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Angela Merkel is traditionally known as Germany’s “safe pair of hands,” but when government-coalition talks unexpectedly collapsed late Sunday night after just four weeks, her future as the country’s chancellor was suddenly in question.

A second option would involve a return of the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s former “grand coalition” partner, to the government. While such a coalition would easily command a parliamentary majority, it’s one the center-left SPD ruled out in September after its poor showing in the country’s general election—which delivered its worst-ever result more than half a century—and one it rejected again Monday, reaffirming that it would rather have new elections altogether.

With Jamaica no longer an option, Germany is faced with three choices: The first is a minority government, formed by Merkel’s CDU/CSU party in coalition with either the FDP (which would leave the government 29 seats short of a majority) or the Greens (short 42 seats). Though that’s not impossible, Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me this option would be alien to both Merkel’s leadership style and the country as a whole. “For historical reasons, Germans are very skeptical of minority governments because it reminds people of the Weimar period,” he said, referring to the post-World War I period between 1918 and 1933 known for its political instability. “For somebody like Angela Merkel, it’s not in her style of governing to run a minority government because she’s not exactly a big gambler.” And a minority government would certainly be a gamble for Merkel—effectively denying her the authority she needs to push through reforms both at home and within the eurozone. “She’s somebody who doesn’t just embody stability, but I think she also likes stability herself.”

As a starting point, I’ve accepted the prevailing scientific view that man-made greenhouse gases contribute to global warming.

ut I’ve been routinely pessimistic and skeptical that we can do much about it. That is, we can’t easily control the forces that worsen global warming.

We have yet to discover or create some low-cost fuel that would replace fossil fuels

But many historians remain skeptical. ''I strongly doubt that plate tectonics and the Big Bang might contribute to our understanding of history,'' Mr. Revel said after listening to Mr. Christian's talk at the convention.

''Unfortunately,'' he wrote, ''historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.''

To understand the last few thousand years of human history, he insisted, scholars need to understand the rest of the past as well, up to and including the Big Bang -- in short, the whole 14-billion-year span of time itself.

On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy; four years after he opened his bar he stopped drinking completely. He didn’t see the problem.“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me.

on March 27, when Kristen got off the phone with her father, she called an ambulance. He was wheezing. His oxygen level turned out to be a dangerously low 70 percent. On April 9, he died of Covid-19. The following day, Artie Nelson, one of his longtime bartenders at JJ Bubbles, and also in his 70s, died of the virus as well.

the combination of being on a cruise ship — a proven petri dish for infections — and visiting a country with a full-blown outbreak is hard to ignore. But there was a way he might have avoided the trip, his daughter speculated. “If Trump had gone on TV with a mask on and said, ‘Hey this is serious,’ I don’t think he would have gone.”

the Republican party had become ripe for a populist revolution after decades of shedding college-educated, professional-class voters and trading them for working-class voters. The problem here wasn’t that the college-educated voters were better or worse than the working-class voters—the problem was the disequilibrium this shift created.

it left a vestigial Washington-class of corporate Republican types resenting a growing base that felt neglected and rejected by them.

The new voters who came into the party were drawn to the GOP on largely cultural grounds and were not particularly enchanted by the Ryanomics that party elites had been offering since 1980. According to Pew’s political typology breakdown in 2017, these “market skeptic” Republicans made up about 20 percent of the party

Jeff Bezos announced the creation of the Bezos Earth Fund, which will disperse $10 billion in the name of combatting climate change. The fund is a triumph of philanthropy—and a perfect emblem of a national failing.

In a healthy democracy, the world’s richest man wouldn’t be able to painlessly make a $10 billion donation. His fortune would be mitigated by the tax collector; antitrust laws would constrain the growth of his business. Instead of relying on a tycoon to bankroll the national response to an existential crisis, there would be a national response.

in an age of political dysfunction, Bezos has begun to subsume the powers of the state. Where the government once funded the ambitious exploration of space, Bezos is leading that project, spending a billion dollars each year to build rockets and rovers. His company, Amazon, is spearheading an experimental effort to fix American health care; it will also spend $700 million to retrain workers in the shadow of automation and displacement.

Senate GOP Doubt Health of Obamacare Replacement They can afford to lose no more than two from their ranks, and at least one is ‘irretrievably gone.’

Republican senators returning from a week at home in their states are signaling that they may not be able to pass health care overhaul legislation. On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters he believes the Senate's efforts to craft a bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, were failing.

I also want to concede two problems with this approach. The first is that no less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias

when you’re dealing with long-term trends, there’s a lot of evidence to choose from

This means that every lukewarmer, including especially those in positions of political authority, should be pressed to identify trends that would push them toward greater alarmism and a sharper focus on the issue.

The talented staff that remain still produce memorable journalism. But when it comes to covering Trump – according to interviews with 18 current and former Journal staffers, some of whom have provided the Guardian with previously unpublished emails from Baker – many say this is no thanks to management.

“The Journal has done a lot of good work in covering the Trump administration, but not nearly as much as it should have,” another recent departee said. “I lay almost all of that at Gerry’s doorstep. Political editors and reporters find themselves either directly stymied by Gerry’s interference or shave the edges off their stories in advance to try to please him (and, by extension, Murdoch).”

“This is the most access he has had to a sitting president ever – that is something he’s tried to do and has done in other countries particularly with British prime ministers,” Ellison said. “He’s choosing his own personal access over having any journalistic clout.

still debating whether the letter cost Mrs. Clinton the presidency. It’s certainly possible. But I am not at all sure, in part because of the final Upshot/Siena College poll in Florida.

But it’s now clear that Mrs. Clinton was weaker heading into Oct. 28 than was understood at the time

showed Mr. Trump gaining quickly on Mrs. Clinton in the days ahead of the Comey letter

The most popular link on Facebook about the Johnson & Johnson news was shared by a conspiracy theorist and self-described "news analyst & hip-hop artist" named An0maly who thinks the pandemic is a cover for government control. It's a stark example of what experts warn could be a coming deluge of false or misleading information related to the one-shot vaccine.

In the case of the post by An0maly, a Facebook representative said the company has taken action against previous posts of his that have broken the social media platform's rules. It broadly removed more than 16 million pieces of content over the past year related to COVID-19 misinformation, but because this specific post did not contain any factually incorrect information, it would stay up.

But that story shifted on Tuesday after federal health officials recommended a temporary halt in the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after a handful of reports about blood clots surfaced among the millions who have received the shot.

State officials are skeptical that President-elect Joe Biden can meet his goal of 100 million coronavirus shots in his first 100 days, with a week to go before his start date and a slew of unanswered questions still swirling around his plan.

Multiple state officials and sources familiar with the Biden transition team's outreach told CNN in recent interviews that they are unclear on major details of the Biden team's plans -- including those for mass vaccination sites, vaccine supply issues and funding for local governments.

But states have questions, too, starting with a critical one: Will there even be enough vaccines to pull off 100 million shots in the first 100 days?

How will online misinformation (“fake news”) affect America’s 2020 elections? It’s the kind of question that might send voters scurrying to the nearest stack of political science journals. But you’d be better off looking north—to Canada, and its impending federal elections, which will be held on October 21, 2019.

In part that’s because Canada has taken steps to address the potential for misinformation in this election cycle, developing what Politico recently characterized as “the most detailed plan anywhere in the Western world to combat foreign meddling in its upcoming election.” The government’s plan includes transparency guidelines for political advertising online, the establishment of a cybersecurity task force dedicated to monitoring for potential election threats, and the allocation of $7 million Canadian dollars to digital and civic literacy initiatives.

if all that fails, the country also has a non-partisan panel that’s empowered to alert the public in the event of significant foreign interference in the election.

As this hottest-on-record, godforsaken decade draws to a close, it’s clear that global warming is no longer a problem for future generations but one that’s already displacing communities, costing billions, and driving mass extinctions. And it’s worth asking: Where did the past 10 years get us?

And unless we find some way to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, the Keeling curve will not dip below 400 parts per million again in your lifetime, your children’s lifetime, or their children’s lifetime, because carbon dioxide can hang around in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

Among scientists, that score was settled a long time ago. But for some reason, the average Joe has taken a lot longer to come around to the idea … some reason that probably has a lot to do with the billions of dollars spent by fossil fuel companies to seed skepticism about the science of climate change and then muddy the waters around what we should do about it. There will always be skeptics and conspiracy theorists, but this decade, we’ve seen more and more Americans come to accept the basics of climate science, which could translate into more political will to take action in the 2020s.

Way back in 2003 I wrote that Republicans had become a radical force hostile to America as it is, potentially aiming for a one-party state in which “elections are only a formality.” In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein warned that the G.O.P. was “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts” and “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The past two months have, however, been an object lesson in the extent to which “grass roots” anger is actually being orchestrated from the top. If a large part of the Republican base believes, groundlessly, that the election was stolen, it’s because that’s what leading figures in the party have been saying

we’re looking at a party that has gone feral — that has been cut off from the rest of society.

He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty.

Wilson’s contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions. 

In the decades that followed, however, his ideas became an inspiration and a guide to national leaders, diplomats, activists, and intellectuals around the world.

Tens of millions of Americans were glued to their televisions, laptops and mobile devices Wednesday as an act of domestic terrorism played out live for the whole world to watch. Fear, anger and disgust were the reactions I heard most from friends, family and on social media platforms.

Many Americans are skeptical of the ability of politicians in Washington, particularly the Republicans, to hold all of the terrorists and their supporters accountable.

Time and time again for the last four years the American public has watched President Donald Trump avoid accountability for his outrageous and immoral behavior. Republicans have consistently enabled him, and our judicial system, with the exception of the election issues, has not been able to thwart his constant judicial stalling and obstruction. Color the American public skeptical that this time our institutions will deliver.

No matter how encouraging the news, growing numbers of people said they would refuse to get the shot.

But over the past few weeks, as the vaccine went from a hypothetical to a reality, something happened. Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated.

In polls by Gallup, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Research Center, the portion of people saying they are now likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 percent this summer to more than 60 percent, and in one poll 73 percent — a figure that approaches what some public health experts say would be sufficient for herd immunity.

At 8 a.m. on Friday, Vice President Mike Pence will roll up his sleeve to receive the coronavirus vaccine, a televised symbol of reassurance for vaccine skeptics worried about its dangers.

Public health officials said they were pleased that the vice president was going to be vaccinated in public, along with Surgeon General Jerome Adams, despite the president’s own lack of interest in sending a similar public health message.

coronavirus is regularly killing around 3,000 Americans a day

PLANO, Texas — Fighting for his political survival from the second floor of his campaign bus last week, Senator John Cornyn warned a small crowd of supporters that his party’s long-held dominance in this historically ruby-red state was at risk.

Asked whether Mr. Trump, the man who redefined Republicanism, was an asset to Mr. Cornyn’s re-election effort, the senator was suddenly short on words.“Absolutely,” he said, stone-faced.

This year’s election seems likely to plunge both Republicans and Democrats into a period of disarray no matter who wins the White House.