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But his initial impulse to jettison politics altogether soon gave way to the gravitational pull of the game: In a conversation a few weeks later, he had changed his mind. He was starting Nucleus.

The story of how Mr. Parscale came to work for Mr. Trump is serendipity, plus a little of Mr. Parscale’s opportunistic savvy. He was already a successful marketing executive, well known in the business circles of San Antonio, when about ten years ago one of his clients was on a flight next to someone who was about to take a job working for the Trump family. The client jotted contact info on an airplane napkin, and soon Mr. Parscale was looped in to bid on some digital work for the family. He cut his rate to make sure he would get the job.

“Americana worked,” he said. “Just Americana. ‘Bring back that America pride’ worked. Pictures of a space shuttle. Half my ads just look like a Fourth of July party with a Vietnam vet. I wasn’t some mad genius.”

He saw himself as a campaign manager but also something more: a partner to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the campaign from the White House, and he enjoyed the limelight enough that he would take the stage at Trump rallies and throw red MAGA caps into the crowd.

While friends advised Mr. Parscale to make a clean break from the campaign, he chose instead to accept a smaller role. For the Republican National Convention, Mr. Parscale was in charge of video supplements to the program. Working mostly from his Florida home, he became frustrated.

The federal government has reached agreements with a number of pharmacy chains — including Costco, Walmart and CVS — to administer vaccines in their stores and other locations once vaccines become more widely available. So far, 40,000 pharmacy locations have enrolled in that program, General Perna said.“What we should be looking at is the rate of acceleration over the coming weeks,” Dr. Slaoui said, “and I hope it will be in the right direction.”

Experts have long said the best defenses against surging cases are preventative measures like masks and social distancing, as well as widespread vaccination. So far, at least 22.1 million doses of coronavirus vaccines have been distributed and nearly 6.7 million have made their way into patients' arms. Health officials had hoped to get 20 million people vaccinated at the start of the new year, but the administration of vaccines has undergone delays and roadblocks.

So far, the state's vaccination efforts have struggled, and only about a third of the more than 2.1 million doses received have made it into the arms of residents.

California, an epicenter of the pandemic in the US, added 49,685 new cases on Sunday alone, bringing the total number of cases in the state since the pandemic began to more than 2.6 million.

Starting Monday, the state will boost its vaccine rollout to include health care workers, nursing home residents and staff, and those living in congregate settings such as assisted living or shelters, according to new guidance from the state health department

As the surge ratchets up infection, hospitalization and fatality numbers across states, officials are working to make it easier to access vaccinations.

De Blasio spoke Sunday from a site at the Bathgate Industrial Park, stating that the city is "well on-pace" to reach 100,000 vaccinations by this week

The Georgia Department of Public Health has launched a Covid vaccine locator website in hopes of increasing access in the state that has administered the least vaccines per capita,

More than 28,400 new Covid-19 deaths have been reported in just the first 11 days of 2021, according to data from Johns Hopkins.

At this rate, more people could die from Covid-19 in January than any other month of this pandemic. December had a record high of 77,431 deaths due to Covid-19.

The recent riot at the US Capitol would likely be a "surge event" that "will probably lead to a significant spreading" across the country, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said

"Then these individuals all are going in cars and trains and planes going home all across the country right now.

the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,”

Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”

The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”

Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.

a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school

Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.

even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”

“What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”

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.

"So too is the claim that CVS and Walgreens will save the day: they don't have excess personnel available to inoculate millions of Americans. Nor are they equipped to deal with the rare but serious reactions which may occur.

Democrats, who have long advocated increasing the amount of financial relief distributed across the country, plan to hold a vote on Monday to approve a stand-alone bill that would increase the payments to $2,000. It is unclear whether that legislation will stand a chance in the Senate, where Republicans have long been resistant to spending more than $1 trillion on pandemic relief.

the president was “posturing to make himself, to bring himself back as the hero of the American people”

This needs to be addressed or else future generations of Americans will still be paying the price in decades to come.

Debt isn't always bad, however. There are times when it is useful, and now is one of those times. We need money to fight the pandemic, help the millions of people whose lives have been damaged, support businesses and prop up the economy until things get back to normal. We aren't out of the woods yet, even with the recent positive vaccine news, and we need to borrow more.

Here then is what the Biden administration should do. First, focus on getting the pandemic under control, helping those in need and supporting the economy.

These could include sensible cost control measures, such as increasing the retirement age and encouraging those who want to continue to work part time into retirement to do so.

Even at today's rock-bottom interest rates, we could quadruple federal education spending or send every family an annual check of $2,200 with the money we are spending on interest.

Once the economy is strong enough, as indicated by growth and employment (rather than political whims), the administration and Congress should gradually implement sensible measures to get control of the debt. This could include repealing some or all of the irresponsible tax cuts of the past years, reducing health care costs throughout the economy, cutting some of the near $1.4 trillion of tax breaks in the code and restoring sensible spending caps.

We also need to address our major trust fund programs that are facing insolvency in the upcoming years, including Social Security and Medicare.

Just because more debt is necessary right now doesn't mean it is harmless. We entered the last recession with debt as a share of GDP at 35%. This one is at 80% and we will leave it at well over 100%. US debt is growing faster than the economy and will break the all-time record set just after World War II as soon as 2023.

To Biden's credit, his campaign plan included trillions of dollars in revenue raisers and spending reforms, creating opportunities for lawmakers to fund new public investments in a fiscally responsible manner. It is a start, but there will be much more to do. Debt naysayers will want the new administration to opt for the free lunch approach -- borrowing rather than paying for new priorities -- but that is a dangerous economic plan in the long run that invites serious risk and leaves us vulnerable at a time we should be pursing an agenda of economic strength.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli have talked about immigrants taking American jobs, blasted Democrat-run sanctuary cities, touted “America First” and warned of “evil people who seek to travel to the United States with the intent of harming and killing Americans.”

In Phoenix last week, Wolf warned that there would be a surge in migration and an “unimaginable public health crisis” at the southern border if Trump were to lose the election — a series of nakedly political statements that stunned many former officials.

“The rhetoric that’s come out of Wolf and Cuccinelli is appearing to be a propaganda arm of the White House,”

The arrests were part of “Operation OPTical Illusion,” a crackdown on the federal Optional Tactical Training program, which allows international students to work in their field of study while on a U.S. student visa.

Cuccinelli directly tied this immigration enforcement action to Trump’s agenda, saying the arrests “will open up those jobs for American workers” and emphasizing that this “has been a very high priority for this President.”

Earlier in October, ICE put up bold black and red billboards in several parts of Pennsylvania, featuring the faces of six immigrants and their charges of burglary, robbery, and assault in big lettering. The agency described them as “at-large immigration violators who may pose a public safety threat” and said the campaign was meant to “educate the public about the dangers of non-cooperation policies.

“These billboards are clearly intended to fuel anti-immigrant fervor one month before the election,”

The politically significant locations of these press conferences, and the presence of senior leadership, means each event has been covered by local news and circulated on social media, likely reaching their intended in-state audience and beyond.

“the Trump administration is building [a] new wall and doing so faster than ever before” and “the Trump admin is putting America first by protecting American workers.” On Thursday, Wolf posted an almost 2-minute video about news media raising questions about Trump’s promised border wall in what was effectively a campaign ad, with the message: “They said it couldn’t be done…They were wrong. 400 times and counting.”

“DHS is showing us a textbook example of why we have a federal law against government officials using their positions to support a political campaign,”

“Top DHS officials are acting more like campaign surrogates than public servants, and they need to be held accountable.”

“I am deeply disturbed that ICE is spending government dollars and putting lives at risk in furtherance of what is described as a political messaging campaign,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Pham in early October.

Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised concerns the agency has also been timing other law enforcement actions for political purposes. In September, ICE announced that 19 non-citizens in North Carolina had been charged with illegally voting in the 2016 election.

This time around, the ICE announcement about the charges — which came more than three years after the investigation started — were also “highly suspect, and likely to be politically driven,” says Helen Parsonage, an attorney who represents five of the non-citizens.

While Trump’s 2016 rallies were often filled with vivid accounts of immigrant crime, “build the wall” chants and infamous readings of a poem about a snake to illustrate the threat posed by immigrants and refugees, it’s a theme he’s rarely touched on in his 2020 rallies.

Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?

For many, it’s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn’t matter because politicians don’t listen to them anyway.

This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party.

“As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans’ anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with long histories of racial discrimination in voting.

Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.

In Nevada, the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party have sued to stop counting mail-in ballots until observers can more closely monitor the signature-matching process.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States. Modern Republicans have done it so consistently that in 1982 a federal court barred the national party from engaging in any so-called anti-voter-fraud operations.

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field — and will not even try.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines.

Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines.

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act.

The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.

That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980.

Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.

2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with abandon.

All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief. He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

He is only repeating what most Republicans have believed for decades: When more people vote, Republicans lose.

In Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, Republicans have fought to prevent the counting of all mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before Nov. 3.

This year, in the face of the unprecedented hurdles to voting introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Scholars, researchers and judges have said for years that voting fraud of any kind is vanishingly rare in this country. That hasn’t stopped Republicans from alleging that it happens all the time. They know that accusations of fraud can be enough by themselves to confuse voters and drive down turnout.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots

That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote. Only then can those who believe in representative democracy for all Americans reset the rules and help ensure that everyone’s vote counts.

He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines. It would mean allowing people with criminal records to vote as soon as they have completed the terms of their sentences.

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act. The first bill would update the old map the Supreme Court invalidated in 2013 and would identify the states and localities that are racially discriminating against their voters today, requiring them to seek federal court approval before changing any election laws.The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.

The House of Representatives passed both of these bills in 2019, with all Democrats voting in favor both times. The Voting Rights Amendment Act got the vote of a single House Republican. H.R. 1 got none.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines. Since the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, almost 1,700 polling places have been shut down, most of them in the states that had been under federal supervision for their past discriminatory voting practices. It’s no surprise that voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.

Even with the sixth straight month of job gains, payrolls will likely remain well short of their pre-pandemic peak, underscoring the severe damage from the coronavirus pandemic and policies meant to contain it.

The bank said Thursday it would continue to buy €1.35 trillion, equivalent to $1.59 trillion, of government and corporate debt through at least June 2021, under an emergency bond-buying program unveiled in March. It also left its key interest rate at minus 0.5%.

Our impression is that the ECB will do what it takes to effectively absorb the bulk of public debt net issuance until at least the end of 2021, if not beyond,” said Frederik Ducrozet, an economist with Pictet Wealth Management in Geneva.

The Working Families Party, aligned with high-profile progressives, such as New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is battling on behalf of liberal candidates in contests that will decide who holds positions as sheriffs and prosecutors.

"We're going from protests to the polls," Angela Angel, a former Maryland state legislator who is a senior adviser to the new Black Lives Matter PAC, told CNN. "We understand in this moment that the real power is in exercising our right to vote."

the group has targeted young voters in more than a dozen key states with a particular focus on reaching people who had requested absentee ballots but had not yet returned them.

In Georgia, a traditionally red state now in play in this year's presidential and US Senate elections, the Black Lives Matter PAC is backing Joyce Barlow, a Democrat running for the Georgia House of Representatives to represent a swath of rural southwest Georgia.

A study released earlier this year by the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina's Law School at Chapel Hill examined more than 2,300 prosecutors' races around the country and found contested elections in fewer than 700 -- or less than a third -- in either the primary or general election.

The groups engaged in electoral politics include Black Lives Matter, the sprawling social justice organization closely associated with this year's protests.

Tuesday's election "isn't just about the presidency. Your money, your minimum wage is on the ballot."

"We saw that very different outcomes were realized by Black people killed by police violence, based on the prosecutors elected in their jurisdictions," said Arisha Hatch, who oversees the Color of Change PAC.

Taylor's mother has sought the appointment of an independent prosecutor to handle the case. In September, Cameron announced that a grand jury indicted one former Louisville Metro Police Department Detective Brett Hankison, with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment in connection with his actions on the night of the raid.

But the Color of Change PAC and other liberal groups are putting their political muscle into local prosecutors' races around the country

In Florida, meanwhile, the PAC is urging a "yes" vote on Amendment 2, which would phase in a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the Sunshine State by 2026.

Rural counties might lack enough lawyers to mount a challenge to an incumbent. Prosecutor elections don't generate much attention. And voters don't always understand the power local county and district attorneys wield.

The Working Families Party mailers in the race tout Rucker's opposition to cash bail for non-violent offenses. "People shouldn't be sitting in jail because they can't afford to not be there," Rucker said in an interview with CNN.

The Working Families Party's "people's charter" calls to "shift resources away from policing, jails and detention centers" and into schools, housing and jobs programs.

Snowden has lived in Russia since 2013, having initially been granted asylum

He faces criminal charges in the U.S. including espionage and theft of government property related to the leak.

Snowden also faces other legal repercussions.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia sided with U.S. officials who said that by not submitting the book for a pre-publication review, Snowden violated nondisclosure agreements he signed while working for the NSA and CIA.

For all others, the test is optional – but a strict 10-day quarantine is required for those who choose to not get tested, The Lancet reports.

One goal of the program is to keep the nation's hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

Some have been critical of the government's plan.

"This could undermine public trust towards testing and all other pandemic containment measures," she told The Lancet.

During the apartheid years, the White minority governments aligned themselves with the Western nations and leveraged SA's militarily strategic position to maximize British and US support.

The government's views tend to be at odds with those of President Donald Trump's administration over Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the seemingly intractable issue of Palestinian statehood, of which Ramaphosa's government is a vocal supporter.

There was anger when he tagged all of Africa, along with Haiti, as "shithole" countries, causing an affronted South African administration to summon the US chargé d'affaires for a dressing down.

President Cyril Ramaphosa's government seized on the #BlackLivesMatter protests to lament George Floyd's "regrettable death" and condescendingly observed that the incident "[presented] the USA with an opportunity to address fundamental issues of human rights."

This support, articulated by President Ronald Reagan as "constructive engagement," alienated the oppressed Black majority and left a lingering bad taste with many in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, which has been the ruling party since South Africa's first democratic election in 1994.

Privately, it has a preference for Biden, with a government analyst telling me that South Africa believes the Democratic candidate would return to the multilateralism that Trump has scorned and is expected to be less protectionist and isolationist when it comes to China.

South Africa is dependent on a strong economic relationship with the US. There are around 600 US firms here, with many making SA their springboard to the rest of Africa.

The US is South Africa's third-biggest export destination and the country benefits from the Generalized System of Preferences trade program and the country hopes to continue to benefit from the US African Growth and Opportunity Act, currently under review.

Trump's stance on Israel has also drawn strong but quiet support from some sectors of South Africa's shrinking Jewish community, which numbers barely more than 50,000, equivalent to only 0.1% of the country's population of 58 million.

Modi has courted the US administration by inviting Ivanka Trump to India, inviting Trump himself to an Indian-American "Howdy Modi" rally in Houston and, most spectacularly, ensuring the US president received the largest possible audience during his visit to India with events that included a 100,000-strong rally in Gujarat.

Senior Indian officials say relations between the leaders of major countries are driven overwhelmingly by national interests and only marginally by personalities. They point to Modi's excellent working relationship with Obama, whom Modi invited to be chief guest at India's Republic Day parade.

Modi is best known for his religion-infused nationalism, but he is also a fervent proponent of climate action andr has massively expanded his country's welfare programs.

If Biden wins, the Indian government can be expected to re-engage on climate issues, an easing of immigration restrictions and a resumption of less rancorous trade talks.

Democrats have criticized these policies as human rights abuses that are biased against Muslims; Indian officials argue that these are a misunderstanding of what the legislation sought to accomplish.

Indians, great admirers of the US and its technological capabilities, have been bewildered at how the nation has blundered its way through the pandemic.

When it became clear India's rickety healthcare system and unruly federal structure were failing to contain the virus, Modi agreed to impose one of the severest economic lockdowns in the world.

Trump, in turn, has compared the US's record on testing favorably to that of India's and claimed India and other countries are not giving proper counts of their Covid fatality numbers.

There is also considerable vicarious pride in the choice of an Indian-American, Sen. Kamala Harris, as Biden's running mate. One noticeable characteristic of the present campaign is the degree to which both candidates have gone to woo the Indian-American community. That the US is home to what is perceived by Indians as their most successful diaspora is just one more -- and arguably the most lasting -- reason that India and the US will remain close, irrespective of election results in either country.

Iran, had tried to influence the election by sending intimidating emails was a stark warning. Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.

Iran is building upon Russian techniques and trying to demonstrate that it, too, is capable of being a force in the election.

The fact that Iran — which has stepped up its cyberabilities drastically over the past decade, after its nuclear program was attacked with American and Israeli cyberweapons — was involved demonstrates how fast other nations have learned from Russia’s influence operations in 2016.

Mr. Ratcliffe has been attacked by intelligence officials and Democrats for being overly partisan and Mr. Wray has been the target of Mr. Trump’s fury, including for his repeated insistence that Russia was a threat to the election.

Iran has tinkered at the edges of American election interference since 2012, but always as a minor actor. Last year they stepped up their game, private cybersecurity firms have warned. They have caught Iranian operatives occasionally impersonating politicians and journalists around the world, often to spread narratives that are aimed at denigrating Israel or Saudi Arabia, its two major adversaries in the Middle East.

“But they have gone from propaganda to deliberate interference in this election,

“Their focus here is to prey on existing fears that election infrastructure will be subverted and hacked, as well as fears of voter intimidation,” he said.

Some spoofed emails sent to voters contained links to a false and deceptive video that attempted to scare voters into believing the senders were also capable of manipulating the mail-in vote process, playing on fears that Mr. Trump has fanned with his insistence that mail-in ballots are subject to fraud.

The officials also did not make clear whether either nation hacked into voter registration systems.The material obtained by Iran and Russia was mostly public, according to an intelligence official, and Iran was using it as an opposing political campaign might. Some voter information, including party registration, is publicly available, and voters’ names may have been merged with other identifying material like email addresses from other databases, according to intelligence officials, including some sold by criminal hacking networks on the “dark web.”

WASHINGTON — Iran and Russia have both obtained American voter registration data, and Tehran used it to send threatening, faked emails to voters that were aimed at influencing the presidential election, top national security officials announced on Wednesday evening.

There was no indication that any election result tallies were changed or that information about who is registered to vote was altered, both of which would threaten to alter actual votes,

“This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.

WASHINGTON — Iran and Russia have both obtained American voter registration data, and Tehran used it to send threatening, faked emails to voters that were aimed at influencing the presidential election, top national security officials announced on Wednesday evening.

both of which would threaten to alter actual votes

And it was not clear that either nation hacked into voter registration systems

Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.

Mr. Ratcliffe said the effort was aimed at hurting President Trump, and intelligence officials have said Iran opposes the president’s re-election. But if the emails had the effect of intimidating Democrats, they could also have hurt Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee.

That's one reason why Philadelphia spent $5 million on new equipment to speedily process the deluge of mail-in ballots.

One machine sorts returned ballots in hours, instead of days if done manually. Another machine cuts open envelopes and spreads them apart with suction cups so workers can quickly pull out the ballots.

And there are 12 high-speed scanners that process 32,000 ballots an hour.

Meanwhile, President Trump continues to sow doubt about the veracity of voting in Philadelphia. The Trump campaign videotaped people putting ballots in drop boxes.

That prompted Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner to issue a warning. "Anyone who comes to the cradle of American democracy to try to suppress the vote — and violates the law and commits crimes — is going to find themselves in a jail cell talking to a Philadelphia jury," he said last month.

So far, there have been no reports of voter intimidation.