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The “alternatives to detention” program tracks 96,574 individuals, but the Biden administration’s 2022 budget request calls to increase that number by approximately 45,000 to 140,000.

Biden met with the three living survivors of the massacre before delivering his speech. All three survivors – Viola “Mother” Fletcher, Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis and Lessie “Mother Randle” Benningfield Randle – are over 100 years old. Biden acknowledged them in his remarks, saying, “Now your story will be known in full view.”

Harris could do to change these realities. Having served in the Senate for four years, she has some ties in the chamber. But Biden, who served in the chamber for nine times has long, is thought to have much deeper relationships with Senators – and has been unable to win them over.

“Well, [massacre survivor] Mother Fletcher said that when she saw the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, it broke her heart,” he continued: “A mob of violent white extremists, thugs, said it reminded her of what happened here, 100 years ago, in Greenwood. Look around at the various hate crimes against Asian Americans and Jewish Americans, hate that never goes away.”

Under Biden’s proposal, multinational corporations would be prevented from shifting profits across borders to exploit the most attractive low-tax locations as their profits would be taxed at a minimum global corporation tax rate either where they are booked or headquartered.

Biden also appeared to criticize two moderate Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, referencing “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends”. Manchin has said he opposes the For the People Act.

Joe Biden noted that he is the first US president to ever visit Tulsa to commemorate the anniversary of the 1921 race massacre that killed at least three hundred African Americans.

Joe Biden is now meeting with the three living survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, according to the latest White House pool report.

Many vehicles on the road today already implement some level of automation technology, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration breaks down into various levels.

he Trump administration informed some members of Congress last year that Mr. Stemberger was most likely arrested after ICE shared information with foreign authorities through Operation Cocoon, according to correspondence reviewed by The New York Times.The correspondence suggests U.S. authorities became aware of Mr. Stemberger’s plans before he left, something Vic Stemberger believes amounted to a missed opportunity to save his father. John Eisert, the assistant director of investigative programs for Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, said the agency generally became aware of such plans when it picked up on irregular travel, but declined to comment on Mr. Stemberger's case.

Investigators from the Southern District of New York and the Drug and Enforcement Administration, in part hoping to lighten Mr. Stemberger’s sentence, told Spanish authorities in October 2019 that he appeared to have been “pressured, cajoled and subjected to a variety of deceptive and manipulative strategies to induce him to believe that he would receive millions of dollars in inheritance funds.”

J. Bryon Martin, a 77-year-old retired pastor from Maine, spent nearly a year in jail in Spain after authorities found more than three pounds of cocaine hidden in an envelope he picked up in South America. He said a woman he fell in love with online had asked him to pick up the package and bring it to her.Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, pushed the State Department to work with Spanish authorities to secure Mr. Martin’s release on humanitarian grounds in 2016.

Mr. Wiegner said narcotics organizations used to recruit young people vacationing in South America but had turned to less obvious targets. “You probably wouldn’t suspect a grandmother or grandfather of carrying 25 kilos of cocaine,” he said. “If you have a 25-year-old European surfer, it might raise a bit more suspicion.”

In his email exchanges with the scammers, Mr. Stemberger occasionally expressed concern that he was entering a fraudulent agreement, a finding U.S. investigators highlighted to Spanish authorities when arguing that Mr. Stemberger thought he was pursuing a legal business opportunity.

The data, aggregated by ZIP code, will also be incorporated into illness signals that Kinsa makes available in its public HealthWeather map. The company sometimes shares this ZIP-code-level information with pharmacies, vaccine distributors and other companies. Clorox, for instance, has used Kinsa’s data to determine where to target its ads. (Lysol will have no special access to the data, Kinsa says.)

And then, of course, there are the inevitable privacy concerns. Kinsa emphasizes that all data provided to the city will be aggregated and anonymized.

City health officials will also have access to this aggregated, anonymized data, which they hope will help them identify unusual illness clusters earlier than is currently possible. “It’s measuring something that we’ve never really been able to measure before,” Dr. Varma said. “This is information about people’s biological measurements, being taken by somebody in their home before they’ve actually, in many situations, sought care.”

Over the coming months, city officials will keep close tabs on how well the program is working, Dr. Varma said.

Nonetheless, the government began a classified study, called Project Sign, out of concern that such objects could be advanced Soviet weapons. That was followed by Project Blue Book, which reviewed about 12,000 cases from 1952 to 1969, 701 of which could not be explained. It ended with a report saying U.F.O.s were not worth further study

Other cases include a spinning disk that was seen hovering above O’Hare Airport in Chicago in 2006, and two “sunlight-colored” objects reported by a professional pilot in England in 2007, as The New Yorker reported.

Senior administration officials who had been briefed on the report’s contents told The Times that the report still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, but that it concludes a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology.

But the F.D.A. advisory committee, along with an independent think tank and several prominent experts — including some Alzheimer’s doctors who worked on the aducanumab clinical trials — said the evidence raised significant doubts about whether the drug is effective.

The F.D.A. authorized the drug under a program called accelerated approval, which has been applied to therapies for some cancers and other serious diseases for which there are few, if any, treatments.

The risks with aducanumab involve brain swelling or bleeding experienced by about 40 percent of Phase 3 trial participants receiving the high dose. Most were either asymptomatic or had headaches, dizziness or nausea. But such effects prompted 6 percent of high-dose recipients to discontinue. No Phase 3 participants died from the effects, but one safety trial participant did.

About two million Americans may fit the description of the patients the drug was tested on: people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or the stage just before that, Alzheimer’s-related mild cognitive impairment. About six million people in the United States and roughly 30 million globally have Alzheimer’s, a number expected to double by 2050. Currently, five medications approved in the United States can delay cognitive decline for several months in various Alzheimer’s stages.

The crux of the controversy over aducanumab involved two Phase 3 trials with results that contradicted each other: One suggested the drug slightly slowed cognitive decline while the other trial showed no benefit. The trials were stopped early by a data monitoring committee that found aducanumab didn’t appear to be showing any benefit. Consequently, over a third of the 3,285 participants in those trials were never able to complete them.

Aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, targets a protein, amyloid, that clumps into plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and is considered a biomarker of the disease. One thing both critics and supporters of approval agree on is that the drug substantially reduces levels of amyloid, and the F.D.A. said that the drug’s effect on a biomarker qualified it for the accelerated approval program.

He estimates 25 to 40 percent of the clinic’s roughly 3,000 patients might be eligible, but it doesn’t have enough neurologists.

Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, for instance, used a website with pre-checked boxes that committed donors to give far more money than they had intended, a recent Times investigation found. That cost some consumers thousands of dollars that the campaign later repaid.

“While there’s nothing inherently wrong with companies making money, there is something wrong with those companies intentionally manipulating users to extract their data,” said Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Delaware Democrat, at the F.T.C. event. She said she planned to introduce dark pattern legislation later this year.

More than one in 10 e-commerce sites rely on dark patterns, according to another study, which also found that many online customer testimonials (“I wouldn’t buy any other brand!”) and tickers counting recent purchases (“7,235 customers bought this service in the past week”) were phony, randomly generated by software programs.

“The internet shouldn’t be the Wild West anymore — there’s just too much traffic,” said a Loyola Law School professor, Lauren Willis, at the F.T.C. event. “We need stop signs and street signs to enable consumers to shop easily, accurately.”

"Diplomacy is always our goal. Our goal is to reduce the risk of escalation. But, to date, we have not received any response," Psaki said, noting that the outreach "follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea, despite multiple attempts by the US to engage."

However, experts told CNN prior to Kim Yo Jong's message that Pyongyang was likely to rebuff diplomatic efforts for the time-being for a number of reasons including the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden team's ongoing North Korea policy review, the meetings in the region and above all, the administration's rhetoric.

"That's just a non-starter for the North Koreans," said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the administration had reached out to North Korea, noting they have "a number of channels, as we always have had, that we can reach out through."

"It has to be nuanced because you can't just say, you know, we want to have talks, and the talks are going to be about North Korea's complete denuclearization, because that sounds very one sided," he told CNN. "It would have to be long term and not the Libya model of complete denuclearization upfront before we give them anything they want."

But after the summit, Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the agreement pledged North Korea to the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear program, despite the fact that it said nothing of the sort.

Former officials and experts also noted that Biden administration officials' commitments not to lift tariffs on North Korea during confirmation hearings did not go unnoticed, which could be one factor driving Pyongyang's decision not to engage directly with the US.

"What if the US and China come out of their meetings this week and make it clear that they are headed for escalating US-China tensions? If you are Kim Jong Un you would read that as meaning that it is less likely that China will put the squeeze on North Korea," said Anthony Ruggiero, a former National Security Council official. "If that happens, maybe Kim now knows he can go to China to buy more pieces for its nuclear programs, or to go to China and sell more coal. That would be a bad sign for the future of any US-North Korea diplomacy."

Aum said that he doesn't think they'd "want to do anything to provoke the US prior to some greater signal that the US is going to take a very hostile approach."

The jump in revenue will not initially change the fortunes of players, who are locked into a 10-year collective bargaining agreement narrowly ratified in March 2020

Each of the broadcasters’ deals include agreements for their respective streaming platforms, while Amazon will show Thursday night games on its Amazon Prime Video service.

It will be the first major expansion to the N.F.L. season in more than four decades, when teams began playing 16 games, up from 14, in 1978

The league was able to fully complete its 2020 season on schedule in part because it worked hand-in-hand with the N.F.L. Players Association to hammer out Covid-19 protocols and a raft of other rules.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, many television and digital media executives said the N.F.L. had the upper hand in negotiating major increases in rights fees because the league had a long-term labor deal in place and because its programming took less of a ratings hit than other broadcasts of U.S.-based sports during the pandemic.

N.F.L. games are also the most watched programming on television by far, making up 76 of the 100 most watched television programs in 2020.

School food programs have been working hard: offering groceries, pre-prepared meals and everything in between. But as we've reported, it often isn't enough.

Congress passed a law giving families the cash value of the meals they missed when schools were closed.

if your family didn't have food stamps already, you might get a debit card in the mail with hundreds of dollars on it to spend at any grocery store. Families were eligible for $117 per child per month.

all by itself, Pandemic EBT, as it was known, lifted between 2.7 million and 3.9 million children out of hunger.

According to a report from Feeding America, 1 in 4 households with children experienced food insecurity in 2020

So far, so good. But the plan ran into a wall of bureaucracy. One complication was that this fall, not every school around the country was closed all month. Closures varied week to week, state to state, district to district, and even school to school.

States were supposed to calculate the number of missed meals and give the money out equitably.

And so as a result, everything has been in a holding pattern."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture didn't issue guidance to states on plans for how to do this for six weeks. So far, they have approved only the plans from Massachusetts, Indiana and Rhode Island. And they haven't yet touched the issue of how to give out the money to children under 6.

USDA remains committed to providing states with technical assistance that delivers benefits to eligible children and responds to changes in schools' instructional models and children's eligibility over the course of the school year. USDA will continue to actively partner with states to understand their concerns, streamline processes, and provide benefits in accordance with our authority."

"The long and short of it is for the past three-plus months, states should have been able to distribute more than $100 of food benefits per child [per month]," she says. "And USDA is not making it easy for any state to roll out this program."

It rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."

The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.

The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control

This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have to change much about their usual behavior.

more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.

The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate

Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm

Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.

The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts

When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.

A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC -- confirmed to me that no call ever happened.

The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda

The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion

It was a problem for the country that the President was not only a conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact.

So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China -- though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.

The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before

according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.

The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about the payment to Stormy Daniels

he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious -- Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen -- and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.

The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation

ere's what he told NBC's Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: "You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it." Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy.

The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions

When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions -- though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them,

Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them

The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice

Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.

That's not the story he did tell -- whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama's legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over -- more than 160 times before I lost count -- that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.

The Crazy Uncle lie award: Windmill noise causes cancer

At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.

his 2019 declaration that "they say" the noise from windmills "causes cancer."

The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks

Trump's big health care plan was eternally coming in "two weeks."

My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year

Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan's Man of the Year years before his presidency?He wouldn't have been. He wasn't.

The most depressing lie: Trump won the election

Trump's long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.

The North test-fired a ballistic missile just three weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration four years ago

“Pyongyang is signaling that denuclearization is not on the cards and that it will continue to develop its nuclear program as long as there is no agreement with Washington to halt it,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, KF-VUB Korea chair at the Institute for European Studies in Brussels.

The details on weapons might be partially an attempt to grab focus away from the country’s economic woes. During the pandemic, North Korea sealed itself off from the outside world, letting border trade with China and foreign travel plummet and leading to what was likely the worst economic slide in a generation last year.

The United States entered its longest expansion on record in July and the jobless rate is at a 50-year low, yet the deficit has continued to widen.

The deficit is growing in large part because tax receipts are falling, as Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts continue to siphon revenue from the Treasury. The numbers reflect the fact that Mr. Trump’s most significant legislative achievement is not paying for itself, as Republicans have said it would.

“The biggest factor was the tax cuts, which gave a short-term sugar high but now are just contributing to a larger deficit,”

Fears of trillion-dollar deficits could renew the desire of Republicans in Congress to propose cuts to social programs, like food stamps, Social Security and other safety net benefits. Republicans have long pointed to swelling deficits as a reason to pursue their long-held vision of smaller government, including undoing many of the programs ushered in during the New Deal and Great Society to help the most disadvantaged Americans.

Senator Mike Enzi, a retiring Republican from Wyoming who leads the budget committee, called the country’s fiscal path unsustainable and said spending must come down.

Republicans, who have shut down the government in their quest to cut spending, have enabled the increases that are exacerbating the deficit.

With the deficit growing, it remains unclear how Mr. Trump and the Democrats will address the issue during the election. Democratic candidates such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have introduced broad expansions of social safety net programs and have proposed paying for them with big tax increases on the rich.

On Friday, before the deficit figures were released, Mr. Trump remained focused on recent increases in the stock market and the low jobless rate. “The economy is booming,” he said.

The conversation usually tracks the order identified in the introduction: from curiosity to excitement to critique. I try to start the critique by looking at the data

I begin with the program defaults, life expectancy on the y axis and per-capita income on the x axis, quickly identifying the watermark and explaining the ways that the different colors apply to various regions and that size is equal to population.

I usually use it as a review of the modern era. The simplicity of bubbles moving up and down, left and right seems to stick with students as they see the historical events they’ve studied made manifest

Why did they choose one data set over the other? Can we trust this data? Does it matter if there is some data we can, and some data we can’t, trust? How does the context of us using the tool, in a classroom, vary from the context for which it was created—info-tainment?

Then, I move the class to an examination of the structure and narrative of the graph. Where does the axis’ scale, logarithmic or linear, switch? Why? How does that change our understanding of the graph? Why are some countries represented as independent entities long before they even existed? Why and how does this reify the nation state? Why did the project designers make these choices? What argument is the project making? Is this visualization misleading us to drive a narrative

after the students have finished critiquing the program, I circle back to the place that this project has in our class. How does it reinforce, contradict, or qualify the material we have covered in this course

a “pedagogical pause.” Why did I show them this project, with its methodological and conceptual problems, to them? What is the value in viewing and discussing it? How does it help them better understand the past and, just as importantly, their present?

Gapminder offers a powerful tool for combining a variety of historical thinking skills with solid content review. Within the space of one class period students review broad historical trends of the past 200 years, hone their data literacy skills, interrogate the primacy of the nation state, and reflect on the ways they learn

Covid-19 is crushing the healthcare system, with the California Department of Public Health reporting around 39,000 daily new cases and hundreds of deaths a day as of December 23

First and foremost, it is important to adhere to the key public health measures: masks, social distancing, avoidance of crowds. This approach remains effective, even if it has been adopted unevenly across the country. After 11 months, however, adhering to these measures can be extremely tedious and at times seemingly intolerable -- even for the most ardent public health fans, including myself.

Yes, it has given hope to the world, but it also may seduce people into thinking wrongly that it will be OK to ease up on preventative measures before the vaccine is widely available.

Forgoing masks and social distancing will only compound this national tragedy. We are currently seeing roughly 200,000 daily new cases and more than 2,500 deaths in the U.S. per day

Of the Trump administration's many Covid-19 failures, its inability to develop a modern, convenient and reliable national testing program is the most unforgivable.

Germany and South Korea have made this the cornerstone of their effective control programs, while Hong Kong has placed test kit vending machines in subway stations. And professional sport leagues have made testing several times a week a core approach to their containment strategy.

Yet we are only performing averages of less than 2 million tests per day in the U.S. While this is about double the rate in September, it still falls far short of what is necessary. In April, experts called for at least 5 million tests a day by early June to ensure a safe social opening, and 20 million tests a day by mid-summer to remobilize the economy. Others have hoped for even more aggressive goals to "test nearly everyone, nearly every day."

President-elect Joe Biden appears to understand the value of this strategy, which could bridge the many vulnerable months between now and the development of vaccine-induced herd immunity.

Analysis of government data shows that just 6.7% of federal employees are under the age of 30 — compared with 20.6% of those in the employed labor force. That's even more problematic when you consider that about one-third of federal workers will be eligible to retire in the next five years.

We need talented young folks in government, not only to replace those coming to the end of their careers of service, but also to bring new skills that will help the country confront a wide array of public challenges and opportunities.

The administration should greatly expand its efforts to encourage talented college students to apply for paid internships at government entities.

The program could include a mentorship component, pairing experienced leaders with prospective new talent, aimed at guiding participants in their work and encouraging and helping them pursue a career in public service

For the duration of the administration, the government could arrange about 20,000 internships a month at a time — for example, 400 dedicated to federal, state or city government in each state if distributed evenly.

Second, the program could be expanded through competition

Third, given their prior experience, participants in the internship program could have fast-tracked access to compelling projects upon completion of their college degrees

The nonprofit Partnership for Public Service would provide initial staff and infrastructure to help facilitate the recruitment, selection and matching operations for the federal component to ensure that participants are placed in internships.

Challenges like protecting the population against pandemics and unwinding centuries of racial injustice will not be solved in the span of a single presidency, or even within a single generation. To tackle these and other challenges, the American government — and its ability to attract innovative talent — has to be built for the long haul. And we have to start building it now.

both chambers of Congress recessed multiple times throughout the year as the Capitol went largely without a widespread testing program.

the Democrat-controlled House installed emergency proxy voting and remote hearings

Pelosi triggered a broader COVID-19 testing program for Congress following new requirement for travelers to the Washington, D.C., area.

But efforts to test as many as 2,000 a week still falls short for a Capitol complex that includes more than 530 lawmakers and a workforce of 20,000 or more.

A previous outbreak in September was tied to a White House Rose Garden ceremony to announce Amy Coney Barrett as President Trump's Supreme Court justice nominee.

By this summer, dozens of Capitol workers reported a positive test or were presumed so, and Gary Tibbetts, a longtime staffer for Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida, died from COVID-19 on July 24.

the First Step Act would release more than 3,100 federal prison inmates and said its retroactive sentencing reform had led to nearly 1,700 sentence reductions. The Sentencing Project said last year that Black Americans made up 91 percent of everyone receiving reductions.

Trump reinstituted the federal death penalty. Seven people have been executed this year under the policy — five were white, one was Native American and the other was Black. And there are 55 federal death-row prisoners. Twenty-five are African Americans, 22 are white, seven are Latino and one is Asian.

Under the Trump administration, the Black unemployment rate steadily improved, dropping to 5.4 percent at its bottom in August 2019, compared to 7.5 percent when Trump took office in January 2017. But that achievement is attributable to economic growth that was already revving when Trump took office, economists say.

Black workers did not see employment levels ever go “above the trend.”

The bill is a 10-year renewal of funding. During Obama’s eight years in office, mandatory HBCU funding ranged from almost $80 million to $85 million per year. The same has been true during Trump’s administration.

Even with record-low unemployment rates in 2019, Black Americans still had fewer jobs than their white counterparts — even for those with college or advanced degrees — according to research by EPI.

In April, when unemployment peaked at 14.7 percent — the highest level seen since the Great Depression — the unemployment rate for Black workers was even higher, at 16.7 percent. By September, the share of unemployed Black workers still struggling to find a job only dropped to 12.1 percent.

Many banks limited their initial application pool for the small business rescue Paycheck Protection Program to previous customers, a staff report by the House coronavirus subcommittee found. Democrats and non-profits argue that shut out many minority-owned businesses that lacked business banking relationships from the program, which offered forgivable loans to companies that kept their workers on the payroll.

when the labor market is tight, like it was in first three years of the Trump administration, discrimination tends to decline.

The amount of funding for HBCUs is “the same thing that we had under President Obama.”

creating “more than 8,000 opportunities zones, bringing jobs and opportunities to our inner-city families.”

Opportunity zones “are tax incentives to encourage those with capital gains to invest in low-income and undercapitalized communities,” according to the Tax Policy Center.

A feature of the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, the program was intended to benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income communities. But there’s very little data about what’s actually happening in opportunity zones. There isn’t a full accounting of the number of opportunity zone projects, let alone basic information such as what those projects are, why they’re being pursued and who is benefiting from them.

the vast majority of opportunity zone capital appears to be going into real estate rather than operating businesses, meaning that the opportunity zones aren’t creating sustainable, long-term jobs.

he scrapped an Obama rule requiring localities to track patterns of segregation or lose federal funding.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development replaced the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act with a much weaker rule in July, using a waiver to exempt the new regulation from public-comment requirements. Public comments allow people to weigh in on proposed rules before they’re finalized. But by bypassing that critical step, the agency essentially expedited a months-long process without any public input.

baseless fear of crime and decreased property value as attempted triggers to get at white anxiety about living with people of color — and African Americans in particular — and the idea of integration itself,”

new rule in September overhauling the Obama administration’s 2013 “disparate impact” rule. The new rule would have required plaintiffs to meet a higher threshold to prove unintentional discrimination — known as disparate impact — and given defendants more leeway to rebut the claims.

A federal court intervened this month -- the day before the rule was set to take effect last week -- issuing a preliminary nationwide injunction to bar HUD from implementing the new regulation until the merits of a lawsuit brought by civil rights advocates have been decided.

Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it.

In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,”

“That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.

Before you can dig into how cities and states are handling their coronavirus response, you have to deal with the elephant in the hospital room: Almost all of this would be simpler if the Trump administration and its allies had, at any point since January, behaved responsibly.

Early federal financial-aid programs could have been renewed and expanded as the pandemic worsened. Centrally coordinated testing and contact-tracing strategies could have been implemented. Reliable, data-based federal guidelines for what kinds of local restrictions to implement and when could have been developed.

The country could have had a national mask mandate. Donald Trump and his congressional allies could have governed instead of spending most of the year urging people to violate emergency orders and “liberate” their states from basic safety protocols.

But that’s not the country Americans live in. Responding to this national disaster has been left to governors, mayors, and city councils, basically since day one

it’s a lot of wasted time and money.” Instead of centralizing the development of infrastructure and methods to deal with the pandemic, states with significantly different financial resources and political climates have all built their own information environments and have total freedom to interpret their data as they please.

Even in cities and states that have had some success controlling the pandemic, a discrepancy between rules and reality has become its own kind of problem.

When places including New York, California, and Massachusetts first faced surging outbreaks, they implemented stringent safety restrictions—shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates, indoor-dining and bar closures. The strategy worked: Transmission decreased, and businesses reopened. But as people ventured out and cases began to rise again, many of those same local governments have warned residents of the need to hunker down and avoid holiday gatherings, yet haven’t reinstated the safety mandates that saved lives six months ago

beneath this contradiction lies a fundamental conflict that state and local leaders have been forced to navigate for the better part of a year. Amid the pandemic, the people they govern would generally be better served if they got to stay home, stay safe, and not worry about their bills. To govern, though, leaders also need to placate the other centers of power in American communities: local business associations, real-estate developers, and industry interest groups

The best way to resolve this conflict would probably be to bail out workers and business owners. But to do that at a state level, governors need cash on hand; currently, most of them don’t have much. The federal government, which could help states in numerous ways, has done little to fill state coffers, and has let many of its most effective direct-aid programs expire without renewal.

If you make people safe and comfortable at home, it might be harder to make them risk their lives for minimum wage at McDonald’s during a pandemic.

However effective these kinds of robust monetary programs may be at keeping people fed, housed, and safe, they are generally not in line with the larger project of the American political establishment, which favors bolstering “job creators” instead of directly helping those who might end up working those jobs

Why can’t a governor or mayor just be honest? There’s no help coming from the Trump administration, the local coffers are bare, and as a result, concessions are being made to business owners who want workers in restaurants and employees in offices in order to white-knuckle it for as long as possible and with as many jobs intact as possible, even if hospitals start to fill up again. Saying so wouldn’t change the truth, but it would better equip people to evaluate their own safety in their daily life, and make better choices because of it.

Kirk Sell stopped me short. “Do you think it might be the end of their career, though?” she asked. “Probably.”

With people out of work and small businesses set up to fail en masse, America has landed on its current contradiction: Tell people it’s safe to return to bars and restaurants and spend money inside while following some often useless restrictions, but also tell them it’s unsafe to gather in their home, where nothing is for sale.

Transparency, Kirk Sell told me, would go a long way toward helping people evaluate new restrictions and the quality and intentions of their local leadership. “People aren’t sheep,” she said. “People act rationally with the facts that they have, but you have to provide an understanding of why these decisions are being made, and what kind of factors are being considered.”

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories — as demanded by Ms. Kanoute and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.

The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.

Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.

“My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and a conservative.

Faculty members, however, pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity.

In 2016, students denounced faculty at Smith’s social work program as racist after some professors questioned whether admissions standards for the program had been lowered and this was affecting the quality of the field work. Dennis Miehls, one of the professors they decried, left the school not long after.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates

“Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment,”

Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a summer camp program for young children. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, mentioned that to Ms. Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will lodge complaints.

“We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.

A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”

That night Ms. Kanoute wrote a Facebook post: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

Her two-paragraph post hit Smith College like an electric charge. President McCartney weighed in a day later. “I begin by offering the student involved my deepest apology that this incident occurred,” she wrote. “And to assure her that she belongs in all Smith places.”

Ms. McCartney did not speak to the accused employees and put the janitor on paid leave that day.

Ms. McCartney appeared intent on making no such missteps in 2018. In an interview, she said that Ms. Kanoute deserved an apology and swift action, even before the investigation was undertaken. “It was appropriate to apologize,” Ms. McCartney said. “She is living in a context of ‘living while Black’ incidents.”The school’s workers felt scapegoated.

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”

The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to comment on why she called security on Ms. Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?

The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on Facebook.” She found that Ms. Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email, along with that of Mr. Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.

“This is the racist person,” Ms. Kanoute wrote of Ms. Blair, adding that Mr. Patenaude too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at the time of the incident.) Ms. Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”

Ms. Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic, and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, she said, she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.

Smith College put out a short statement noting that Ms. Blair had not placed the phone call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. Ms. McCartney called her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.

By September, a chill had settled on the campus. Students walked out of autumn convocation in solidarity with Ms. Kanoute. The Black Student Association wrote to the president saying they “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.”

Smith officials pressured Ms. Blair to go into mediation with Ms. Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” Ms. McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Ms. Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.

On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

Ms. Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Ms. Kanoute lived in the one where she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student whispered to another: There goes the racist.

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Professor Lendler said in an interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be thinking of,’” he said.

In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases, although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

“I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”

He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”

“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”