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the school or lawyers for those who said Sandusky victimized them.

The settlements, including the one covering the 1971 allegation, were reached after Sandusky's 2012 conviction. But few details have been provided on the payouts by eithe

The university has paid out more than $90 million to settle more than 30 civil claims involving Sandusky, now 72 and serving a lengthy prison sentence for the sexual abuse of 10 children. The trial involved only allegations dating as far back as the mid-1990s.

The insurers cited an allegation that a boy had told the longtime Penn State football coach in 1976 that he had been molested by Sandusky. The court document also cited statements, from those claiming they had been Sandusky's victims, that two unidentified assistant coaches had said they witnessed inappropriate contact between Sandusky and children in the late 1980s.

Barron said those allegations, and others raised in some news reports in recent

days, are "unsubstantiated and unsupported by any evidence other than a claim by an alleged victim.""Coach Paterno is not alive to refute them. His family has denied them," Barron said.

Sue Paterno, who has defended her husband's legacy and said the family had no knowledge of new claims, also called for an end to what she called "this endless process of character assassination by accusation."

In 2001, Paterno told high-ranking university officials one of his assistant coaches reported seeing Sandusky acting inappropriately with a child in a team shower. In 2011, Paterno told a grand jury he did not know of any other incidents involving Sandusky, who retired from Penn State in 1999.

She went on to say that the prestigious and exclusive Penn Law Review had a “diversity mandate,” and that some black students face an “uphill battle” because they aren’t properly matched to the high-level school. “We’re not saying they shouldn’t go to college – we’re not saying that,” she said. “I mean, some of them shouldn’t.”

Wax would not talk with the Forward on the record about the controversy. But she did write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week pointing out that Ruger had not actually released data that would have proved her right or wrong – which the petition itself also asked for – and called on him to do so.

She also claimed in a return appearance to Bloggingheads last week that she was a mentor to black students and had never received a bias complaint until last year, and that Penn’s blind grading process prevents her from knowing which grade she is giving to which students until the semester ends.

She also admitted that she did not have data that could prove her original statement about class rank correct.

In an 2015 article explaining her opposition to affirmative action programs, Wax described her childhood as “part of a close-knit, observant, conservative Jewish family in a predominantly Catholic town….Although it was common in our culture to complain a lot — about friends, relatives, business partners, bad luck, and the general cluelessness of non-Jews—we were not permitted to complain that anti-Semitism and discrimination were standing in our way. We knew discrimination was out there, but the discussion was limited to anti-Semitism as a general social problem rather than as a stumbling block in individual lives.”

Her 2009 book “Race, Wrongs and Remedies” argued that cultural-behavioral issues, not racism, are the most important factors preventing African-American progress. Such statements have garnered criticism from black Penn students as far back as 2005.

Nonetheless, according to RateMyProfessors.com, Wax has received mostly high marks from her students in recent years, though one commenter described her as someone who is “obsessed with her own victimization at the hands of forces she believes deserve blame for being victims themselves” but is nonetheless a “decent instructor when she can just stick to the course content.”

But for Penn students, especially students of color, the decision to remove Wax from her introductory class was the right one. “It’s been incredible to see how black students and alumni came together, grappled with how to handle this, and moved to create a change, and I hope that it continues,” the president of Penn’s Black Law Students Association, Nick Hall, told Philly.com.

Wax, for her part, sees her experience as part of an ominous trend, which could especially affect Jewish students. “Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left,” Wax wrote in an email to the Forward. She added that such pressures were especially powerful on female students. “Things were so much better in the 1970s, when I was a young women undergraduate at Yale. I am grateful to have come of age during that period. I wouldn’t want to be an undergraduate at an elite college today.”

Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez noted how the U.S. government sought Guzman's extradition as early as June 16, before he escaped for a second time from a Mexican prison in July.

In an interview conducted for Rolling Stone magazine three months after he escaped from prison, he touted his drug trade, saying he "supplies more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world."

He spent hours talking to actor Sean Penn, who interviewed him for the magazine during a secret meeting in the Mexican jungle. He answered followup questions several weeks later while still on the run, the magazine said. Guzman received the followup questions through an intermediary and answered them in a videotape he sent to Penn.

The article posted online Saturday includes a blunt admission about his intricate dealings in the cartel world. "I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats," Guzman told Penn.

When he was not bragging about his drug trade during his time on the run, the kingpin was trying to make a movie deal.

Police and the military successfully hunted down Guzman and his henchmen this week partly because he or his representatives contacted filmmakers about making an El Chapo biopic, Attorney General Gomez said.

"Another important aspect that allowed us to pinpoint his location was having discovered Guzman Loera's intention to film a biographical movie through establishing communication with actors and producers, which formed a new line of investigation," Gomez said.

Hollywood will likely make a movie or even a series about El Chapo, as it has about other drug lords, such as Colombia's Pablo Escobar in "Narcos."But for now, Guzman won't have a direct hand in any.

His efforts to develop a biopic ends in a scene with an interesting twist: After six months on the lam, Guzman is now back in the same maximum security prison from which he escaped, according to a Mexican law enforcement official with knowledge of the case.

His ability to elude authorities was due in large part to the support he has among rank-and-file Mexicans. He was also able to pay off local government and military authorities and spread largesse.

“It makes us sad because he is a good guy and gives us security,” said Los Mochis resident Mariana Ocampo, 21.

In the end, it wasn't exhaustive Mexican detective work, nor sophisticated U.S. intelligence, that exposed Guzman's whereabouts. It was ego and a chance at Hollywood.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Arely Gomez said Guzman had been in talks to produce a movie about his life.

“He established communication with actors and producers, which has formed a new line of investigation,” she said in a late-night news conference as Guzman was being transported from Los Mochis.

One of those contacts was apparently actor Sean Penn, who revealed in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone, published Saturday, that he had held a secret interview with Guzman in October at his jungle hide-out in Mexico.

Surrounded by the drug lord's armed security troops, Guzman told Penn of his daring prison escape, in an interview translated by Kate del Castillo, an actress who had famously played a drug trafficker in a Mexican soap opera.

“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,” he boasted. “I don't want to be portrayed as a nun.”

Gomez said authorities were able to track Guzman's meetings with lawyers and other associates and were close to capturing him in October, apparently after his meeting with Penn. He had been spied by helicopter, she said, but was accompanied by two women and a child, and so security forces decided not to engage.

Gomez also gave new details about Guzman's summer escape, saying his brother-in-law, two pilots and tunnel engineers were involved. Once he made it through the tunnel, on a motorcycle speeding over specially built rails, he was whisked to an airfield where his airplane and a decoy took off in the night.

In a statement Saturday afternoon, the Mexican government announced the beginning of extradition proceedings that would set the stage for Guzman to face trial in the United States.

The proceedings are in response to two formal extradition requests from the U.S. government for crimes including murder, money laundering and arms possession, according to the statement.

During her conversation with the DP, Wax emphasized that her view was not meant to imply the superiority of white people specifically. “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she said. “The irony is: bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”

Wax has previously fielded criticism for a 2013 lecture she gave at Middlebury College, “Diverging Family Structure by Class and Race: Economic Hardship, Moral Deregulation or Something Else?” Her lecture pointed out the declining marriage rate among minorities and “indicated that family construction among blacks is on average characterized by higher divorce rates, higher rates of extra-marital fatherhood and multiple partner fertility,” according to a recap in the Middlebury student newspaper.

“Enduring injuries to human capital are now the most destructive legacy of racism,” Wax wrote in the WSJ article. “Evidence suggests that soft behavioral factors, including low educational attainment, poor socialization and work habits, paternal abandonment, family disarray, and non-marital childbearing, now loom larger than overt exclusion as barriers to racial equality.”

At Penn, Wax has previously drawn sharp rebukes from her colleagues for taking a stance against same-sex marriage. According to a DP article from June 2006, Wax expressed support for “Ten Principles On Marriage and the Public Good,” a report that, among other things, called for marriage to be defined as solely between a man and a woman.

In the previous year, she penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, headlined “Some Truths About Black Disadvantage,” which spawned criticism from the Black Law Students Association at the time.

Some members of the audience greeted Wax with signs proclaiming “racist” and, after the lecture, Margaret Nelson, a Middlebury sociology professor, told the student paper that “students of color were being attacked and felt attacked.”

Wax knows her beliefs are not typically shared with students at elite, Ivy League universities, whom she told the DP can be "totally clueless, out of touch and oblivious."

The fraternity members did not call for an ambulance until 10:48 a.m. on Feb. 3, the documents said – nearly 12 hours after Mr. Piazza’s ordeal began.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

If that comparison sounds overwrought, consider the words of Denny Gioia, a management professor at Penn State who, in the early 1970s, was the coordinator of product recalls at Ford. At the time, the Ford Pinto was showing a tendency to explode when hit from behind, incinerating passengers. Twice, Gioia and his team elected not to recall the car—a fact that, when revealed to his M.B.A. students, goes off like a bomb. “Before I went to Ford I would have argued strongly that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall,” he wrote in the Journal of Business Ethics some 17 years after he’d left the company. “I now argue and teach that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall. But, while I was there, I perceived no strong obligation to recall and I remember no strong ethical overtones to the case whatsoever.”

Executives are bombarded with information. To ease the cognitive load, they rely on a set of unwritten scripts imported from the organization around them. You could even define corporate culture as a collection of scripts.

back to Volkswagen. You cannot unconsciously install a “defeat device” into hundreds of thousands of cars. You need to be sneaky, and thus deliberate.

The most troubling thing, says Vaughan, is the way scripts “expand like an elastic waistband” to accommodate more and more divergence.

Embarrassed and unable to overturn the script they themselves had built in the preceding years, Morton-Thiokol’s brass buckled. The “no launch” recommendation was reversed to “launch.”

“It’s like losing your virginity,” a NASA teleconference participant later told Vaughan. “Once you’ve done it, you can’t go back.” If you try, you face a credibility spiral: Were you lying then or are you lying now?

Scripts are undoubtedly efficient. Managers don’t have to muddle through each new problem afresh, Gioia wrote, because “the mode of handling such problems has already been worked out in advance.” But therein lies the danger. Scripts can be flawed, and grow more so over time, yet they discourage active analysis

the final decision to deceive was, on an individual level, rational—the logical end to a long sequence.

This sequence of events fits a pattern that appears and reappears in corporate-misconduct cases, beginning with the fantastic commitments made from on high.

All of which placed personnel in a position of extreme strain.

We know what strain does to people. Even without it, they tend to underestimate the probability of future bad events. Put them under emotional stress, some research suggests, and this tendency gets amplified. People will favor decisions that preempt short-term social discomfort even at the cost of heightened long-term risk. Faced with the immediate certainty of a boss’s wrath or the distant possibility of blowback from a faceless agency, many will focus mostly on the former.

What James Burke, Johnson & Johnson’s CEO, did was anticipate the possible results of these pressures, well before they built up. He shared Henry James’s “imagination of disaster.” And it’s why he introduced, if you will, a set of counterscripts. It was a conscious effort to tinker with the unconscious criteria by which decisions at his company were made. The result was an incremental descent into integrity, a slide toward soundness, and the normalization of referencing “Our Credo” in situations that might otherwise have seemed devoid of ethical content.

This reaction isn’t excusable. But it is predictable.

What we know of Ferdinand Piëch, Volkswagen’s chairman before the scandal, is that he was no James Burke. At a 2008 corruption trial that sent one VW executive to jail, Piëch referred to alleged widespread use of VW funds on prostitutes as mere “irregularities,” and chided a lawyer for mispronouncing Lamborghini. (“Those who can’t afford one should say it properly” were his precise words.) This was around the time the emissions cheating began.

“Culture starts at the top,” a businessman recently said in an interview with the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. “But it doesn’t start at the top with pretty statements. Employees will see through empty rhetoric and will emulate the nature of top-management decision making … A robust ‘code of conduct’ can be emasculated by one action of the CEO or CFO.”

Just two blocks away, a big order of tacos was picked up after midnight on Jan. 8 by a man driving a white van, like the one believed to be driven by Mr. Guzmán’s associates, witnesses said.

Hours later, on a highway heading out of town, the authorities finally got Mr. Guzmán, arguably the most powerful drug dealer in the history of the trade, for the third time since 1993.

Mr. Guzmán’s capture — described using information from interviews with witnesses and government officials, police reports, military video and Mexican news reports confirmed by officials — brings to a close, for now, one of the most exhaustive manhunts the Mexican government has conducted, an endeavor that drew in more than 2,500 people across the nation.

As the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Mr. Guzmán is the embodiment of an identity the country has fought to shed for decades.

Either way, Mr. Guzmán represents a deep crisis for Mexico’s leaders as they struggle to define the country’s image.

His daring escape from prison last July, in view of the video camera in his cell, cast a lurid spotlight on the incompetence and corruption that has long dogged the Mexican state, driving many to view the government on a par with criminals.

El Chapo’s image, by contrast, seemed only to grow after his escapes. Perhaps more than the infamy he gained as a cartel chief — responsible for shipping tons of drugs to more than 50 countries around the world, with a wider reach than even Pablo Escobar in his heyday — Mr. Guzmán has earned a reputation as the world’s pre-eminent escape artist.

During the 17 months Mr. Guzmán was locked up, he met often with associates, not only to plan his legal defense, but also to plot his escape, Mexican officials said. His men purchased land within sight of the prison, constructing an outer wall and an unfinished building on the site. From there, a mile away, the digging began.

The Mexican authorities were monitoring the phones of Mr. Guzmán and his accomplices, reading the odd and unexpectedly tender exchanges between him and the actress. Mr. Guzmán promised to protect Ms. del Castillo as he would his own eyes, an affectionate phrase Mexican parents often say of their children.

Six days later, a detachment of marines swept in to capture Mr. Guzmán on his ranch, acting with information from American authorities. During the raid, Mr. Guzmán, who always took his two cooks with him wherever he went, darted into a gully as he fled, injuring his face and leg.

In the following weeks, operations continued in and around areas under Mr. Guzmán’s control. The brutal weather of an approaching winter also concerned the cartel leader — Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, where life could be more comfortable, was under constant surveillance. He needed to go somewhere outside his traditional zone of influence.

The government, aware that Mr. Guzmán was planning a trip to an urban center, followed one of his associates to a house in Los Mochis, on a busy road with a movie theater, restaurants and shopping nearby.

A commander ordered one of the marines to toss a grenade in front of one of the many doors blocking their advance. As the mission continued, two marines advanced down another hallway, pressing cautiously toward a staircase used by the surviving gunmen to escape to the roof, drawing fire away from the interior of the house.

After the marines arrived, Mr. Guzmán was taken to Mexico City in a helicopter, the capture finally over. Soon everyone was gone, leaving behind just one thing: an unpaid bill, according to an employee of the hotel.

To keep him locked up this time, the authorities said they would rotate his cells, never allowing him to stay anywhere long enough to burrow his way out again. Vigilance would be enhanced, with more officers and round-the-clock surveillance from extra cameras.

But to many, the longer the drug lord remains in prison in Mexico, the higher the risk of flight. His imprisonment could drag on for a year, perhaps longer, given the numerous — and creative — injunctions filed by his team of lawyers to fight his extradition to the United States, where he faces federal indictments on charges that include narcotics trafficking and murder.

During the 17 months Mr. Guzmán was locked up, he met often with associates, not only to plan his legal defense, but also to plot his escape, Mexican officials said. His men purchased land within sight of the prison, constructing an outer wall and an unfinished building on the site. From there, a mile away, the digging began.

“A rising economic tide tends to sink the Trump tugboat,”

This pattern is not limited to the United States. There are numerous studies demonstrating that European and British voters who are falling behind in the global economy, and who were hurt by the 2008 recession and the subsequent cuts to the welfare state, drove Brexit as well as the rise of right-wing populist parties.

political scientists at Penn, Duke and University College London, found, for example,A strong relationship between job loss and decreased generalized solidarity. We find evidence of in-group bias and the bias becomes more pronounced due to exposure to austerity policies

austerity policies adopted in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse were crucial both to voter support for the right-wing populist party UKIP in Britain and to voter approval of Brexit.

the EU referendum (Brexit) could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for a range of austerity-induced welfare reforms. These reforms activated existing economic grievances

Further, auxiliary results suggest that the underlying economic grievances have broader origins than what the current literature on Brexit suggests. Up until 2010, the UK’s welfare state evened out growing income differences across the skill divide through transfer payments. This pattern markedly stops from 2010 onward as austerity started to bite.

The results here and in England reinforce the conclusion that the worse things get, the better the right does.

As a rule, as economic conditions improve and voters begin to feel more secure, they become more generous and more liberal. In the United States, this means that voters move to the left

postwar prosperity from 1945 to the mid-1970s led to a liberal international consensus:In light of the historical experience of advanced countries, embracing the program of embedded liberalism made economic and political sense. Twentieth-century democratic capitalism had proved to be both successful and resilient: it had delivered high growth; it had allowed governments to fund generous social programs; and it had sent its main political and economic competitor — communism — to the ash heap of history.

As global competition, outsourcing and later, automation, began to produce significant economic disruption, beginning in the 1970s, this liberal consensus frayed.

If the Republican Party now depends on the votes of those who are falling behind, does the party have a vested interest in economic stagnation and decline?

“as conservatives see it, the more visible government dysfunction is, the better. It provides civic education.”

Taylor argued that as far as conservatives go,anything that dispels the illusion that government can be harnessed for positive ends is generally a good thing, and anything that reduces its power and scope is a salutary development.

Trump’s populism offered a false but compelling diagnosis of their economic problems, immigrants and insufficiently protectionist trade policy, which dovetails neatly with rural white anxieties about declining cultural status and relative political power. If you can align threats to identity with threats to material security, as Trump did, it’s pretty powerful.

But, in actual practice moving from campaigning to governing, Wilkinson continued, Trump’strade war is positively hurting agriculture and manufacturing, and every Republican member of congress has voted multiple times to strip away health benefits — leaving ‘identity threat’ as the party’s last resort.

Identity threat — ‘I don’t recognize this country anymore’ — is very abstract compared to material threat — ‘my daughter with leukemia will die if they don’t cover pre-existing conditions’ — and far less motivating. And the argument that the G.O.P. establishment itself has become a threat to economic/material welfare has started to become persuasive.

It’s going to get worse for the G.O.P. as the urgency of the economic problems grows. But they just don’t understand that pushing the same button over and over isn’t going to have the same effect. And this is so in part because they don’t really want to see the seriousness of economic divergence, because they have no idea what to do about it that is remotely consistent with Zombie Reagan social policy dogma.

This is not, according to Lindsey,a conspiracy, but rather a rotten equilibrium. Lack of trust in government brings charlatans to power, further reducing trust in government and widening the path to power for future charlatans

The first, of course, is Trump himself. His victory in 2016 was a charlatan’s ascent, and his presidency has served to sustain distrust in government — fuel, in one sense, for the continued success of charlatans. For the moment, though, his failure to win money for the border wall has punctured his viability as a governing force.

Trump’s second, if less heralded, achievement has been to invigorate the Democratic opposition

In 2014, Officer Jason Shuck shot a man who ran away from the police when they approached him as he was panhandling outside a Walmart in Springfield, Mo. Officer Shuck later told an investigator his “brain was saying Taser” but his “body moved faster” and he drew his pistol.Local prosecutors allowed the officer to plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge. As part of the plea deal, Mr. Shuck, who quit the police department, agreed to never work again in a job that required him to carry a firearm.

Mr. Weisberg said that cases in which officers say they mistook which weapon they were using are rare. He said they are legally different from the majority of police shootings, where officers concede they used deadly force but argue they were justified in doing so.

In 2019, Matthew D. Weintraub, the district attorney in Bucks County, Penn., investigated a case of weapon confusion involving an officer who yelled, “Taser!” before shooting a man in a police holding cell. Mr. Weintraub ultimately ruled out charges after finding that the shooting was “neither justified, nor criminal” and that the officer had an “honest but mistaken” belief that he had used his Taser against the victim, who was injured but survived.

Mr. Orloff said that had prosecutors known Mr. Mehserle was going to make that argument before charging him, “it would have made it more likely that a manslaughter charge was filed as opposed to a murder charge.” Mr. Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.Mike Rains, a lawyer in California who represents law enforcement in criminal and civil cases, including Mr. Mehserle, said officers mistake firearms for stun guns because they are on “autopilot,” and the officers should not be held criminally culpable.He said many officers in such cases have been trained to draw the stun gun with the same hand as their firearm. He said they typically have fired only one shot with the firearm, indicating a mistake — if they intended to use the firearm, he said, they would likely have fired multiple shots.

“We do know how to dial down the transmission of the virus by a lot with our behavior,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We’ve got a lot of agency there.”

The vaccine alone will not be enough to get ahead of the virus: It will take years to inoculate enough people to limit its evolution. In the meantime, social distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing — coupled with aggressive testing, tracking and tracing — might buy some time and avert devastating spikes in hospitalizations and deaths along the way. These strategies could still turn the tide against the virus, experts said.

“It’s a race against time,” said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist and a member of a World Health Organization working group on coronavirus adaptations.

experts had warned from the start that it would only be a matter of time before the virus became an even more formidable adversary.

The spread of the variant lashing Britain has left some countries vulnerable at a time when they seemed on the brink of scientific salvation.A case in point: Israel. The country, which had launched a remarkably successful vaccine rollout, tightened its lockdown on Friday after having discovered cases of the variant. About 8,000 new infections have been detected daily in recent days, and the rate of spread in ultra-Orthodox communities has increased drastically.

Yet in the course of the pandemic, governments have often proven reluctant or unable to galvanize support for those basic defenses. Many countries have all but given up on tracking and tracing. Mask-wearing remains politically charged in the United States, despite clear evidence of its efficacy.

“Every situation we have studied in depth, where a virus has jumped into a new species, it has become more contagious over time,” said Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University. “It evolves because of natural selection to get better, and that’s what’s happening here.”

Experts say that countries should focus instead on ramping up vaccinations, particularly among essential workers who face a high risk with few resources to protect themselves. The longer the virus spreads among the unvaccinated, the more mutations it might collect that can undercut the vaccines’ effectiveness.

The variants that have emerged in South Africa and Brazil are a particular threat to immunization efforts, because both contain a mutation associated with a drop in the efficacy of vaccines. In one experiment, designed to identify the worst-case scenario, Dr. Bloom’s team analyzed 4,000 mutations, looking for those that would render vaccines useless. The mutation present in the variants from both Brazil and South Africa proved to have the biggest impact.

Still, every sample of serum in the study neutralized the virus, regardless of its mutations, Dr. Bloom said, adding that it would take a few more years before the vaccines need to be tweaked.“There should be plenty of time where we can be prospective, identify these mutations, and probably update the vaccines in time.”

Dr. Rambaut and colleagues released a paper on the variant discovered in Britain on Dec. 19 — the same day that British officials announced new measures. The variant had apparently been circulating undetected as early as September. Dr. Rambaut has since credited the South Africa team with the tip that led to the discovery of the variant surging in Britain.

Public health officials have formally recommended that type of swift genetic surveillance and information-sharing as one of the keys to staying on top of the ever-changing virus. But they have been calling for such routine surveillance for years, with mixed results.

Britain has one of the most aggressive surveillance regimens, analyzing up to 10 percent of samples that test positive for the virus. But few countries have such robust systems in place. The United States sequences less than 1 percent of its positive samples. And others cannot hope to afford the equipment or build such networks in time for this pandemic.

The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points in Wisconsin and Florida; 3 points in Arizona and 2.4 points in Pennsylvania.

More broadly, Mr. Trump is facing an avalanche of opposition nationally from women, people of color, voters in the cities and the suburbs, young people, seniors and, notably, new voters. In all four states, voters who did not participate in 2016, but who have already voted this time or plan to do so, said they support Mr. Biden by wide margins. That group includes both infrequent voters and young people who were not yet eligible to vote four years ago.

Melissa Dibble, 47, of Boynton Beach, Fla., is one of those newly active voters. A registered independent, Ms. Dibble said she did not vote in 2016 because she did not believe Mrs. Clinton was “the right president for our country” and found Mr. Trump “laughable.” She said on Friday that she planned to vote for Mr. Biden that afternoon.

Vince Kowalewski, 73, of Muhlenberg Township, Pa., said he had never voted in his life but was intent on voting against Mr. Trump, whom he called “the worst president we’ve ever had.”“I have to go in there and vote against him,” Mr. Kowalewski said.But Mr. Kowalewski said he also appreciated Mr. Biden’s health care policies, including the Affordable Care Act, which he credited with helping his daughter receive lifesaving cancer treatment.

Based on the poll, however, it seems that Mr. Biden rather than Mr. Trump could be the beneficiary of record-busting turnout.

In Arizona, for example, the president had an eight-point advantage with men but Mr. Biden was the overwhelming favorite of women, winning 56 percent of them compared with Mr. Trump’s 38 percent.

The other group that is propelling Mr. Biden is college-educated white voters, a traditionally Republican bloc that has fled the Trump-era party. The former vice president is leading by double digits among white voters with college degrees in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona and beating him, 48 percent to 45 percent, with that constituency in Florida.

But Ms. Robles also said she believed there was a larger issue at stake in the vote.“I don’t want to be dramatic,” she said, “but I’m voting this year because it feels like democracy is at stake.”

Dr. Atlas’s position has been challenged by medical advisers around him who have backgrounds in infectious disease response, revealing a significant rift in the White House over the right approach. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, has pushed for aggressive, broad testing even among young and healthy people, often clashing with Dr. Atlas in meetings.

“I would always be happy if we had 100 percent of students tested weekly,” Dr. Birx said on Wednesday in an appearance at Penn State University, “because I think testing changes behavior.”

Dr. Atlas at one point influenced the administration’s efforts to install new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus, upsetting Dr. Birx and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director

The administration’s efforts to fund federal and state testing have long been fraught. In July, as administration officials and top Senate Republicans clashed over the contours of their initial $1 trillion proposal, the White House initially balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and help federal health agencies.

Since the early days of the pandemic, Mr. Romer has argued for a wide-scale testing program, costing as much as $100 billion. He had hoped to persuade Dr. Atlas that if officials could quickly identify and isolate people carrying the virus, they would slow its spread and allow normal economic activity to resume more quickly.

In his email, sent to Dr. Atlas’s personal account, Mr. Romer proposed additional testing and isolation efforts that could allow far more Americans to return to work and shopping, generating economic activity that would be 10 or 100 times larger than the cost of the testing program itself.

Dr. Atlas replied that the push for such testing was the result of “a fundamental error of the public health people perpetrated on the world.”Mr. Romer said he was taken aback by the answer: “Atlas just responded in a way that just honestly made it seem like he was in over his head,” he said.

The $400,000 threshold spares all but 1.8% of households, a group projected to earn 24.8% of adjusted gross income in 2021, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

In the long run, adhering to such political limits on U.S. taxing capacity might prove challenging as the country faces persistent budget shortfalls. But in the short term, in a weak economy with low interest rates, deficit financing for stimulus efforts is widely supported by lawmakers in both parties.

The former vice president is proposing between $3 trillion and $4 trillion in tax increases over a decade, aiming to generate enough money to cover the cost of his permanent policy initiatives in areas such as education and climate change. Much of his agenda won’t happen unless Democrats also retake the Senate.

The $400,000 threshold would impose a limit tighter than some Democrats want. The party’s leading proposals for paid family leave and Social Security expansion both feature broad payroll-tax increases that would

affect people below that level and would have to be reworked to meet the test.

In addition, the Biden campaign talks only about “direct taxes,” which exclude the corporate tax increases that generate more than 40% of the revenue in the Democratic presidential nominee’s plan.

The report argues that the pandemic exposed the huge power imbalance at the heart of the fashion industry, which demands that suppliers in some of the poorest countries in the world bear all the upfront production costs while buyers pay nothing until weeks or months after factories ship the goods.

Despite leaving suppliers and workers facing ruin, some retailers have paid out millions in dividends to shareholders. In March, Kohl’s, one of the US’s largest clothing retailers, paid out $109m in dividends just weeks after cancelling large orders from factories in Bangladesh, Korea and elsewhere

In an open letter published in April, the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia appealed to buyers to honour their contracts to protect the 750,000 workers who rely on the Cambodian garment industry.

“All parties in the global apparel supply chain are feeling the extreme burden caused by Covid-19,” the letter said. “However, manufacturers [factories] operate on razor-thin margins and have much less ability to shoulder such a burden as compared to our customers [buyers]. The consequential burden faced by our workers who still need to put food on the table is enormous and extreme.”

In Bangladesh, more than a million garment workers have been fired or furloughed as a result of cancelled orders and buyers’ refusal to pay, according to the CGWR. Despite a government package of more than $500m to factories to help mitigate job losses, Bangladeshi workers have reported not being paid for two months or more.

“While their economic position at the top of supply chains gives them the power to renege on what they owe suppliers during a crisis, they have a moral obligation to protect the most vulnerable … and that begins with protecting the wellbeing of the workers at the bottom of supply chains.”

Topshop owner Arcadia Group, Walmart, Urban Outfitters and Mothercare are listed among those which have made no commitment to pay in full for orders completed and in production.

n contrast, said WRC’s Nova, a substantial number of big brands and retailers are now fulfilling their financial obligations to suppliers. H&M and Zara made a commitment to pay after Anner first revealed the scale of the cancellations in a CGWR/WRC report published at the end of March. Gap is among others that have since followed suit.

“Whether the Delta variant is already at that plateau, or whether there’s going to be further increases before it gets to that plateau, I can’t say. But I do think that plateau exists.”

Antibodies, which can prevent the virus from entering our cells, are engineered to latch onto specific molecules on the surface of the virus, snapping into place like puzzle pieces. But genetic mutations in the virus can change the shape of those binding sites.

“If you change that shape, you can make it impossible for an antibody to do its job,”

But as more people acquire antibodies against the virus, mutations that allow the virus to slip past these antibodies will become even more advantageous.

The good news is that there are many different kinds of antibodies, and a variant with a few new mutations is unlikely to escape them all, experts said.

its sleeve to counteract the evolution of the virus,” Dr. Pepper said. “Knowing that there is this complex level of diversity in the immune system allows me to sleep better at night.”

“It’s a lot harder to evade T cell responses than antibody responses,”

And then there are B cells, which generate our army of antibodies. Even after we clear the infection, the body keeps churning out B cells for a while, deliberately introducing small genetic mutations. The result is an enormously diverse collection of B cells producing an array of antibodies, some of which might be a good match for the next variant that comes along.

Whether the virus will become more virulent — that is, whether it will cause more serious disease — is the hardest to predict,

Unlike transmissibility or immune evasion, virulence has no inherent evolutionary advantage.

Some scientists predict that the virus will ultimately be much like the flu, which can still cause serious illness and death, especially during seasonal surges.

“The virus has no interest in killing us,” Dr. Metcalf said. “Virulence only matters for the virus if it works for transmission.”

It is too early to say whether SARS-CoV-2 will change in virulence over the long-term. There could certainly be trade-offs between virulence and transmission; variants that make people too sick too quickly may not spread very far.

Then again, this virus spreads before people become severely ill. As long as that remains true, the virus could become more virulent without sacrificing transmissibility.

Moreover, the same thing that makes the virus more infectious — faster replication or tighter binding to our cells — could also make it more virulent.

Although many possible paths remain open to us, what is certain is that SARS-CoV-2 will not stop evolving — and that the arms race between the virus and us is just beginning.

We lost the first few rounds, by allowing the virus to spread unchecked, but we still have powerful weapons to bring to the fight. The most notable are highly effective vaccines, developed at record speed. “I think there is hope in the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines at this point are more effective than flu vaccines have probably ever been,”

“I have great faith that we can sort any detrimental evolutionary trajectories out by improving our current or next generation vaccines,”

be you have a re-infection, but it’s relatively mild, which also boosts your immunity,”

rising vaccination rates may already be suppressing new mutations.And the evolution rate could also slow down as the virus becomes better adapted to humans.

“There’s low-hanging fruit,” Dr. Lauring said. “So there are certain ways it can evolve and make big improvements, but after a while there aren’t areas to improve — it’s figured out all the easy ways to improve.”

Eventually, as viral evolution slows down and our immune systems catch up, we will reach an uneasy equilibrium with the virus, scientists predict. We will never extinguish it, but it will smolder rather than rage.

So far, studies suggest that our antibody, T cell and B cell responses are all working as expected when it comes to SARS-CoV-2. “This virus is mostly playing by immunological rules we understand,”

Others are more optimistic. “My guess is that one day this is going to be another cause of the common cold,”

There are four other coronaviruses that have become endemic in human populations. We are exposed to them early and often, and all four mostly cause run-of-the-mill colds.

much of the world remains unvaccinated, and this virus has already proved capable of surprising us. “We should be somewhat cautious and humble about trying to predict what it is capable of doing in the future,”

While we can’t guard against every eventuality, we can tip the odds in our favor by expanding viral surveillance, speeding up global vaccine distribution and tamping down transmission until more people can be vaccinated

The future, he said, “depends much, much more on what humans do than on what the virus does.”

But that changes for publicly-funded universities when speech veers into targeted harassment that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”

The legal commentator David Lat explained further, writing: “If I repeatedly send antisemitic emails and texts to a single Jewish student, that is far more likely to constitute harassment than if I set up an antisemitic website available to the entire world.”

As a result, what we’ve seen on campus is a mixture of protected antisemitic (as well as anti-Islamic) speech and prohibited harassment.

So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage?

For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.

The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students

Moreover, each of the schools represented at the hearing has its own checkered past on free speech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America

So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask, where was this commitment to free expression in the past?

That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents

Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment, and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups who hold offensive views

But that’s the wrong answer. It’s doubling down on the problem.

At the same time, however, it would be wrong to carry on as if there isn’t a need for fundamental change. The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes. The status quo is intolerable.

The best, clearest plan for reform I’ve seen comes from Harvard’s own Steven Pinker, a psychologis

He writes that campuses should enact “clear and coherent” free speech policies. They should adopt a posture of “institutional neutrality” on public controversy. (“Universities are forums, not protagonists.”) They should end “heckler’s vetoes, building takeovers, classroom invasions, intimidations, blockades, assaults.”

But reform can’t be confined to policies. It also has to apply to cultures. As Pinker notes, that means disempowering a diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus that is itself all too often an engine of censorship and extreme political bias

Most importantly, universities need to take affirmative steps to embrace greater viewpoint diversity. Ideological monocultures breed groupthink, intolerance and oppression.

Universities must absorb the fundamental truth that the best answer to bad speech is better speech, not censorship

do not protect students from speech. Let them grow up and engage with even the most vile of ideas. The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty. Without that liberty, the hypocrisy will reign for decades more.