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Biden's performance was more akin to a cautious walk across a not-quite-frozen lake. Every step was careful and calculated, lest an unexpected crack led to a dark, icy fate.

At one point, in an answer about the filibuster - an arcane Senate rule that has thwarted many a president's ambitious agenda - Biden appeared to lose his train of thought, ending his sentence with the wave of a hand.It wasn't exactly a bravura performance, but conservatives have set the bar so low for Biden's coherence, that as in the presidential debates, Biden was able to surpass most expectations.

He led with a newsworthy promise that, by his 100th day in office, healthcare workers will have distributed 200 million vaccination jabs (that's very good news, although the US still lags behind some other countries when comparing the number of jabs done relative to the size of the population).

This week, two Florida teens were suspended for a few hours on a slingshot ride around three stories high after a cable snapped, rescue officials told CNN affiliate WKMG-TV. The passengers were rescued without injuries from the ride at Old Town theme park by the Osceola County Fire Rescue and Kissimmee Fire Department. The cable that snapped was non-load-bearing, rescue crews said. The cause of the malfunction is still being investigated.

The slingshot ride was last inspected on March 19 without issue, the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services told WKMG. Stine said the company performs daily inspections, with state inspections happening twice a year.

Slingshot attractions across Florida in Daytona Beach, Orlando and Panama City Beach have been closed as a result of the Kissimmee malfunction, WKMG-TV reported.

It’s a three-wheel, ultra-aerodynamic electric vehicle covered in 34 square feet of solar cells. The car is so efficient that, on a clear day, those cells alone could provide enough energy to drive about 40 miles — more than twice the distance of the average American’s commute.

All-electric vehicles perform much better, but they’re still not perfect. About 10 percent of the energy that goes into them is lost converting alternating current from the electrical grid into direct current for the battery. Inefficiencies in the drive system eat up another 20 percent, and the car must still deal with wind resistance and friction, through regenerative braking systems can reduce some waste.

From top to wheels, the Aptera is designed to eliminate as much waste as possible. Its creators say the car is 13 times more efficient than a gas-powered pickup truck and four times more efficient than the average electric vehicle

Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.

State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.

For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.

Protesters gathered in the streets of Warsaw and other cities on Wednesday night after Poland's government announced a near-total ban on abortion had suddenly gone into effect.

The country's Constitutional Court had ruled in October to ban terminations of pregnancies with fetal defects – nearly the only abortions that occur in Poland, which already had strict limits on the procedure. Abortion will now only be permitted in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother's health or life is in danger.

The implementation of the ruling was delayed after weeks of huge protests in the fall.

On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.

On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.

One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.

Polls conducted throughout Trump’s presidency show that his critics feel far more strongly about their opposition to him than his defenders feel about their support

while Trump has maintained a fairly steady overall approval rating in the low 40s, the proportion of Americans who actually like and trust him is much lower.

74 percent of Democratic registered voters strongly disapproved of Trump, but only 50 percent of Republican registered voters strongly approved of him. Which base would you rather have going into this fight — and into 2020?

Performing the Hajj pilgrimage is compulsory for every Muslim who is physically able and can afford the trip. It consists of five days of ritual worship, practical formalities underscored by layers of meaning and symbolism. The symbolic themes of traveling toward the Beloved and of journeying between life and death are made real in the various and specific proceedings. Many of the rituals of Hajj, taught to Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad, are drawn from the life of the Prophet Abraham and his family (known to Muslims as the Prophet Ibrahim).

The Hajj pilgrimage contains symbols of Abraham’s actions, including throwing stones at the spots where the devil taunted Abraham, the sacrifice of a sheep, and worship around the Kaaba. Enduring the sometimes-difficult journey to Saudi Arabia, and then the journey between various points around Makkah during the five days of Hajj, is also reminiscent of Abraham’s wandering nature

This strong woman, a slave and a woman of color, practically a single mother, had the strength to survive. Her memory is kept alive every day because her running between the hills of Safa and Marwa is a crucial part of the Hajj rites. Pilgrims re-enact Haajar’s search for help by walking between the two hills seven times while absorbed in prayer. Enter the holy mosque at any time of the year and you will see thousands of pilgrims walking in Haajar’s footsteps, because the walk between Safa and Marwa is also an obligatory part of the other Muslim pilgrimage (known as Umrah, which can be performed at any time of the year).

Fairstein fought to reframe conversations about rape, the story explained. In one case, she protested the courtroom inclusion of a victim’s “sex diary,” because she believed allowing it into evidence was tantamount to blaming the victim. She said she wanted to overhaul the “he said-she said” mentality that always seemed to give more weight to the man’s side of the story. She wanted people to believe women. Basic as it sounds now, 30 years ago much of this philosophy was revolutionary.

she believed in what she was doing, and what she was doing was good.

I bring it up to complicate her. I bring it up because I recognize, with sickened dismay, that I, as a woman, probably benefited from her earlier accomplishments.

Those who slept less than six hours a night “produced cognitive performance deficits equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation.”

a group who slept only four hours a night — a common amount for those who wake up very early — for six days in a row. That group quickly developed higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, higher blood pressure and produced half the usual amount of antibodies to a flu vaccine.

regularly getting four hours of sleep is the equivalent of the mental impairment of being up for 24 hours.

The coronavirus crisis could not have been more cunningly engineered to expose Mr Johnson’s flaws. He was made prime minister not because anyone thought that he was a cool and decisive head with the leadership skills and moral seriousness required to handle the gravest public health emergency in a century.

He was put there because he was a successful representative of the entertainer branch of populist leadership that prospered in the pre-virus era. “We elected him to be a ‘good times’ prime minister,” comments one senior Tory. “His curse is to be prime minister in bad times.”

The wrong criticism of his performance is to say that he has made mistakes. Confronted with a novel disease for which the country was unprepared, any prime minister would have made errors. The correct criticism is that he has failed to learn from his mistakes and egregiously repeated them.

Feudalism was the system in European medieval societies of the 10th to 13th centuries CE whereby a social hierarchy was established based on local administrative control and the distribution of land into units (fiefs). A landowner (lord) gave a fief, along with a promise of military and legal protection, in return for a payment of some kind from the person who received it (vassal).

military service or the regular payment of produce or money

The word ‘feudalism’ derives from the medieval Latin terms feudalis, meaning fee, and feodum, meaning fief

Kindness. Humility. Responsibility. These traits were once “the definition of manliness,” Barack Obama told a crowd on Saturday, campaigning in Flint, Mich., for his former running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“It used to be being a man meant taking care of other people, not going around bragging,” Mr. Obama said.

n two days, Americans will take their shot, making a choice between two presidential candidates who resemble vastly different case studies in what a man, even in 2020, should do or be.

“The government agencies we thought were keeping us safe and secure—the CDC, the FDA, the Police—have either failed or, worse, have been revealed to be active creators of danger and insecurity,” Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote on Twitter.

Why have America’s instruments of hard and soft power failed so spectacularly in 2020?

We are prepared for wars against states and militant groups, but not against stateless forces such as pandemics and climate change.

The most straightforward way to assess the UK’s performance is to compare the number of deaths with the fatalities normally experienced for the time of year.

The “excess death” rate over the average of the previous five years has topped 60,000. With 955 “excess deaths” for every million people, the UK has the grimmest record of all countries providing comparable data. In that respect only can the Johnson government’s performance be said to be “world-beating”.

The OECD is projecting that the UK will suffer the deepest downturn among advanced economies. It is only a forecast, but it chimes with other indicators suggesting that this country will pay a uniquely high price for its sluggish imposition of the lockdown and the government’s chaotic mismanagement of the attempt to grope towards an exit.

He is trailing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in most national and battleground state polls,

After an initial match up that quickly descended into a glorified shouting match, with Trump repeatedly interrupting Biden and running roughshod over the moderator, the second debate, scheduled for last week, was canceled after the President tested positive for the coronavirus and subsequently refused to take part in a virtual meeting.

The candidates will have their microphones cut off while their opponents respond to the first question of each of the debate's six segments.

The United States devotes a lot more of its economic resources to health care than any other nation, and yet its health care outcomes aren’t better for it.

That hasn’t always been the case. America was in the realm of other countries in per-capita health spending through about 1980. Then it diverged.

It’s the same story with health spending as a fraction of gross domestic product. Likewise, life expectancy. In 1980, the U.S. was right in the middle of the pack of peer nations in life expectancy at birth. But by the mid-2000s, we were at the bottom of the pack.

When people look back on this surreal election year, I suspect they will see plague as the core actor. If you take a normal, functioning society and then force it to go underground for months, freezing it in place, forcing its members into long and unnatural mutual isolation, suspending the usual ways in which people make a living, ratcheting up financial insecurity … well, that’s a recipe for serious social upheaval.

it strikes me that this medical achievement doesn’t resolve the psychological trauma, the suspension of normality, the anxiety of an invisible enemy. It merely diverts it away from the illness itself toward broader social and political grievances. I don’t think you can fully explain the sudden increase in intensity of the social justice cult, for example, and its explosion in our streets and in our media in the last couple of months, without taking account of this. I don’t just mean the pent-up plague-driven frustration of young people, who, often forced to live at home with their parents, took the opportunity to finally get out, get together and do something, after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. I mean the more general frustration and despair of a generation with a gloomy and unknowable economic future—suddenly finding shape and voice in a simple, clarion call to reshape all of society. 

I wrote about the Flagellants in the essay—a new group of fanatical, radical penitents who challenged and mocked the church authorities during the Black Death, whipping themselves bloody in large crowds across Germany, calling everyone to account for their sins. It’s the same dynamic now: a movement to use a plague to cleanse ourselves of the past and indict the entire community for its iniquity

Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large

Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:a lack of effective travel restrictions;repeated breakdowns in testing;confusing advice about masks;a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;and inconsistent messages from public officials.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

Most Americans sympathize with protests, disapprove of Trump's response - Reuters/Ipsos

A majority of Americans sympathize with nationwide protests over the death of an unarmed black man in police custody and disapprove of President Donald Trump’s response to the unrest, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

The demonstrations, some of which have turned violent, began last week after a Minneapolis police officer was videotaped kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes, even after Floyd appeared to lose consciousness.