6 billion metric tons in 2020, a 7 percent reduction from 2019, driven in large part by transportation declines.

The figures tell the story of a rebound that’s slightly stronger than that of air travel: a sharp drop in March and April, as state and local restrictions fell into place, followed by a gradual rise to around 80 percent of 2019 levels.

Some national parks located near cities served as convenient recreational escapes throughout the pandemic. At Cuyahoga Valley National Park, 2020 numbers exceeded 2019 numbers from March through December. At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, numbers surged after a 46-day closure in the spring and partial closures through August; between June and December, the park saw one million additional visits compared to the same time period in 2019.

The government will “take every measure to absolutely guarantee the safety of the treated water and address misinformation,” he said, noting that the cabinet would meet again within a week to decide on the details for carrying out the plan.

Ten years later, the cleanup is far from finished at the disabled plant, which is operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. To keep the three damaged reactor cores from melting, cooling water is pumped through them continuously.

There are now about 1.25 million tons of wastewater stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the plant site. The water continues to accumulate at a rate of about 170 tons a day, and releasing all of it is expected to take decades.

But the Japanese government’s plan faces strong opposition from local officials and fishing crews, who say that it would add to consumer fears about the safety of Fukushima seafood.

Responding to Japan’s decision, the U.S. State Department said in a statement, “In this unique and challenging situation, Japan has weighed the options and effects, has been transparent about its decision, and appears to have adopted an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards.”

The corporate assets are in addition to another $7 trillion worth of government debt that the Fed said it will continue to purchase to keep the economic recovery humming.

"Portfolio sales will be gradual and orderly, and will aim to minimize the potential for any adverse impact on market functioning," the Fed said.

The Fed currently holds $13.7 billion worth of corporate assets, including more than $5 billion of corporate bonds and another $8.5 billion worth of exchange-traded funds.

The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it will begin winding down a program that purchased tens of billions of dollars of corporate assets to shore up the economy during the pandemic.

Scientists have already found that vaccines using different technologies can vary in their effectiveness. The strongest vaccines include Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, both of which are based on RNA molecules.

Some preliminary studies suggest that these markers — known as correlates of protection — exist for Covid-19 vaccines. Research is underway to find them.

Clinical trials showed that the vaccine had an efficacy of 95 percent against the original version of the coronavirus. But a variant called Alpha, first identified in Britain, lowered the effectiveness to 89.5 percent.

Pfizer has begun a trial to test both options. Some volunteers who have already received two doses of their vaccine will get a third dose of the same shot as a booster. As part of the same trial, researchers will give other volunteers an experimental booster designed to protect against the Beta variant.

Dr. Hensley says it’s wise to prepare for the possibility that boosters will be needed. But he hoped that they didn’t become a distraction from the pressing need to get first doses to billions of people across the world.

The new restrictions have a disproportionate impact on Black and other minority voters. There is little comfort in the fact that these rules are much less restrictive than those in the olden days. The Jim Crow regime was constructed gradually.

Some of the areas that are addressed by H.R. 1, including protections for voting and provisions to limit gerrymandering, are also urgent, because the threats to electoral democracy are interlocking. Restricting participation in elections, and playing with district boundaries, both conduce to the election of more extreme politicians, who in turn are more likely to regard elections as purely partisan competitions waged without regard to the public interest.

Senators with hesitations about H.R. 1 need to put forward their own ideas for protecting the rights of voters. The power of the states to administer elections is unquestioned, but it is not unlimited. In a representative democracy, the legitimate power of the representatives cannot extend to acts designed to undermine democracy.

Every single thing people can do to slow transmission helps — including wearing masks, getting tested and avoiding crowded indoor spaces — especially given concerns about current and future variants, since it could be what gets us past the threshold into exponential decay.

As more and more people get vaccinated, people can gradually ease precautions while cases continue to decline. Keeping cases down gets easier over time until — and this is the beauty of vaccine-driven herd immunity — it’s almost effortless, once enough people are vaccinated, to keep cases sustainably low. That’s the power of exponential decay.