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Immediately after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, all corners of the political spectrum repudiated the mob of President Trump’s supporters. Yet within days, prominent Republicans, party officials, conservative media voices and rank-and-file voters began making a rhetorical shift to try to downplay the group’s violent actions.

“I heard that on antifa websites, people were invited to go to the rally and dress up like Trump supporters, but I’m not sure what to believe anymore,” she said. “There were people there only to wreak havoc. All I know is that there was a whole gamut of people there, but the rioters were not us. Maybe they were antifa. Maybe they were B.L.M. Maybe they were extreme right militants.”

But any window of reflection now seems to be closing as Republicans try to pass blame and to compare last summer’s lawlessness, which was condemned by Democrats, to an attack on Congress, which was inspired by Mr. Trump.

As Washington, D.C., and state capitals enact security measures, solo actors may pose a threat in coming weeks as extremist groups are advising followers to avoid large rallies but remain opposed to the incoming administration, according to people who track such groups.

Nonetheless, extremism watchdog groups and former law-enforcement officials say there is still a threat from lone-wolf extremists who are inspired by such groups. The far-right groups, which don’t accept the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump, could become more aggressive in the coming months after security is lowered, the watchdogs and ex-officials said.

“These are people that honestly are intent on doing what it is they’re going to do under the cover of darkness. They’re going to do it in a way that people are not going to see them coming.”

Dr. Zanon, who until the end of December was the medical director at a hospital in Como in Italy’s hard-hit Lombardy region, says when the pandemic arrived he didn’t have enough doctors and nurses. Intensive-care unit beds were scarce and there wasn’t a large network of local clinics to help take the strain. With money tight, technology used in the hospital had also fallen behind.

Per capita private and public spending on health care, adjusted for inflation, fell by 2.6% in Italy between 2009 and 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Greece, it plunged by almost a third. Health-care costs tend to rise faster than overall inflation, because of the rising health-care needs of aging populations as well as technological advances, so even keeping spending constant often requires cutting something, such as staff or services offered.

“There’s no doubt that if southern European countries had kept up with spending in recent years, their health-care systems would have had more capacity to respond to the pandemic and deaths would have been lower,” said Gavino Maciocco, a doctor and professor of public health at the University of Florence. “If you spend less, you will have worse outcomes for patients.”

Taiwan gets the gold medal for its coronavirus strategy. It has close ties with mainland China, where the disease originated, receiving almost 3 million visitors from there in a typical year. It is a densely populated land, and Taipei, the capital city, has crowded public transit. And yet, with a population of nearly 24 million, Taiwan has had just seven deaths. New York state, with a smaller population, has had 33,000.

SARS also came out of China, where authorities bungled the initial response and withheld information from the outside world. The Taiwanese were caught unprepared and made several mistakes. In the aftermath, they totally overhauled their pandemic preparedness procedures. They ensured they had adequate supplies of equipment on hand. They made plans to act early, smartly and aggressively.

Many Asia-Pacific countries have succeeded against covid-19 — South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. All were hit by SARS or witnessed its economic damage, and they learned from the experience. The only non-Asian country with a SARS outbreak was Canada, and it, too, changed its procedures after 2003 and took precautions.

Looking at decades of people’s answers to questions such as whether someone was “very happy,” they found that “money and prestige do appear to buy happiness, and more is continuously better.” But there is a kicker: This was not a stable finding.

In the 1970s, people with different amounts of money experienced similar levels of happiness. But over time a gap developed, one that turned into something of a chasm

Income inequality was not much of an issue in the early to mid-1970s, when the top 1 percent of households earned less than 10 percent of total income in the United States. But the income gap between the 1 percent and the rest is now at the highest level in 50 years,

pocalypse often feels inevitable. After all, aren’t we in the “sixth mass extinction”? Haven’t populations of wild animals already crashed by 60 percent? Don’t we have just “10 years left” to avert climate meltdown? Do we really dare to hope?

in every case, there is a path through.

framing can make extinction feel like a force too huge and powerful to avert.

Without the oil industry’s balance-sheets and project-management skills, it is hard to imagine the world building anything like enough wind farms, solar parks and other forms of clean energy to stop catastrophic global warming.

The question is no longer “whether” Big Oil has a big role to play in averting the climate crisis. It is “when”.

To cynics, all the climate-friendly noises amount to little in practice, since few people are ready to make carbon-cutting sacrifices that would force oil firms’ hand. But noises are sometimes followed by action. Should they be this time, the 2020s may be do-or-die for the oil industry.

the News Guild of New York — the union that represents 1200 New York Times employees — recently set out its goals for the newspaper, especially with respect to its employees of color. Money quote: “Our workforce should reflect our home. The Times should set a goal to have its workforce demographics reflect the make-up of the city — 24 percent Black, and over 50 percent people of color — by 2025.”

what I want to focus on is the core test the Guild uses to judge whether the Times is itself a racist institution. This is what I’ll call the Kendi test: does the staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?

systemic racism, according to Kendi, exists in any institution if there is simply any outcome that isn’t directly reflective of the relevant racial demographics of the surrounding area.

In my prior life as an insurance executive, it was my job to deceive Americans about their health care. I misled people to protect profits

That work contributed directly to a climate in which fewer people are insured, which has shaped our nation’s struggle against the coronavirus, a condition that we can fight only if everyone is willing and able to get medical treatment. Had spokesmen like me not been paid to obscure important truths about the differences between the U.S. and Canadian health-care systems, tens of thousands of Americans who have died during the pandemic might still be alive.

In 2007, I was working as vice president of corporate communications for Cigna.

State by state, neighborhood by neighborhood, black families pay 13 percent more in property taxes each year than a white family would in the same situation, a massive new data analysis shows.

Black-owned homes are consistently assessed at higher values, relative to their actual sale price, than white homes

To expose the structural and historical factors behind these discriminatory property tax assessments, the economists analyzed more than a decade of tax assessment and sales data for 118 million homes throughout the country.

Janet Yellen isn’t going to blow up the economy. Antony Blinken isn’t going to blow up the free world. Alejandro Mayorkas isn’t going to put kids in cages. All this promises to make 2021 better than 2020 purely by default.

so many rank-and-file Republicans refuse to accept that Trump lost fair-and-square is a very bad sign about the sanity — or lack thereof — of the party.

rump is going to skip the inauguration so that he can announce his next run for president is another bad sign for and about the party’s future. Together, they augur for the QAnonization of the G.O.P., which is just awful news for a democracy with a two-party system.

Now, as she prepares to face off against Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday and to play a starring role in the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Ms. Harris will be tested as a national leader and a voice of the party unlike ever before.

While President Trump spent months waging relentless attacks on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s mental acuity, lowering the bar for his opponent, Democrats have, by contrast, heralded Ms. Harris as a star prosecutor and talented debater, which carries its own set of risks.

Fiery exchanges have become a hallmark of Ms. Harris’s political career, and many Democrats are gleefully anticipating that her experience as a district attorney and a California attorney general means she will have no trouble holding Mr. Trump and his allies to account.

The economic collapse sparked by the pandemic is triggering the most unequal recession in modern U.S. history, delivering a mild setback for those at or near the top and a depression-like blow for those at the bottom, according to a Washington Post analysis of job losses across the income spectrum.

While the nation overall has regained nearly half of the lost jobs, several key demographic groups have recovered more slowly, including mothers of school-age children, Black men, Black women, Hispanic men, Asian Americans, younger Americans (ages 25 to 34) and people without college degrees.

White women, for example, have recovered 61 percent of the jobs they lost — the most of any demographic group — while Black women have recovered only 34 percent, according to Labor Department data through August.

I started interviewing 100+ experts -- several types of scientists, psychologists, therapists, activists, journalists, artists, and philosophers

They helped me gain a deep understanding of why there is nothing pathological about feeling eco-anxious; how psychiatric trauma sets in after fast moving climate disasters and slower moving ecological events; how social injustice - the kernel of climate change - affects emotional wellbeing; what individuals can do to cope when the dark scientific data in their head takes over; why the secret sauce for emotional resilience lies in community ties; and what kinds of system overhaul are needed to climate-proof the mental health system.

I also developed a critical awareness of how my own white, middle-class, cis-gendered, and able-bodied privilege was fuelling my eco-anxiety. My lack of personal experience with existential threats meant I had a lower reserve of existential resilience to rely on

Few of the 500-odd residents of the fishermen’s village will ever forget the freezing night of Jan. 13, 2012, when the Costa Concordia shipwrecked, killing 32 people and upending life on the island for years.

In no time, Giglio residents hosted thousands of journalists, law enforcement officers and rescue experts who descended on the port

On Thursday, 10 years to the day of the tragedy, the victims’ families, some passengers and Italian authorities attended a remembrance Mass and threw a crown of flowers onto the waters where the Costa Concordia had rested. At 9:45 p.m., the time when the ship ran aground, a candlelit procession illuminated the port’s quay while church bells rang and ship sirens blared.

These increases have been caused in part by the greater transmissibility of Omicron, which means more children are being infected with covid. But it is possible that the variant also poses a greater risk to youngster

The case-hospitalisation ratio in the last two weeks of December was 50% higher than in the two weeks before Omicron was first detected.

a near 50% increase in hospital admissions per 100,000 cases in children aged four or younger after the variant was first detected, and a 70% increase in unvaccinated children aged five to 11 (but a decrease in those over the age of 12).

Divorce spiked in the 1970s and 1980s among all groups but the “funny thing” that happened was that social learning took place among the better-educated third of the population. So while divorce and single parenting continued to rise for those with less education, it plunged in the 1990s and after among the educated. Their failure, I would argue, was not so much experimenting with other lifestyles as failing to share what they had learned—that kids desperately need the stability of two parents. It’s not that elites were failing to practice what they preached; it was instead, as Charles Murray put it, their failure to preach what they practiced.

None of the organs of popular culture—entertainment, teen magazines, books, or movies, which are overwhelmingly produced by elites—stress the importance of marriage

That said, it isn’t fair to hold elites entirely responsible for the life decisions of the rest of society. Average people have agency too, and if you’ve fathered three kids out of wedlock and hardly make your child support payments, it’s no excuse to say elites made the rules.

Post-Covid, the geopolitical order has been thrown into tumult. At the beginning of the pandemic, commentators wondered about the fate of the United States, its indifferent political leadership and its apparently diminished “state capacity.” Lately, they have focused more on the sudden weakness of China: its population in decline, its economy struggling more than it has in decades, its “zero Covid” reversal

the descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.

On the campaign trail and in office, promising a new prosperity, Boris Johnson used to talk incessantly about “leveling up.” But the last dozen years of uninterrupted Tory rule have produced, in economic terms, something much more like a national flatlining.

When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness.

A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.

In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.

a growing trend among Generation Z, loosely defined as people born between the years of 1996 and 2012. Equipped with ride-sharing apps and social media, “zoomers,” as they are sometimes called, are getting their driver’s licenses at lower rates than their predecessors. Unlike previous generations, they don’t see cars as a ticket to freedom or a crucial life milestone.

Those phases “are consistently getting later,” said Noreen McDonald, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gen Zers are more likely to live at home for longer, more likely to pursue higher education and less likely to get married in their 20s.

The trend is most pronounced for teens, but even older members of Gen Z are lagging behind their millennial counterparts. In 1997, almost 90 percent of 20- to 25 year-olds had licenses; in 2020, it was only 80 percent.