Group items tagged

three Democratic members are expected to leave office to take on roles in the new Biden administration: Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana (2nd Congressional District) to be White House senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement; Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico (1st Congressional District) to be Secretary of the Interior; and Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio (11th Congressional District) to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Democrats: 222Republicans: 211

There will be 60 freshmen in the 117th Congress. Seventeen of those seats flipped during the 2020 general election, with Republicans picking up 14 seats and Democrats picking up 3.

Eleven of the Republicans who picked up seats defeated Democrats who flipped seats in the wave year of 2018, while one GOP pickup came from the defeat of long-time Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, one came in an open seat (Iowa's 2nd) and one was in a Libertarian-held seat (Michigan's 3rd District).

Total 2020 flipped House districts: 17

Total Women: 118

The 117th Congress will see a record number of women in the House, and a record number of Republican women.

Republican Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, born August 1, 1995, will be the youngest member of this Congress at age 25. He takes that title from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York who, at 31, is now the chamber's second youngest member.

Republicans: 51 (including Sen. Kelly Loeffler)Democrats: 48 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats)

There will be 7 new senators at the start of 117th Congress, including Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who was sworn in in December.

Total women: 26 (will decrease to 25 when Padilla replaces Harris)

Total states with two female senators: 5 (will decrease to 4 when Padilla replaces Harris)

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, born on December 31, 1979, remains the Senate's youngest member at 41.

Total Black members in the House and Senate: 61

The 117th Congress will have the largest number of Black members in the history of the House and in the history of Congress. The 58 representatives are a new record for the House, while the record-high three in the Senate remains the same, at least until Harris resigns to become vice president.

Total Latino members in the House and Senate: 44

Fourteen newly elected veterans will be joining the House this year, according to the University of San Francisco and the Veterans Campaign. That's down from the 18 veterans who were first elected in 2018, but up slightly from the three cycles before that.

Vance’s lawyers have said he was justified in demanding them because of public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.

The supreme court in July ruled 7-2 against the president, rejecting Trump’s arguments that he can’t even be investigated, let alone charged with any crime, while he is in office

Through his lawyers, Trump argued that the subpoena was issued in bad faith, might have been politically motivated and amounted to harassment of him

The likelihood that the taxes would be released was unlikely to be resolved before the November election

former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen saying it was common for the Trump Organization to submit falsified financial records when the company applied for loans.

those misstatements could establish crimes including falsifying business records, insurance and tax fraud and scheming to defraud.

he paid just $750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House and no income tax at all in 11 of 18 years it reviewed

At the time, Trump dismissed the report as “fake news” and maintained he has paid taxes, but he provided no specifics

There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.

There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

“We don’t expect Chris or our other moderators to be fact-checkers.”

of the election, a subject on which the two candidates have divergent views. President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.

President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.

President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.

There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

“We don’t expect Chris or our other moderators to be fact-checkers.”

Trump’s and Biden’s records The Supreme Court: This issue has gained new importance with the announcement of Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. COVID-19: Daily cases are on the rise in nearly half of U.S. states. The economy: Expect this to be closely tied to the pandemic. Race and violence in U.S. cities: The framing of this topic has drawn criticism, but protests against racism and police brutality are ongoing around the country. The integrity of the election: See the latest on election security from NPR here.

Trump’s and Biden’s records The Supreme Court: This issue has gained new importance with the announcement of Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. COVID-19: Daily cases are on the rise in nearly half of U.S. states. The economy: Expect this to be closely tied to the pandemic. Race and violence in U.S. cities: The framing of this topic has drawn criticism, but protests against racism and police brutality are ongoing around the country. The integrity of the election: See the latest on election security from NPR here.

Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in taxes.

Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in tax

Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in taxes.

The New York Times reports that Trump’s tax returns show millions of dollars in losses and that Trump paid only $750 in income taxes in each of 2016 and 2017, and in 10 of the last 15 years paid no income tax at all. The report also raised questions about questionable tax deductions made by Trump that could run afoul of tax law.

The New York Times reports that Trump’s tax returns show millions of dollars in losses and that Trump paid only $750 in income taxes in each of 2016 and 2017, and in 10 of the last 15 years paid no income tax at all. The report also raised questions about questionable tax deductions made by Trump that could run afoul of tax law.

almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

But the diagnoses had a lucrative side effect: They let the insurers collect more money from the federal government’s Medicare Advantage program.

Medicare Advantage, a private-sector alternative to traditional Medicare, was designed by Congress two decades ago to encourage health insurers to find innovative ways to provide better care at lower cost.

by next year, more than half of Medicare recipients will be in a private plan.

a New York Times review of dozens of fraud lawsuits, inspector general audits and investigations by watchdogs shows how major health insurers exploited the program to inflate their profits by billions of dollars.

The government pays Medicare Advantage insurers a set amount for each person who enrolls, with higher rates for sicker patients. And the insurers, among the largest and most prosperous American companies, have developed elaborate systems to make their patients appear as sick as possible, often without providing additional treatment, according to the lawsuits.

As a result, a program devised to help lower health care spending has instead become substantially more costly than the traditional government program it was meant to improve.

Eight of the 10 biggest Medicare Advantage insurers — representing more than two-thirds of the market — have submitted inflated bills, according to the federal audits. And four of the five largest players — UnitedHealth, Humana, Elevance and Kaiser — have faced federal lawsuits alleging that efforts to overdiagnose their customers crossed the line into fraud.

The government now spends nearly as much on Medicare Advantage’s 29 million beneficiaries as on the Army and Navy combined. It’s enough money that even a small increase in the average patient’s bill adds up: The additional diagnoses led to $12 billion in overpayments in 2020, according to an estimate from the group that advises Medicare on payment policies — enough to cover hearing and vision care for every American over 65.

Another estimate, from a former top government health official, suggested the overpayments in 2020 were double that, more than $25 billion.

The increased privatization has come as Medicare’s finances have been strained by the aging of baby boomers

Medicare Advantage plans can limit patients’ choice of doctors, and sometimes require jumping through more hoops before getting certain types of expensive care.

At conferences, companies pitched digital services to analyze insurers’ medical records and suggest additional codes. Such consultants were often paid on commission; the more money the analysis turned up, the more the companies kept.

they often have lower premiums or perks like dental benefits — extras that draw beneficiaries to the programs. The more the plans are overpaid by Medicare, the more generous to customers they can afford to be.

Many of the fraud lawsuits were initially brought by former employees under a federal whistle-blower law that allows them to get a percentage of any money repaid to the government if their suits prevail. But most have been joined by the Justice Department, a step the government takes only if it believes the fraud allegations have merit. Last year, the department’s civil division listed Medicare Advantage as one of its top areas of fraud recovery.

In contrast, regulators overseeing the plans at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., have been less aggressive, even as the overpayments have been described in inspector general investigations, academic research, Government Accountability Office studies, MedPAC reports and numerous news articles,

Congress gave the agency the power to reduce the insurers’ rates in response to evidence of systematic overbilling, but C.M.S. has never chosen to do so. A regulation proposed in the Trump administration to force the plans to refund the government for more of the incorrect payments has not been finalized four years later. Several top officials have swapped jobs between the industry and the agency.

The popularity of Medicare Advantage plans has helped them avoid legislative reforms. The plans have become popular in urban areas, and have been increasingly embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans.

“You have a powerful insurance lobby, and their lobbyists have built strong support for this in Congress,”

Some critics say the lack of oversight has encouraged the industry to compete over who can most effectively game the system rather than who can provide the best care.

“Even when they’re playing the game legally, we are lining the pockets of very wealthy corporations that are not improving patient care,”

In theory, if the insurers could do better than traditional Medicare — by better managing patients’ care, or otherwise improving their health — their patients would cost less and the insurers would make more money.

But some insurers engaged in strategies — like locating their enrollment offices upstairs, or offering gym memberships — to entice only the healthiest seniors, who would require less care, to join. To deter such tactics, Congress decided to pay more for sicker patients.

Almost immediately, companies saw ways to exploit that system. The traditional Medicare program provided no financial incentive to doctors to document every diagnosis, so many records were incomplete

Under the new program, insurers began rigorously documenting all of a patient’s health conditions — say depression, or a long-ago stroke — even when they had nothing to do with the patient’s current medical care.

But for insurers that already dominate health care for workers, the program is strikingly lucrative: A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research group unaffiliated with the insurer Kaiser, found the companies typically earn twice as much gross profit from their Medicare Advantage plans as from other types of insurance.

The insurers also began hiring agencies that sent doctors or nurses to patients’ homes, where they could diagnose them with more diseases.

Cigna hired firms to perform similar at-home assessments that generated billions in extra payments, according to a 2017 whistle-blower lawsuit, which was recently joined by the Justice Department. The firms told nurses to document new diagnoses without adjusting medications, treating patients or sending them to a specialist

Nurses were told to especially look for patients with a history of diabetes because it was not “curable,” even if the patient now had normal lab findings or had undergone surgery to treat the condition.

Adding the code for a single diagnosis could yield a substantial payoff. In a 2020 lawsuit, the government said Anthem instructed programmers to scour patient charts for “revenue-generating” codes. One patient was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although no other doctor reported the condition, and Anthem received an additional $2,693.27, the lawsuit said. Another patient was said to have been coded for “active lung cancer,” despite no evidence of the disease in other records; Anthem was paid an additional $7,080.74. The case is continuing.

The most common allegation against the companies was that they did not correct potentially invalid diagnoses after becoming aware of them. At Anthem, for example, the Justice Department said “thousands” of inaccurate diagnoses were not deleted. According to the lawsuit, a finance executive calculated that eliminating the inaccurate diagnoses would reduce the company’s 2017 earnings from reviewing medical charts by $86 million, or 72 percent.

Some of the companies took steps to ensure the extra diagnoses didn’t lead to expensive care. In an October 2021 lawsuit, the Justice Department estimated that Kaiser earned $1 billion between 2009 and 2018 from additional diagnoses, including roughly 100,000 findings of aortic atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. But the plan stopped automatically enrolling those patients in a heart attack prevention program because doctors would be forced to follow up on too many people, the lawsuit said.

Kaiser, which both runs a health plan and provides medical care, is often seen as a model system. But its control over providers gave it additional leverage to demand additional diagnoses from the doctors themselves, according to the lawsuit.

At meetings with supervisors, he was instructed to find additional conditions worth tens of millions of dollars. “It was an actual agenda item and how could we get this,” Dr. Taylor said.

Last year, the inspector general’s office noted that one company “stood out” for collecting 40 percent of all Medicare Advantage’s payments from chart reviews and home assessments despite serving only 22 percent of the program’s beneficiaries. It recommended Medicare pay extra attention to the company, which it did not name, but the enrollment figure matched UnitedHealth’s.

Even before the first lawsuits were filed, regulators and government watchdogs could see the number of profitable diagnoses escalating. But Medicare has done little to tamp down overcharging.

Several experts, including Medicare’s advisory commission, have recommended reducing all the plans’ payments.

Congress has ordered several rounds of cuts and gave C.M.S. the power to make additional reductions if the plans continued to overbill. The agency has not exercised that power.

The agency does periodically audit insurers by looking at a few hundred of their customers’ cases. But insurers are fined for billing mistakes found only in those specific patients. A rule proposed during the Trump administration to extrapolate the fines to the rest of the plan’s customers has not been finalized.

Ted Doolittle, who served as a senior official for the agency’s Center for Program Integrity from 2011 to 2014, said officials at Medicare seemed uninterested in confronting the industry over these practices. “It was clear that there was some resistance coming from inside” the agency, he said. “There was foot dragging.”

few analysts expect major legislative or regulatory changes to the program.

“Medicare Advantage overpayments are a political third rail,” said Dr. Richard Gilfillan, a former hospital and insurance executive and a former top regulator at Medicare, in an email. “The big health care plans know it’s wrong, and they know how to fix it, but they’re making too much money to stop. Their C.E.O.s should come to the table with Medicare as they did for the Affordable Care Act, end the coding frenzy, and let providers focus on better care, not more dollars for plans.”

The order reportedly allows the government to collect phone records for any of Verizon’s customers, even if they aren’t suspected of wrongdoing

Presidents Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson rank first through third.

Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush make up the bottom three.

President Ronald Reagan is No. 8, just one slot above President Obama.

there are six Republicans and six Democrats, so if we take the average for Democratic and Republican presidents we can make a head-to-head party comparison

The Democratic presidents scored substantially higher than the Republican presidents, with a score of 26.95. Republican presidents scored -26.95.

Five out of six Democrats reduced the national debt as a percentage of GDP, while four out of six Republicans raised it. The story is similar on budget deficits, with five of the top six performances recorded by Democrats and four of the bottom five recorded by Republicans.

With respect to GDP growth, three of the top four performers were Democrats and four of the bottom five were Republicans. In reducing the poverty rate, the top three were Democrats and two of the bottom three were Republicans. The Democrats also had a better record on employment.

Republicans had better records on reducing inflation, achieving four of the top five performances, while Democrats had four of the bottom five showings. Republicans also did well in lowering tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, claiming the top five spots.

what does this tell us about Obama? When all of the indicators are combined, he ranks ninth out of 12, one position below Reagan but above Bush 41, Carter and Bush 43. Obama is also well below the midpoint that falls between Clinton and Nixon. For Republicans who view Reagan as an economic miracle- maker and Obama as, well, something less than that, it might come as a shock that Obama falls next in line in economic performance.

Lined up against his contemporaries after 1977, Obama ranks third out of six.

“Since the end of the 20th century, the temperature hasn’t done much,” Dr. Christy said. “It’s on this kind of warmish plateau.”

“It’s because the planet is warming. The basic issue is the long-term trend, and it is not going away.”

Sunday’s incident was the 883rd fatal shooting by a law enforcement officer so far in 2015, according to the Guardian’s records. Another 47 people died after being shocked with an officer’s Taser, 33 died after being struck by a law enforcement officer’s vehicle, and 36 were killed in custody. Another received a deadly blow to the head during a fight with an officer.

The shooting was also the 183rd death recorded in California, by far the greatest total of any state. Nine states, however, have recorded more deaths per capita, with Oklahoma having the highest rate.

The US government publishes no comprehensive record of people killed by law enforcement, even after a series of controversial deaths unleashed a national protest movement and demands from activists and lawmakers alike for better data on the subject.

An analysis of the statistics collected so far found the rate of deaths currently stands at 3.1 per day. This rate has remained relatively steady throughout the year, peaking through the month of March to a daily rate of almost four and dipping to an average of 2.6 through June.

The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver’s licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.

Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.

In a statement on Monday night, Mr. Daleiden said: “The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”

The release of the videos last summer created a furor and gave new strength to the conservative drive to defund Planned Parenthood. The organization was forced to apologize for the casual tone that one of its officials had used to discuss a possible transfer of fetal tissue to what she believed was a legitimate medical company. But Planned Parenthood said the fees being discussed were to cover costs and were legal. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

The partnerships were so important that decisions about forming them were vetted at high levels, sometimes by Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, Facebook officials said. While many of the partnerships were announced publicly, the details of the sharing arrangements typically were confidential

Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.

the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections

Data privacy experts disputed Facebook’s assertion that most partnerships were exempted from the regulatory requirements

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.

“I don’t believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user,” said Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook. “No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model.”

Few companies have better data than Facebook and its rival, Google, whose popular products give them an intimate view into the daily lives of billions of people — and allow them to dominate the digital advertising market

Facebook has never sold its user data, fearful of user backlash and wary of handing would-be competitors a way to duplicate its most prized asset. Instead, internal documents show, it did the next best thing: granting other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests.

as the social network has disclosed its data sharing deals with other kinds of businesses — including internet companies such as Yahoo — Facebook has labeled them integration partners, too

Among the revelations was that Facebook obtained data from multiple partners for a controversial friend-suggestion tool called “People You May Know.”

The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

agreements with about a dozen companies did. Some enabled partners to see users’ contact information through their friends — even after the social network, responding to complaints, said in 2014 that it was stripping all applications of that power.

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit privacy research group, said that Facebook would have little power over what happens to users’ information after sharing it broadly. “It travels,” Ms. Dixon said. “It could be customized. It could be fed into an algorithm and decisions could be made about you based on that data.”

Facebook’s agreement with regulators is a result of the company’s early experiments with data sharing. In late 2009, it changed the privacy settings of the 400 million people then using the service, making some of their information accessible to all of the internet. Then it shared that information, including users’ locations and religious and political leanings, with Microsoft and other partners.

But the privacy program faced some internal resistance from the start, according to four former Facebook employees with direct knowledge of the company’s efforts. Some engineers and executives, they said, considered the privacy reviews an impediment to quick innovation and growth. And the core team responsible for coordinating the reviews — numbering about a dozen people by 2016 — was moved around within Facebook’s sprawling organization, sending mixed signals about how seriously the company took it, the ex-employees said.

Microsoft officials said that Bing was using the data to build profiles of Facebook users on Microsoft servers. They declined to provide details, other than to say the information was used in “feature development” and not for advertising. Microsoft has since deleted the data, the officials said.

For some advocates, the torrent of user data flowing out of Facebook has called into question not only Facebook’s compliance with the F.T.C. agreement, but also the agency’s approach to privacy regulation.

“We brought Facebook under the regulatory authority of the F.T.C. after a tremendous amount of work. The F.T.C. has failed to act.

Facebook, in turn, used contact lists from the partners, including Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei — which has been flagged as a security threat by American intelligence officials — to gain deeper insight into people’s relationships and suggest more connections, the records show.

Facebook records show Yandex had access in 2017 to Facebook’s unique user IDs even after the social network stopped sharing them with other applications, citing privacy risks. A spokeswoman for Yandex, which was accused last year by Ukraine’s security service of funneling its user data to the Kremlin, said the company was unaware of the access

In October, Facebook said Yandex was not an integration partner. But in early December, as The Times was preparing to publish this article, Facebook told congressional lawmakers that it was

But federal regulators had reason to know about the partnerships — and to question whether Facebook was adequately safeguarding users’ privacy. According to a letter that Facebook sent this fall to Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, PricewaterhouseCoopers reviewed at least some of Facebook’s data partnerships.

The first assessment, sent to the F.T.C. in 2013, found only “limited” evidence that Facebook had monitored those partners’ use of data. The finding was redacted from a public copy of the assessment, which gave Facebook’s privacy program a passing grade over all.

Mr. Wyden and other critics have questioned whether the assessments — in which the F.T.C. essentially outsources much of its day-to-day oversight to companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers — are effective. As with other businesses under consent agreements with the F.T.C., Facebook pays for and largely dictated the scope of its assessments, which are limited mostly to documenting that Facebook has conducted the internal privacy reviews it claims it had

Facebook officials said that while the social network audited partners only rarely, it managed them closely.

As with most on-the-record discussions with an elected official, I was recording our conversation to ensure accuracy.And after Mr. Corker got off the phone, his two aides made sure I had recorded the call. Like the senator, they wanted to ensure his extraordinary charges were precisely captured.As Mr. Corker noted in our interview, his comments were only the latest, and sharpest, critique he had made of Mr. Trump this year.

Data from the Japan Meteorological Agency show April was the second warmest on record for the entire planet.

Saturday’s carbon dioxide measurement of 415 parts per million at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory is the highest in at least 800,000 years and probably over 3 million years. Carbon dioxide levels have risen by nearly 50 percent since the Industrial Revolution.

The clip at which carbon dioxide has built up in the atmosphere has risen in recent years. Ralph Keeling, director of the program that monitors the gas at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, tweeted that its accumulation in the last year is “on the high end.”

Eighteen of the 19 warmest years on record for the planet have occurred since 2000, and we keep observing these highly unusual and often record-breaking high temperatures.

When Hillary Clinton asked Colin Powell how he managed to use a Blackberry while serving as Secretary of State, he replied by detailing his method of intentionally bypassing federal record-keeping laws:

And view her with contempt for opposing same-sex marriage in 2008, while fawning over men like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, who held the same position at the same time

Yet, we have all heard and seen countless liberal posers passionately decrying her “far right voting record,” untrustworthy promises or ever-changing policy positions. Jon Stewart recently called Clinton, “A bright woman without the courage of her convictions, because I don’t know what they even are.” Because if he doesn’t know, she must not have any, right?

Since then, Clinton racked up a Senate voting record more liberal than any nominee since Mondale. Her 2008 platform was slightly to Obama’s left on domestic issues. Her 2016 platform was barely to the right of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders.

Generations from now, people will shake their heads at this moment in time, when the first female major party presidential nominee—competent, qualified and more thoroughly vetted than any non-incumbent candidate in history—endured the humiliation of being likened to such an obvious grifter, ignoramus and hate monger. We deserve the shame that we will bear.

Forecasts called for perhaps as much as 2in of snow in the Berkshire mountains in western Massachusetts on Friday into Saturday; an inch or so on grassy areas of central Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire and western Connecticut; and rain with a few flakes possible in the Boston area, he said.

Temperatures may plummet to record lows. The 9 May record low in Boston is 35F, also in 1977. Freeze warnings are in place for parts of Pennsylvania, Tubbs said, with freeze watches stretching into New Jersey and as far south as Maryland.

Thursday after being forced closed by the state because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’re a weather-driven business,” she continued. “But to have this happen the minute we are open is quite unbelievable.”

But under Mr. Trump, who liked to attack the news media as the “enemy of the people,” the practice resurged.

Mary McCord, who led the Justice Department’s national security division late in the Obama administration and into the first part of the Trump administration, argued that there should be flexibility to do so under certain circumstances, if all other methods of gathering information had been exhausted.

Separately, the Justice Department informed USA Today on Saturday that it was withdrawing a disputed subpoena seeking information about who had read an online article about a February shootout in Florida in which two F.B.I. agents were killed. U

That meeting occurred about three weeks after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland took office, and about two months before the Justice Department asked a judge to quash the order to Google.Mr. Coley has noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”

The regulations make an exception to that requirement of advance notification only if “the attorney general determines that, for compelling reasons, such negotiations or notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm.”

On Saturday, civil liberties and press freedom advocates condemned the sequence of events. Patrick Toomey, a senior staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the Justice Department’s actions “a disgrace.”

But survivors, funeral directors and scientists say the real numbers of infections and deaths in India may be many times more than the reported figures. The sheer number of patients has all but collapsed the health system in a country that invests less on public health — just above 1% of its gross domestic product — than most of its peers. (Brazil spends more than 9% of its GDP on health; in the U.S., the figure is nearly 18%.)

Each day, he goes to every crematorium and burial ground in his district of the capital, tallying deaths from COVID-19. Of his 11 staff members, five currently have COVID-19, he said.

Fewer positive results mean fewer confirmed infections and fewer deaths attributed to the coronavirus. India's total pandemic deaths this week crossed the 200,000 mark. But that's still lower than the overall death tolls in the United States, Brazil and Mexico, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

He attributed this disparity to administrative chaos.

There is another reason why India's coronavirus numbers may be skewed: hubris. In early March, India's health minister declared that the country was in the "endgame of the COVID-19 pandemic." Daily cases had hit record lows of about 8,000 a day in early February, down from a peak of nearly 100,000 cases a day in September.

But over the winter, as cases began creeping up, some politicians didn't pay attention — or perhaps didn't believe the coronavirus could return.

There have also been allegations that some politicians tried to suppress inconvenient news about rising case numbers.

Last year, at the height of the pandemic's first wave in India, Sirohi said he was counting about 220 COVID-19 deaths a day. When NPR spoke to him Wednesday, he counted 702 for that day. He passes those numbers up the chain of command. But the death figures the government ultimately publishes for his region have been at least 20% lower than what he's seeing on the ground, he said.

There are reasons why fewer Indians might die from COVID-19. India is a very young country. Only 6% of Indians are older than 65. More than half the population is under 25. They're more likely to survive the disease.

By analyzing total excess deaths – i.e., the difference between total deaths in Mumbai one year, compared with the year before — he estimates that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 would have to have been undercounted by at least two-thirds to account for the higher 2020 death tally.

Those calculations are based on data from Mumbai, India's richest major city, where access to health care is better than elsewhere. So the number of undercounted deaths could be even higher in less well-off parts of the country — such as in Santosh Pandey's village.

Scientists said recorded infections are even more of an underestimate. But they have a better idea of how much infections have been undercounted because they have serological data from random antibody tests that authorities conducted across large swaths of the country.

Results of a third national serological survey conducted in December and January showed that roughly a fifth of India's population had been exposed to the virus. That meant for every recorded coronavirus case, almost 30 went undetected.

She's a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who's designed models that show India's reported infections will peak in late May. She predicts India could be confirming as many as 1 million new cases a day and 4,500 daily deaths by then.

The institute's director, Chris Murray, told NPR that India may be detecting only 3% or 4% of its daily infections.

India's deaths in this latest wave would peak around the third week of May, according to the institute's model.

That could mean more shortages, fewer hospital beds and more tragedy on top of what India has already endured in recent weeks.

The bulging zones of high pressure in the Arctic, which have facilitated the unusual warmth and intensified melting, are displacing the cold air normally contained in that region into the mid-latitudes — like a refrigerator door left open.

Much of the central and eastern United States have seen lower-than-normal temperatures in the past week.

The jet stream, the high-altitude current separating cold air and warm air, has taken unusually erratic meanders

“We can’t say that the rapid Arctic warming is causing this particularly pattern, but it certainly is consistent with that,”

News of the record-breaking statistic comes the same day the U.K. announced a major step in its race to develop COVID-19 vaccines, formally approving Pfizer and the German company BioNTech's vaccine for emergency use.

Even with a vaccine in sight, the U.S. continues to grapple with a major surge in new coronavirus infections.

"It's time to cancel everything. And if it isn't essential, don't do it," he said during a news conference.

"Anyone who has returned a confirmed positive test during this initial phase of testing in their team's market is isolated until they are cleared for leaving isolation"

Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,

Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.

The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”

In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.

Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”

The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”

This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.

“They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”

Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”

That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”

Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.

For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.

Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.

The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.

Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.

But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.

he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.

Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.

“There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”

Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.