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Mr. Biden’s environmental policy proposals include a pledge to “prioritize strategies and technologies that reduce traditional air pollution in disadvantaged communities.

Douglas Buffington, the deputy attorney general of West Virginia, said the rule “represents a big win for West Virginia coal.”

“If they had been tightening it could have been a huge blow to the coal industry,” he said

Already, president-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is planning to move forward quickly in his first months in office to reinstate and strengthen many of the environmental rules rolled back by Mr. Trump

“We’re starting to see evidence that long-term exposure to air pollution — which disproportionately affects communities of color & low-income communities — is linked to COVID-19 death rates.”

Although the E.P.A.’s own staff scientists recommended tightening the current emissions rule, Mr. Wheeler said the scientific evidence was insufficient to merit doing so.

PM 2.5 pollution contributes to tens of thousands of premature deaths annually, and that even a slight tightening of controls on fine soot could save thousands of American lives

“There is a growing body of evidence that it is linked to neurological damage. And there is a growing body of evidence linking exposure of PM 2.5 to elevated levels of increased Covid morbidity.”

“The arguments against this rule are strong,” he said. “Even before that Harvard study there was very strong scientific evidence that stronger controls are merited. The Covid crisis reinforced that, but we didn’t need the Covid crisis to tell us that.”

The new rule retains a standard enacted in 2012, during the Obama administration. That rule limited the pollution of industrial fine soot particles — each about 1/30th the width of a human hair, but associated with heart attacks, strokes and premature deaths — to 12 micrograms per cubic meter

When E.P.A. scientists conducted that mandatory review, many concluded that if the federal government tightened that standard to about nine micrograms per cubic meter, more than 10,000 American lives could be saved a year.

The scientists wrote that if the rule were tightened to nine micrograms per cubic meter, annual deaths would fall by about 27 percent, or 12,150 people a year.

After the publication of that report, numerous industries, including oil and coal companies, automakers and chemical manufacturers, urged the Trump administration to disregard the findings and not tighten the rule

Biden's relief proposal now shifts to Congress, where it may change substantially as Democratic leaders transform it into a bill. They must decide whether they want to use a special legislative process called reconciliation, which would require only a simple majority of votes to pass the Senate -- eliminating the need for Republican support -- but would limit the provisions that could be included. Also, reconciliation also be used only sparingly each year.

In his speech Thursday night, Biden said he would like to work with members of both parties to enact his American Rescue Plan, indicating that he wants to go the traditional route, which would require the backing of at least 10 Republican senators.

Whatever leaders decide, the effort is expected to have an easier time passing in the House -- which approved a $3 trillion relief package last May that contained measures similar to those in Biden's plan -- even though Democrats now hold a slimmer majority there.

In coming weeks, senators will have their hands full with President Donald Trump's impeachment trial and with voting on the President-elect's Cabinet nominees, none of whom have been confirmed yet.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told The Washington Post on Thursday that people should get an additional $2,000 in stimulus checks on top of the $600 they received as part of the $900 billion relief package lawmakers passed last month -- more than the $1,400 top-off payment Biden is suggesting.

One of those senators is Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia. He has recently expressed doubts over providing $2,000 in stimulus payments, preferring a more targeted approach.

President-elect Joe Biden unveiled a $1.9 trillion relief package Thursday that included more stimulus payments and other direct aid, but don't expect to see those funds in your bank account anytime soon.

Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said he was being taken to the Matrosskaya Tishina federal prison, where Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch-turned-politician, served much of his prison sentence before he was pardoned in 2013.

And in a signal that Mr. Navalny’s detention could be an irritant for President-elect Joe Biden’s ties with Russia, incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan also called for Mr. Navalny’s release. Lawmakers have already called for measures to be taken against Moscow for Russia’s alleged hack of U.S. government computer systems, revealed last month.

“Judging by everything it allows Western politicians to think that they can distract attention from the deep crisis the liberal model of development has found itself in,” he said.

Moscow says it hasn’t received sufficient proof from European laboratories that the opposition leader had traces of a nerve agent in his system and says he could have been suffering from what Russian doctors called a metabolic imbalance, akin to a low-blood sugar attack.

Suburban and rural districts are much likelier to offer in-person learning than big urban ones, which more commonly serve poor and minority families.

53% of children from low-income families were learning entirely remotely, compared with 40% for those with the wealthiest parents.

young children have played little role in spreading the virus and are the least able to learn remotely.

“Teachers’ unions will have to be more responsible when they cannot point to someone in the White House who is saying: ‘You should inject yourself with bleach.’”

America in its early days was not a full democracy by any stretch of the imagination. The institution of chattel slavery remained a bedrock of our society, and much of our economy. The violent, forced seizure of Native American land was a cornerstone of the American ideal of “manifest destiny,” codified into policy through laws like the Indian Removal Act.

our republic did not arrive overnight.

There is nothing magical about our democracy that will rise up and save us. Building the democratic processes we cherish today took hard and dedicated work, and protecting them will take the hard and dedicated work of people who love this country.

t took a literal civil war to quash a violent white-supremacist insurrection, and then to extend basic rights to the formerly enslaved.

Even then, it would take decades of organizing to guarantee women the right to vote—and later basic reproductive freedom

It would take a labor movement to outlaw child labor, institute the 40-hour work week, establish a minimum wage, and create the weekend.

And it would take a civil-rights movement, a century after the Civil War, to end legal segregation and establish basic protections for Black people in this country.

The genius of our Constitution is not that it was ever sufficient (the Bill of Rights was not even included at first), but that it was modifiable—subject to constant improvement and evolution as our society progressed.

Our republic is like a living, breathing organism. It requires attention and growth to meet the needs of its population. And just as it can be strengthened, it can be corrupted, weakened, and destroyed.

Donald Trump was not elected in a vacuum. Inequality, endless wars, and the corruption of unaccountable elites are all common precursors to either violent revolutions or dramatic expansions of democracy.

President Joe Biden has been tasked with bringing us back from the brink. He will govern a country whose citizens no longer share the same basic reality. He will govern a country that has deep, unhealed wounds and layers of unresolved traumas. We must all work with him and with one another to heal those wounds and to resolve those traumas. The insurrection on January 6 tells us that we are almost out of time.

Will we follow Trump and his co-conspirators down the path of democratic breakdown, or choose instead the arduous route of democratic reform?

Those who plot, plan, or incite violence against the government of the United States must be held fully accountable. That includes not just conviction of the former president by the United States Senate, but removal of any lawmaker or law-enforcement officer who collaborated with the attackers.

We are doomed to repeat this cycle of instability and backsliding if we do not make a bold effort to reimagine our democracy—from our elections on down. We need to end the dominance of unchecked corporate money in our politics, remove the substantial barriers to voting for low-income communities and people of color, ban gerrymanders, and give full voting rights and self-government to the voters of Washington, D.C.

We must remove the antidemocratic elements from our system, including by eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, reforming the courts, abolishing the Electoral College, and moving toward a ranked-choice voting system.

political violence does not go away on its own. Violent clashes and threats to our democracy are bound to repeat if we do not address the structural inequities underlying them. The next Trump will be more competent, and more clever. The work to prevent the next catastrophes, which we should all be able to see coming, starts now.

On Tuesday, Biden is expected to follow his first-day actions by tackling family separation, the root causes of migration, and the legal immigration system.

The Senate is also expected to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas as Homeland Security secretary on Tuesday, after Monday night's vote was delayed due to weather.

Biden pledged to set up a task force focused on identifying and reunifying families separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration's controversial "zero tolerance" policy.

The task force will be chaired by the Department of Homeland Security secretary and work across the US government, along with partners, to find parents separated from their children under the former administration. CNN previously reported that first lady Jill Biden is expected to take an active role in the task force.

It will be charged with identifying all children separated from their parents or legal guardians on the southern border, facilitating and enabling the reunification of children with their families,

Lawyers are unable to reach the parents of 611 children who had been split from their families by US border officials between 2017 and 2018, according to the latest court filing in an ongoing family separation case.

"The Biden administration is committed to remedying this awful harm the Trump administration inflicted on families," a senior administration official said, calling the policy a "moral failure" and "national shame."

"The goal of the task force is one to identify, but two to make recommendations as to how the families can be united, taking into account the menu of options that exist under immigration law," the official said.

The administration plans to provide aid to the region to support initiatives combating corruption and revive the Central American minors program that had been ended by Trump and allows certain at-risk youths to live in the US, according to a senior administration official.

The policy, informally known as "Remain in Mexico," has left thousands of asylum seekers waiting in dangerous and deplorable conditions on the border.

The Biden administration has stopped new enrollments into the program, but has not disclosed its plans to address the thousands of migrants still waiting in Mexico, saying only that they will be taken into account as new systems are put in place.

"The situation at the border will not transform overnight," a senior administration official said. "This is in large part due to the damage done over the last four years,

The order will also call for a series of actions to restore the asylum system, which was drastically changed over the last four years and made it exceedingly difficult for migrants to be granted asylum in the US.

Like the other executive orders, it also seeks to reverse Trump-era policies that targeted low-income immigrants, including calling for a review of the public charge rule which makes it more difficult for immigrants to obtain legal status if they use public benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers.

It had an absurdist and knowing exuberance that appealed to both those who were intellectual slumming it as well as the mass market.

Victoria’s Secret understood the allure of the personal brand, hitting just at the moment before Instagram would transform the notion of fame.

By naming its Angels and promoting them as people and stars in their own right — by actually media-training them — they gave models power, profile and security.

All of which promised to serve as a springboard into the next stage of a career, not to mention making them more competitive with the actors who increasingly occupied the covers of glossy fashion magazines.

And Victoria’s Secret paid well: When Gisele Bündchen left the company in 2006, she was the highest paid model in the world, and, she told Refinery29 that Victoria’s Secret was 80 percent of her income.

The effect obscured the dark underside of the story: the crazy diets (no solid food for days before the show!) and fitness regimens (at least two workouts a day) that the models underwent in search of the elusive perfect body. (And there was that Jeffrey Epstein connection.) It pushed an unrealistic version of a woman’s body on the world.

the kind of arch, knowing performance of exaggerated femininity that the Angels were created to embody has neither ascended to the heavens or been consigned to hell, depending on your point of view.

Rather it still exists in the drag community (where, arguably, the antecedents of the Angels could be found all along), packaged for popular and positive consumption in the form of such shows as “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

crucially, unlike in Russia and Ukraine, central European countries largely avoided a situation where a few people walked off with the majority of the prized former state assets.

“Joining the EU was the key moment, not because of subsidies, but because of frameworks: anti-monopoly rules, environmental protection and so on,” says Grabski

In some countries in the region, these institutional frameworks are still under attack from governments, but the situation compared with neighbouring Ukraine, for example, where the courts, police and tax authorities are hopelessly dependent on political and big business interests, is incomparable

if there is one factory that symbolises both central Europe’s growth over the last three decades and the potential pitfalls going forward, it is not the Gdańsk shipyard but the Audi plant at Győr, in north-west Hungary.

Things took off when Hungary joined the EU in 2004 and could be integrated fully into the manufacturer’s supply chain. Today, Audi Hungaria is a modern-day capitalist version of a Soviet monogorod, or one-factory town. The vast complex on the outskirts of Győr is a set of nondescript white hangars linked by an internal road system, and the plant has its own restaurants, medical clinic, fire station and postal service.

Going forward, the key will be moving away from an economic model of western European countries outsourcing production to the east, and towards one that sees ideas and innovation developed inside the region. Only in this way, analysts say, will the countries of the region be able to fully close the gap in wealth and living standards with the other half of Europe. So far, however, there is little sign of the spending on research and development, or institutional reforms, that would be required for such a long-term shift

on average even the poorest parts of society are better off than they were 30 years ago, this is little comfort to those in former industrial areas or rural regions where there is an overwhelming sense of decay; indeed, that decay can feel ever more pressing when compared to the progress experienced in shinier areas

In the three decades since independence, the populations of all the region’s countries have shrunk. Latvia has lost more than a quarter of its population, Bulgaria and Romania around a fifth. With higher salaries a short and easy flight away, the process was inevitable. In parts of the region, this has led to chronic shortages of doctors and other skilled workers.

it’s worth acknowledging just how fast things have improved. Poland has moved from 25% of German income levels 30 years ago to 60% today. “You can’t expect Poles to completely catch up with Germans within one generation. It’s only natural for people to aspire to a good life as quickly as possible. But it’s just unrealistic for this to happen. The whole region has been the dark periphery of Europe for the last 1,000 years,”

About a year and a half ago, she joined a group called Mothering Justice that is working to expand the rights and wellbeing of women and families, particularly women of color who are often “last in line” to get rights or help

Add in the lingering effects of the housing crisis: The banks have regained profitability, but many low-income borrowers have not been made whole.

Since the 2008 housing crisis, Detroit has moved from being a majority homeowner city to being one that is majority renter. Indeed, the city’s much-touted economic recovery – after its emergence from bankruptcy in 2014 — has bypassed many of the city’s neighborhoods.

But women like Dumas could be influential voters in the 2020 US election. African American women constitute the most loyal block of Democratic voters, with 94% voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mothering Justice plans to magnify their members’ sway. Each one is being asked to identify 50 friends and family in her “electoral universe” who may need an extra push, according to Atkinson. They will start nudging them in January.

The WHO estimates one out of every 10 medical products in low- and middle-income countries, which includes most of Africa, is sub-standard or fake.

Analysis by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the WHO estimates substandard and fake anti-malarial drugs could be causing 116,000 extra deaths from the disease every year in sub-Saharan Africa at a cost to patients and health systems of on average $38.5m a year.

Fake medicine can often be indistinguishable from the real products, with the packaging as good if not better than the original.

There's also an issue with the cost of drugs in poorer countries. "If a good quality medicine from a known supplier is too expensive, people may try a cheaper one from an unlicensed supplier," the WHO says.

there was no indication that helping the unemployed deterred workers from taking jobs when they became available

Reagan-style hostility to helping people in need also persisted. There were some politicians and economists who kept insisting, in the teeth of the evidence, that aid to unemployed workers was actually causing unemployment, by making workers unwilling to accept job offers.

Over all, however — and somewhat shockingly — U.S. economic policy actually responded fairly well to the real needs of a nation forced into lockdown by a deadly virus. Aid to the unemployed and business loans that were forgiven if they were used to maintain payrolls limited the suffering. Direct checks sent to most adults weren’t the best targeted policy ever, but they boosted personal incomes.

Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that the most terrifying words in English are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

the employment surge from April to July, in which nine million Americans went back to work, took place while enhanced benefits were still in effect.

Interest rates stayed low, while inflation remained quiescent

The only problem was that it cut off help too soon. Extraordinary aid should have continued as long as the coronavirus was still rampant — a fact implicitly acknowledged by bipartisan willingness to enact a second rescue package

What we should have learned last spring is that adequately funded government programs can greatly reduce poverty. Why forget that lesson as soon as the pandemic is over?

Opposition to helping the unemployed and the poor was never evidence-based; it was always rooted in a mix of elitism and racial hostility. So we’ll still keep hearing about the miraculous power of tax cuts and the evils of the welfare state.

what we should fear most is a government that refuses to do its job.

it has become much tougher for either to amass a commanding Senate majority.

The fact that neither side will control more than 52 seats after Tuesday means that either party has held at least 55 Senate seats in only three congressional sessions since 2000.

some observers believe that the narrow Senate division certain to emerge from Tuesday's election will encourage a return to bipartisan deal-making, like the agreement between centrist Republican and Democratic senators that helped break the months-long stalemate over Covid economic relief legislation.

The narrow majorities have also contributed to a Senate that has grown more rigid, with much more partisan conflict and less of the ad hoc bipartisan deal-making that characterized the body through the second half of the 20th century. The Senate will mark a new high -- or low -- in its rising partisanship on Wednesday when about a quarter or more of Republican senators will vote against recognizing Democrat Joe Biden's election as president

So I think the closeness of it -- whether it's 52-48 or 50-50 or 51-49 -- is probably good for him and good for the country, because he is going to know how to deal in that type of a Senate."

almost all of the senators in both parties who had won their split-ticket victories in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races lost their seats in the next midterm elections (2014 and 2018, respectively).

other observers note that the narrow Senate majorities of recent years have, in practice, produced very few bipartisan compromises.

With control constantly at risk, the majority party faces heightened pressure for lockstep unity, while the minority party never has much incentive to help the majority burnish its record with bipartisan accomplishments that could buttress its advantage in the next election.

Whatever the results of Tuesday's Georgia elections between Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively, those polarizing dynamics are guaranteed to remain in force, because the party that falls into the minority now will remain close enough to immediately begin plotting how to recapture the majority in 2022

The huge Democratic Senate majorities that persisted from the late 1950s through the mid-1990s were rooted in the party's continued dominance of Senate seats from Southern states that routinely voted Republican for president, notes Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. But over the past generation, it has become much more difficult for either party to win Senate seats in states that usually vote the other way in presidential elections.

As recently as 2008, six Senate candidates (five Democrats and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine) won election in states that supported the other side's presidential candidate. In 2012, four Democrats and Republican Dean Heller of Nevada won Senate races in states that voted the other way for president.

in 2016, for the first time since the direct election of senators around World War I, the same party won the Senate and the presidential race in every state.

the meager three majorities of 55 seats or more since 2000 represent the fewest times that any party has accumulated at least 55% of the Senate seats over a 20-year span since the turn of the 20th century, according to official Senate records.

The "return of GOP South and decline in split-ticket voting and increased nationalization of US politics generally" explains "a good amount of the decline in Senate majority margins in recent decades," notes Binder.

Over the past two presidential elections, 20 states have voted both times against Trump; Democrats now hold fully 39 of their 40 Senate seats, all but Collins' in Maine. But 25 states have voted both times for Trump, and Republicans now hold 47 of their 50 seats, all but Joe Manchin's in West Virginia, Jon Tester's in Montana and Sherrod Brown's in Ohio.

In the five states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) that backed Trump in 2016 but switched to Biden in 2020, Democrats now hold six Senate seats and Republicans two, pending the results in Georgia

from 1981 through 2000, Democrats held at least 55 seats in four sessions, while Republicans reached that level of control in three

One party also controlled at least 55% of the Senate seats (which were fewer than 100 at that point because there were fewer states) in eight of the 10 congressional sessions from 1921 through 1940 and seven of the 10 from 1901 through 1920. Only the 1950s saw anything like today's precarious balances: While Democrats controlled at least 55% of the seats four times from 1941 to 1950, neither side reached that level through four consecutive sessions beginning in 1951, until Democrats broke through with big gains in the 1958 election.

Unless Republicans win both of Tuesday's runoffs, the party controlling the Senate will hold a majority of two seats or fewer. That would mark the fifth time since 2000 that the majority party held such a narrow advantage.

Again, the growing correlation between presidential and Senate outcomes may be a key factor in the shift. Pending the Georgia results, only three senators in each party represent states that supported the other side's presidential candidate this year. That means the vast majority of Democratic senators have a strong electoral incentive to support Biden --and the vast majority of Republican senators have a comparable incentive to oppose him.

Breaux, the former Democratic senator, believes the narrow balance of power can overcome that centrifugal pressure by providing small groups of relatively centrist deal-makers from each party the leverage to build majority legislative coalitions.

"You can form coalitions starting in the middle and then moving out on each side until you create a majority," he says.

But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, where Black students said they had long been subjected to ridicule. “Go pick cotton,” some said they were told in class by white students.

The use of the slur by a Heritage High School student was not shocking, many said. The surprise, instead, was that Ms. Groves was being punished for behavior that had long been tolerated.

The Loudoun County suburbs are among the wealthiest in the nation, and the schools consistently rank among the top in the state.

In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs.

A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a “growing sense of despair” among students of color, some of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white students.

“It is shocking the extent to which students report the use of the N-word as the prevailing concern,” the report said. School system employees also had a “low level of racial consciousness and racial literacy,” while a lack of repercussions for hurtful language forced students into a “hostile learning environment,” it said.

In the wake of the report’s publication, the district in August released a plan to combat systemic racism. The move was followed by a formal apology in September for the district’s history of segregation.

Mr. Galligan recalled being mocked with a racial slur by students and getting laughed at by a white classmate after their senior-year English teacher played an audio recording of the 1902 novella “Heart of Darkness” that contained the slur.During that school year, Mr. Galligan said, the same student made threatening comments about Muslims in an Instagram video. Mr. Galligan showed the clip to the school principal, who declined to take action, citing free speech and the fact that the offensive behavior took place outside school. “I just felt so hopeless,” Mr. Galligan recalled.

Ms. Groves said the video began as a private Snapchat message to a friend. “At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” she said in a recent interview, adding that the slur was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”

“It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth,” Mimi Groves said of her video. “How can you convince somebody that has never met you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?

Ms. Groves said racial slurs and hate speech were not tolerated by her parents, who run a technology company and had warned their children to never post anything online that they would not say in person or want their parents and teachers to read.

The day after the video went viral, Ms. Groves tried to defend herself in tense calls with the university. But the athletics department swiftly removed Ms. Groves from the cheer team. And then came the call in which admissions officials began trying to persuade her to withdraw, saying they feared she would not feel comfortable on campus.

“We just needed it to stop, so we withdrew her,” said Mrs. Groves, adding that the entire experience had “vaporized” 12 years of her daughter’s hard work. “They rushed to judgment and unfortunately it’s going to affect her for the rest of her life.”

Since the racial reckoning of the summer, many white teenagers, when posting dance videos to social media, no longer sing along with the slur in rap songs. Instead, they raise a finger to pursed lips. “Small things like that really do make a difference,” Mr. Galligan said.

Mr. Galligan thinks a lot about race, and the implications of racial slurs. He said his father was often the only white person at maternal family gatherings, where “the N-word is a term that is thrown around sometimes” by Black relatives. A few years ago, he said his father said it aloud, prompting Mr. Galligan and his sister to quietly take him aside and explain that it was unacceptable, even when joking around.

For his role, Mr. Galligan said he had no regrets. “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened,” he said. And because the internet never forgets, the clip will always be available to watch.

“I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction. “You taught someone a lesson.”

“We need more direct relief flowing to families, small businesses, including finishing the job of getting people that $2,000 in relief direct payment—$600 is simply not enough,” he said.

Mr. Biden also pointed to historically low interest rates and the Federal Reserve’s limited ability to support credit to small businesses and municipalities as reasons to tolerate higher deficit spending to support economic growth.

you should be investing significant amounts of money right now to grow the economy,

Mr. Biden also said Mr. Trump was unfit to serve as president and that it was a good thing he wasn’t planning on attending his Jan. 20 inauguration. He said he would welcome Vice President Mike Pence to the event.

Mr. Trump said on Twitter hours before Mr. Biden’s appearance that he would not attend, breaking precedent with past outgoing presidents.

Mr. Biden also praised Republicans like Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for standing up to the president’s efforts to overturn the election result. Mr. Biden said Wednesday’s riot made his job of unifying the country easier in some ways since some Republicans were distancing themselves from Mr. Trump.

They were moved into an unfamiliar setting, their belongings whittled down to a few pieces of clothing and mementos thrown in a plastic bag; a new set of masked nurses came in and out of their rooms. Only a handful of residents had cellphones, so Danielle used her own to help residents use FaceTime with family members and friends.

“Nursing homes are really little hospitals, yet they’re not staffed like it. If you asked an I.C.U. nurse to take care of 15 people, she’d laugh at you, but that’s essentially what we have,” Chris Laxton, the executive director of AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, told me.

At the same time, many of these caregivers “are making $12 or $13 an hour,”

workers probably helped spread the virus from facility to facility, home to home.

The numbers of those testing positive in the surrounding community went up by a factor of 100 compared with in the summer. At Brendan House, one positive case “turned into 10, then 50. Before you know it, we had 54 people in our long-term area who were Covid-positive and only three residents who were not positive,” a certified nursing assistant told me.

But if now is not the time, when, and under what conditions, should nursing homes and assisted-living facilities be held accountable for the welfare of their residents and workers?

Factor in the risk of getting sick and dying, and retention, let alone recruitment, becomes far more difficult. In 2020, direct caregiving may have been the most dangerous job in America.

Joe Biden is about the age of the average nursing home resident. Over the summer, he announced a $775 billion proposal to provide care for children, seniors and people with disabilities. The plan, though notional at this point, would eliminate the 800,000-person waiting list for long-term care under Medicaid and pay for 150,000 new community health workers for seniors. It could also help transform millions of low-wage, high-turnover, often transient gigs into stable careers.

C.M.S. must ensure that the $264 billion paid by Medicaid and Medicare to long-term-care providers actually goes to caregiving, instead of shiny new buildings or executive pay.

To improve residents’ quality of life, the government should mandate that long-term-care facilities have appropriate staffing.

In addition, Mr. Biden must reverse Mr. Trump’s laissez-faire approach to this sector. Both C.M.S. and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be given the resources they need to inspect, investigate and fine providers for health and workplace violations. The incoming administration must also strengthen workers’ rights to organize and protest unsafe conditions under the National Labor Relations Act, as it has already promised to do.

“There are jobs that offer $45 per hour to do Covid testing,” she said. As if to nudge her out the door, her nursing home was recently purchased by a large corporation, nullifying the union contract, and management reneged on the promise of holiday bonuses.

Criticism about the lack of clarity on the data that the regulator examined came swiftly after the two vaccines were authorized for emergency use.

has been found to be safe.”

Already the effort has faced setbacks. The Serum Institute, an Indian drug maker that struck a deal to produce the Oxford vaccine even before its effectiveness had been proven, has managed to make only about one-tenth of the 400 million doses it had committed to manufacturing before the end of the year.

The Serum Institute says it is on track to increase production of the vaccine, which is known as Covishield in India.

Initially, the Serum Institute signed a pact with AstraZeneca to make one billion doses of the vaccine for low-and-middle-income countries.

Pending approval of the vaccine by the World Health Organization, Serum will begin supplying other developing nations with doses at manufacturing cost, Mr. Sen said.

India plans to begin a vaccination campaign in the first three months of the year that will cover about one-quarter of the population by August. The first 30 million people inoculated will be health care providers, then police and other frontline workers.

India’s first mass vaccination took place in 1802, to fight smallpox. Subsequent efforts suffered from misinformation and slow acceptance.

government officials aimed information campaigns at religious leaders, helping to nearly eradicate the disease.

The government plans to use the framework of its universal immunization program for pregnant women and newborns — one of the largest and cheapest public health interventions in the world.

India may have to double the number of health workers from the current 2.5 million, said Thekkekara Jacob John, a senior virologist in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

A 3% mortgage might end up in a 2% pool. That’s because to further standardize the loan, parts of the interest go to pay for other transformation services.

In an economy where lots of people are missing payments, that can bite. The surge in payment deferrals during the pandemic, for example, fell hard on servicers.

A big way rate risk manifests is that speed at which people prepay. This in turn can affect what investors are willing to pay, because securities derived from those mortgages essentially become shorter-lived. So even as originators enjoy the benefits of volume when lots of people are refinancing, they might earn less when selling mortgages. Of course, when the Federal Reserve is buying mortgage securities, and when rates on other fixed-income assets are so low, originators’ profits selling mortgages can remain quite large.

Of course, such a move in the United States would immediately run afoul of long-established laws stemming from Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which set up the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) to adjudicate race-based hiring, firing and promotional grievances. Seminal cases such as Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green (1973) and Hazelwood School District v. United States (1977), among many others, served to advance the legal structure through which American companies now deal with matters of race and equity in the workplace

Over time, these lawsuits gave EEO policies more teeth by defining a legal framework for ensuring workplace protections. They also forced companies to rewrite or get rid of unfair employment policies and practices.

However, the cruel irony of America's efforts to curb workplace discrimination is that once Title VII forcibly removed race from the hiring equation, it immediately became that much harder to enact programs to address systemic racism in ways that might be beneficial, which is why our country's long attempts at promoting affirmative action programs ultimately failed.

No matter how we got here, the current system is clearly not working; White males still account for the majority of executive positions. Among the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, only 1% are Black.

America has a diversity problem, and our largest corporations need to embrace bold new models about how to accelerate social and racial justice within their ranks.

CEOs should start by stripping down America's foundational myth of meritocracy -- the notion that one's ability to get ahead in life is solely a function of the combined strength of their efforts and abilities -- and approach corporate recruiting from a new angle.

Several corporate programs, such as Starbucks' College Achievement Plan, have taken steps to make higher education more accessible for employees, but fall short of addressing the social, environmental and economic vectors that impinge upon disadvantaged youths.

What if growing up in a low-income, single-parent household, instead of being seen as an impediment to climbing the social ladder, positioned high-potential young teens for corporate-sponsored talent development programs that would support them from junior high, through high school and college and into the sponsor's corporate ranks? Such a program executed at scale would invariably lift up disadvantaged White youths as well, but that would be a feature, not a bug, making the entire initiative less controversial.

Despite the controversy around the decision, the Trajanos are not wavering. "We want to see more Black Brazilians in positions of leadership in Magalu; this diversity will make us a better company, capable of delivering a better return to our shareholders," Frederico Trajano wrote in a recent article.

"Today the racial make-up of Brazil is over 50% Black and Brown -- it basically looks like what the United States is projected to look like by 2050," observed Frederico Trajano in a recent Zoom interview with me. "American CEOs of large companies would be well-served by looking at what we are doing down here in Brazil on many fronts, including how to ensure that a company's leadership team better reflects the public it serves."

Here in the United States, Americans just elected the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, herself the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, as vice president

American CEOs should look south, and take their cues on racial justice from a bold businesswoman and her son from Brazil.

Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?

My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real.

In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.

This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny.

We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”

While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.

In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.

In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending.

Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.

People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers.

The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.

conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools

For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have

For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals

If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set

He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source.

The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking.

That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it

second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.