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Since the virus emerged, there have been only 59 days on which there were fewer new cases recorded in counties which ended up voting for President Biden in November than in counties which voted for Donald Trump. On every other day, it’s been Biden counties that have seen more cases.

Since the outbreak began, 51 percent of cases and 53 percent of deaths were in counties Clinton won in 2016. Use 2020 numbers and those figures jump to 58 percent and 57 percent, respectively.

there’s also another, more important factor: population. There are more people in counties Biden won in 2020 than there are in counties Clinton won in 2016 — so of course cases in those counties will make up more of the total.

Californians braced for power cuts and a “potentially historic” wind event on Saturday as a growing wildfire prompted fresh evacuations for 50,000 people in the northern Bay Area.

Another blaze that forced evacuations of 50,000 residents in suburbs north of Los Angeles grew to 4,615 acres overnight. The Tick fire, which started on Thursday, has destroyed nine homes and businesses while threatening 10,000 more, according to firefighters.

The Sonoma county sheriff’s office said it is expected to be the biggest evacuation in the county in more than 25 years.

Oregon earmarked $62 million to explicitly benefit Black individuals and business owners. Now some of the money is in limbo after lawsuits alleging racial discrimination.

Data and anecdotes around the country suggested that the coronavirus was disproportionately killing Black people.

the pandemic has starkly exposed the socioeconomic and health disparities that African-Americans face.

SYDNEY — The Sydney Opera House has reopened. Almost 40,000 spectators attended the city's rugby league grand final. Workers are being urged to return to their offices.

Australia has become a pandemic success story.

The nation of 26 million is close to eliminating community transmission of the coronavirus, having defeated a second wave just as infections surge again in Europe and the United States.

activists spearheading unlikely assemblies in rural and conservative corners of the country have faced fierce online backlash and armed intimidation, which in some places is unfolding with the apparent support of local law enforcement.

The reaction, local activists say, threatens not just their safety and free-speech rights. It also endangers their ability, they say, to take the movement touched off by the police killing of George Floyd beyond urban hubs — to places like Omak or Bethel, Ohio, a village of 2,800 where a recent protest drew 700 counterprotesters.

The armed mobilization sheds light on the growth of anti-government militia groups, whose efforts — often coordinated on Facebook and other online platforms — have expanded since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the nationwide outburst of protests for racial justice. Militia activity has marked recent protests in places across the country, often driven by false online alerts about infiltration by antifa and other left-wing militants.

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

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

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

he answers are right there. Even in the chaos of the past two weeks, ordinary people took control of their own safety and we learned that the safest system is one grounded in and accountable to an organized community.

Abdulahi Farah, a Somali organizer, told me, “White men slept overnight in a mosque with Muslim leaders to protect it.” When some neighborhood patrols began to veer toward profiling racial minorities, community members widely circulated a set of directions about how to hold one another accountable for staying true to their values, instead of recreating a police state.

By the third night, Valerie Fleurantin, a community leader and Haitian fitness instructor, told me she saw “targeted arson of minority-owned businesses.” Buildings in neighborhoods on the Northside, which local residents call “Black City,” began to burn even though there were no active protests there.

The Newsom administration’s four-phase plan to reopen slowly, while encouraging Californians to remain vigilant about wearing face coverings and maintaining distanceto stop the spread of disease seemed “perfectly good and smart”, Watchter said.

what I think we didn’t get right was the national political scene,” he said. California, despite its reputation as a progressive state, wasn’t immune to a growing conservative movement that rejects face masks as muzzles on independence and vilifies public health officials as enemies of the people.

In Orange county, where more than 15,000 people have been infected, health director Nichole Quick resigned in mid-June after being confronted with a banner depicting her as a Nazi, protests outside her house and personal threats. Quick had issued an order requiring residents to wear masks in public, which the county sheriff insisted he wouldn’t enforce. After she became the third high-level health official in Orange county to quit, the county quickly reversed Quick’s order – recommending, but not insisting that residents wear masks.

Exacerbated by wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and extremely dry conditions, a fast-moving wildfire spread to more than 6,000 acres in Southern California on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of 25,000 residents, officials said.

Fire officials attributed the spread of the Bond fire to the winds.The blaze began as a house fire in Silverado, about 50 miles from Los Angeles, and quickly spread to the surrounding area, fire officials said. The cause was under investigation.

Chief Fennessy said that more than 500 firefighters were battling the flames and that more than 30 agencies were involved in the effort, which included fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.

Mr. Bruno, an artist and World War II veteran, volunteered for the Moderna clinical trial only because his nephew was doing so. He thought he may have received the vaccine and not a placebo because he had some mild side effects; he became certain after he tested positive for antibodies.

As for side effects? “I’ve had mosquito bites bothered me worse than that,” he said. “I just can’t understand why people are afraid.”

In some states, nearly 40 percent of deaths from Covid-19 have occurred among residents of nursing homes. That’s why an advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine be given first to the nearly three million residents of long-term-care homes.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

China’s top leaders believe that confining residents to their homes during outbreaks is the most effective way to keep death rates low and avoid overwhelming the country’s healthcare system.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a public forum in November that China would have had about 260 million Covid-19 cases and more than three million deaths if it had adopted looser restrictions similar to those in the U.S. and U.K.

China has reported fewer than 260,000 cases and less than 5,000 deaths, compared with 80 million confirmed cases and nearly a million deaths in the U.S.

China’s “zero Covid” policy has a dedicated following: the millions of people who work diligently toward that goal, no matter the human costs.

They informed a woman who was eight months pregnant and bleeding that her Covid test wasn’t valid. She lost her baby.

Two community security guards told a young man they didn’t care that he had nothing to eat after catching him out during the lockdown. They beat him up.

The London Underground is the oldest subway system in the world, so it might seem an unlikely source of innovation for one of the thorniest problems facing humanity in the 21st century: climate change.

While public transit is usually more environmentally friendly than other methods of travel, the Underground is playing a more direct role in a groundbreaking experiment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

The local council for the Borough of Islington in London has developed, planned and installed a way to provide heat and hot water for several hundred homes, a school and two recreation centers, all using otherwise-wasted thermal energy generated mostly by the electric motors and brakes of the Underground’s trains.

Few of the 500-odd residents of the fishermen’s village will ever forget the freezing night of Jan. 13, 2012, when the Costa Concordia shipwrecked, killing 32 people and upending life on the island for years.

In no time, Giglio residents hosted thousands of journalists, law enforcement officers and rescue experts who descended on the port

On Thursday, 10 years to the day of the tragedy, the victims’ families, some passengers and Italian authorities attended a remembrance Mass and threw a crown of flowers onto the waters where the Costa Concordia had rested. At 9:45 p.m., the time when the ship ran aground, a candlelit procession illuminated the port’s quay while church bells rang and ship sirens blared.

Income is one vital indicator of well-being, but it is not the only one: Things like health outcomes and social mobility matter too.

we should shift our focus from poverty to disadvantage. Disadvantage is a more useful term than poverty because we aren’t just talking about income—we’re trying to capture the complexity of a person’s life chances being hindered by multiple circumstances

Disadvantage is more accurate because it implies an injustice. People are being held back—unfairly.

How a Canadian college — in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic — became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.

Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labor shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.

The Canadian government said it was on track to host 900,000 foreign students this year, three times as many as a decade ago.

Gibraltar Preservation Group – a limited liability company of which Drake Cattermole and David Carpenter are principals – has owned the 6-acre property since 2010. The two spent the following years amassing adjacent parcels to propose a financially viable rehabilitation project for the historic property.

During that time, the mansion sat vacant and deteriorated, an aspect that opponents of redeveloping the historic property have pushed to the forefront in their arguments.Local developer Robert Snowberger, of 9SDC – a Wilmington-based historic preservation contractor – introduced plans in February to turn the Gibraltar mansion into a boutique hotel, renovate the greenhouse and garage into restaurant and retail space, and build townhomes on vacant land surrounding the property.

“All would be subject to appropriate restrictive covenants to ensure against unwanted commercial uses,” he wrote. “The city will contract with 9SDC to act as developer of the site, most especially because they have been integral to negotiations with the owner entity, because they have been deeply involved with securing the vitally needed historic tax credits and because they have experience with restoration of historic properties.”

As Shanghai eased one of the longest, toughest lockdowns anywhere since the pandemic began, many of its 25 million residents celebrated being free to move around. The reopening on Wednesday came after Shanghai’s two-month siege against Covid had set off public anger over shortages of food and medicine as well as the harsh enforcement of quarantine rules.

For now at least, that anger gave way to relief after the government wound back many restrictions. During the day, people — all wearing masks — basked in the novelty of previously mundane pleasures like meeting friends and relatives, strolling in parks, and driving through streets that had been largely empty since early April. Hairdressers were, as in many cities freed from lockdowns, busy. Subway lines were open but quiet.

With daily infections now falling to low double digits, the government has launched an urgent effort to revive factories, companies and supply lines vital to China’s sagging economy. On Tuesday, Shanghai recorded 15 infections.