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On Wednesday, Kamala Harris will become the first woman, and the first woman of color, to serve as vice president of the United States.Twelve years ago, hundreds of thousands of people filled the National Mall to watch Barack Obama make history as the nation's first Black president.But when Harris takes the oath, the mall will very likely be nearly empty.

A surging pandemic had already led President-elect Joe Biden and Harris to urge supporters to watch the inauguration from home. Now, after a deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Trump, thousands of National Guard members have been deployed to protect the transfer of power against more violence. The brazen attempt to block Congress from certifying Biden and Harris' November election victory was unprecedented. But for Harris, the undercurrents of hate and racism it represented were not.

Why is it so important to you to stick with the planned ceremony and take the oath outside?I think that we cannot yield to those who would try and make us afraid of who we are.

Next week marks one year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first coronavirus case in the United States.Dr. Robert Redfield, the outgoing CDC director, has been heading the federal public health agency's response to the pandemic from the start.Redfield's departure on Wednesday, when President-elect Joe Biden will usher in a new administration, comes as a record surge in COVID-19 cases is sweeping across the country. The U.S. has far surpassed all other nations with more than 23 million virus-related cases and more than 391,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.But, even as the pandemic enters its deadliest stage yet, Redfield told NPR on Friday that the country is "about to be in the worst" months of the crisis.

When asked if the White House interfered with the CDC's work, Redfield said no. "There was review and comments by different agencies within the White House," he said. "But at the end of the day, the CDC published the guidance that we believe is the most important for the American public."

Why has the U.S. done so much worse than the rest of the world?I think this virus has a unique ability to have differential pathogenesis in different people. And what it really does is it exploits the underlying health condition of the individual it infects.

she told districts that were seeking guidance on how to operate during the coronavirus pandemic that it was not her responsibility to track school district infection rates or keep track of school reopening plans.

initiatives that rolled back civil rights protections for minority children

predatory for-profit colleges that saddle students with crushing debt while granting them useless degrees.

After removing guidance from its website acknowledging “airborne” transmission, the agency cited evidence that indoor air can carry virus-laden particles.

239 experts who study aerosols called on the W.H.O. to acknowledge that the coronavirus can be transmitted by air in any indoor setting and not just after certain medical procedures, as the organization had claimed.

The new advice instead says the virus can “sometimes be spread by airborne transmission” and can be spread by both larger droplets and smaller aerosols released when people “cough, sneeze, sing, talk, or breathe.”

A public option, but for banking. That’s what Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are proposing in a new bill unveiled on Friday.

would foster the creation of public banks across the country by providing them a pathway to getting started, establishing an infrastructure for liquidity and credit facilities for them via the Federal Reserve, and setting up federal guidelines for them to be regulated.

which theoretically would be more motivated to do public good and invest in their communities than private institutions, which are out for profit.

Under his leadership, though, the S.E.C. has made crypto a priority, nearly doubling its enforcement team to 50 members. In February, the agency levied a $100 million fine on the crypto lending company BlockFi over registration failures; BlockFi suspended operations this month as a result of its ties to FTX.

According to public filings, the agency is also investigating the process by which Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, chooses which cryptocurrencies to offer.

“There were a lot of entrepreneurs that grew up in this field and chose to be noncompliant,” Mr. Gensler said in an interview last month at the S.E.C. headquarters in Washington. “We will be a cop on the beat.”

Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers. 

Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.   

“White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.

Several rural scholars whose research was included in the book immediately denounced it

Ms. Lunz Trujillo excoriated the book in an opinion piece for Newsweek as “a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing” people unlike them.

there is a reason President Obama is leading on national security, and it was apparent in his U.N. speech last week, which showed a president who understands that we really do live in a more complex world today — and that saying so is not a cop-out. It’s a road map

Rather than really thinking afresh about the world, Romney has chosen instead to go with the same old G.O.P. bacon and eggs — that the Democrats are toothless wimps who won’t stand up to our foes or for our values, that the Republicans are tough and that it is 1989 all over again. That is, America stands astride the globe with unrivaled power to bend the world our way, and the only thing missing is a president with “will.” The only thing missing is a president who is ready to simultaneously confront Russia, bash China, tell Iraqis we’re not leaving their country, snub the Muslim world by outsourcing our Arab-Israel policy to the prime minister of Israel, green light Israel to bomb Iran — and raise the defense budget while cutting taxes and eliminating the deficit. It’s all “attitude” — without a hint at how we could possibly do all these contradictory things at once, or the simplest acknowledgment that two wars and a giant tax cut under George W. Bush has limited our ability to do even half of them.

Add it all up and it’s a world in which America will have greater responsibility (because our European and Japanese allies are now economically enfeebled) and fewer resources (because we have to cut the defense budget) to manage a more complex set of actors (because so many of the states we have to deal with now are new democracies with power emanating from their people not just one man — like Egypt — or failing states like Pakistan) where our leverage on other major powers is limited (because Russia’s massive oil and gas income gives it great independence and any war we’d want to fight in Asia we’d have to borrow the money from China).

in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play

Exclude Hungary from EU, says Luxembourg's Asselborn

Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn has called for Hungary to be suspended or even expelled from the European Union because of its "massive violation" of EU fundamental values.

"Hungary is not far away from issuing orders to open fire on refugees," he suggested.

Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit

The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after a devastating attack on its lorries near Aleppo on Monday.

Russia and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved.

The Chicago Police Department routinely violates civil rights, uses unnecessary force, discriminates against minority residents, and fails to hold officers accountable — creating a climate of distrust, violence, and fear that makes residents and cops unsafe. That’s according to a massive new report that the US Department of Justice released on Friday.

The investigation followed the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald, initially claimed that the black 17-year-old lunged at police officers and posed a dangerous threat. But a dashboard camera video released in 2015 showed that McDonald was at least 10 feet away from the officers and didn’t move toward police. The revelation worsened already-tense community relations with the police, leading the Justice Department to get involved in its biggest investigation of a local police department yet.

For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts.

The answer to the question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been to partition “Palestine” into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land; but that has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible.

The Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own.

Jews have no place in the Islamic world — except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule

Mississippi to join states’ suit against Obama’s transgender bathroom policy

Mississippi plans to back the 11 other states that filed a lawsuit Wednesday to block the Obama administration’s transgender bathroom policy at public schools

Texas is leading the lawsuit, and governors from Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Utah are also on board.

Obama plays a “long game.” The defining element of his global strategy is that it reflects the totality of U.S. interests — foreign and domestic — to project leadership in an era of finite resources and seemingly infinite demands.

For too many critics, the answer is almost always for the United States to do more of something and show “strength” by acting “tough,” though usually what that something is remains very vague. And doing more of everything is not a strategy.

The foreign policy debate, on the other hand, tends to be dominated by policy day traders — or flashy real estate developers — whose incentives are the opposite: achieving quick results by making a big splash, getting rewarded with instant judgments and reacting to every blip in the market.

The first sentence of his book: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.”

The last: “Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

“Believing he was the agent of God’s will, and acting with divine guidance, George W. Bush would lead the nation into two disastrous wars of aggression,” Mr. Smith writes. “Bush’s personalization of the war on terror combined with his macho assertiveness as the nation’s commander in chief,” he adds later, “were a recipe for disaster.”

Research suggests that children who attend church perform better in school, divorce less as adults and commit fewer crimes. Regular church attendees even exhibit less racial prejudice than their nonreligious peers.

These benefits apply broadly, across a range of faiths, so the phenomenon appears unrelated to doctrine or place

church attendance has fallen substantially among the members of the white working class in recent year

At least 12,472 refugees and migrants have arrived on Europe's shores since the beginning of 2017, according to the UN refugee agency -- only slightly less than the 12,587 Syrian refugees admitted by the US in all of last year.

The UK government recently announced it was halting a program to resettle lone refugee children, after 350 had been brought to Britain. Campaigners had hoped that 3,000 children would benefit from the scheme, introduced last year.

In November 2016, the Home Office issued new guidance barring unaccompanied refugees from Afghanistan, Yemen and Eritrea older than 12, who were living in the now-demolished "Jungle" camp at Calais in northern France, from entering the UK if they have no family there.