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Nearly half of US states are reporting a rise in cases of Covid-19 as the country nears 7 million cases nationwide -- yet another grim milestone.

About 16 states' case numbers are holding steady, while 11 -- Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia -- saw a decline.

California became the first state to surpass 800,000 infections, according to Johns Hopkins data. Texas is second, with about 747,500 cases, followed by Florida with some 695,000 cases.

Day after day he produced boringly predictable pablum, the sort of average-vile stuff pumped out on Fox or Breitbart News all the time. The only thing remarkable about this writing is that Crews was doing it while simultaneously being employed by a government body whose most important task is to fight exactly the kinds of conspiracy theories he was producing. He may even have been doing both at the same time.

Recently, Michael Caputo, the Trump-appointed head spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, was caught meddling with scientific reports on the pandemic put out by the CDC, which, like Fauci’s agency, is part of HHS; he then posted a Facebook video claiming that scientists at the CDC were plotting “sedition” and worse

“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Caputo said. “There are hit squads being trained all over this country,” he continued: “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

Mr. Obama said the president had failed to deliver on the most basic responsibilities of the presidency: The health and safety of the nation

“Tweeting at the television doesn’t fix things. Making stuff up doesn’t make people’s lives better. You’ve got to have a plan.”

Mr. Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic was “rounding a corner,” as new cases are rising in the United States.

Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.

“We knew there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of that.”

The chief organizer of that protest, Meshawn Maddock, on Saturday was elected co-chair of the state Republican Party — one of four die-hard Trump loyalists who won top posts.

The first time I realized that Donald Trump took pleasure in violence was back in March 2016. In an interview, I asked him about the brutish rhetoric and violence at his rallies and the way he goaded supporters to hate on journalists and rough up protesters. Even then Mitch McConnell was urging Trump to ratchet down the ferocity.I told Trump that I had not seen this side of him before and that he was going down a very dark path. With his denigrating mockery of rivals and critics, he had already taken politics to a vulgar place, and now it was getting more dangerous.Shouldn’t parents be able to bring children to rallies without worrying about obscenities, sucker punches, brawls and bullying, I wondered?

He brushed off the questions and blithely assessed the savage mood at his rallies: “Frankly, it adds a little excitement.”

A couple weeks later, I pressed him again on his belligerence and divisiveness, and, with utter candor, he explained why he was turning up the heat.“I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1 and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?” he said. “I’ve come this far in life. I’ve had great success. I’ve done it my way.” He added, “You know, there are a lot of people who say, ‘Don’t change.’”

In the non-canine world, I’m already getting worried the Democrats will lose control of Congress. That’s sorta the pattern when people vote in nonpresidential years. Wondering if it would help if Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer sponsored a pet show.

Don’t be so fatalistic, Gail. In the Senate, you have incumbent Republicans retiring in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and possibly Wisconsin, all of which are swing states and potential Democratic pickups. And Georgia and Arizona, both of which have Senate races in ’22, seem to have swung solidly blue.

But back to the 2022 races. If and when the stimulus package passes and the pandemic finally ends, Democrats look to be in a good position. What are your worries?

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

What Pastor Scott worries about most, though, is that this pandemic is going to take away the church she and her husband, Robert, have spent more than a decade building between their shifts as corrections officers.

A tiny church serving a vulnerable corner of American society is having a life-or-death moment that will never show up in the data. And it’s doing so with little help at a time when the government and economists are hailing all that’s being poured into the economy and calling for more.

Concerns about deficits, debt, and inflation have been set aside. The consensus these days has rallied around a whatever-it-takes approach that, though focused on businesses and markets, has included social programs setting new benchmarks for economic impact.

David Carballo: At its most ambitious, archaeology can cover the totality of the human story, from our evolution as a species to today, since the focus is on material culture rather than on texts—though we typically examine both in tandem. By material culture I mean the places we inhabit (“sites”) and the stuff we use (“artifacts”). Much of our history as a species has no written records and can only be accessed through material remains like sites and artifacts, whereas for other places and times we may have texts, but they represent the official transcripts of the rich and powerful. In those cases, archaeology can provide a voice to the “99 percent” who were non-elites yet played their part in shaping history.

Lacking large domesticated animals, Mesoamerican civilizations developed other solutions to common concerns. Rather than extensive, plowed-field systems, Mesoamericans intensified agriculture in various ways. The ingenious system of lakeshore fields called chinampas is especially noteworthy, as they permitted multiple crop harvests per year and led to a population boom in the Aztec period.

Lacking pack animals, Mesoamericans moved commodities using human porters over land and using canoes over water. For maximizing the circulation of goods in this environment, it made economic sense for populations to nucleate and develop brisk marketplace exchange, daily in larger cities and on a rotating schedule in more rural areas. The twin-city capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, was the largest of these, and likely larger than any city in Europe at the time except for Paris.

From the start it appeared an impossible contradiction. Evangelicals for years have defined themselves as the values voters, people who prized the Bible and sexual morality — and loving your neighbor as yourself — above all.

Donald Trump was the opposite. He bragged about assaulting women. He got divorced, twice. He built a career off gambling. He cozied up to bigots. He rarely went to church. He refused to ask for forgiveness.

t is a contradiction that has held for four years. They stood by him when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.

This is Lee at a strange and singular moment in his career. He has spent nearly four decades and more than 30 films reckoning with the jagged and brutal course of history. Now, in the middle of a global calamity, and with a new film, “Da 5 Bloods,” that revisits the Vietnam War, he is its witness once again — older, more contemplative and as insatiable as ever, despite a legacy as solid as exists in American cinema.

If front-line workers are the heroes of this story, it’s clear who Lee thinks is the villain. The director, an outspoken antagonist of Donald J. Trump since the 1980s, lamented the president’s “pathetic lack of leadership,” singling out his widely condemned public musings on crackpot treatments for the virus.

“Telling people to use ultraviolet lights? Drinking bleach and whatnot?” Lee said, leaning into a chuckle. He squinted, as if he still couldn’t believe it himself. “People will go to the hospital because they believe” that stuff, he said. “Get out of here with that!”

As President Trump struggles for a political response, Republicans and their allies have seized on an answer: attacking climate change policies.

“If You Like the Pandemic Lockdown, You’re Going to Love the Green New Deal,” the conservative Washington Examiner said in the headline of a recent editorial

Elizabeth Harrington, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, wrote in an opinion article in The Hill that Democrats “think a pandemic is the perfect opportunity to kill millions more jobs” with carbon-cutting plans.

There are many cases of huge and systematic abuse where we still pander to the people who turned a blind eye to it, by saying that it was “a sophisticated operation”. Epstein’s operation was certainly expensive. But was it sophisticated? How sophisticated is it really when your private Caribbean property is known locally as “Paedophile Island”?

One of Jackson’s former advisers once claimed to have said to him: “Michael, you’re going to wind up in a lot of trouble. Why don’t you stop all this stuff with the young boys?” Jackson’s deathless reply was: “I don’t want to.”

You can hear it now, in that unmistakeable singsong voice, suffused with an absolute indifference to anything other than personal gratification, and the absolute conviction that one way or another you’re going to get away with it. Which proved to be the case. Why don’t you stop sexually abusing children? “I don’t want to.”

Janet Yellen isn’t going to blow up the economy. Antony Blinken isn’t going to blow up the free world. Alejandro Mayorkas isn’t going to put kids in cages. All this promises to make 2021 better than 2020 purely by default.

so many rank-and-file Republicans refuse to accept that Trump lost fair-and-square is a very bad sign about the sanity — or lack thereof — of the party.

rump is going to skip the inauguration so that he can announce his next run for president is another bad sign for and about the party’s future. Together, they augur for the QAnonization of the G.O.P., which is just awful news for a democracy with a two-party system.

After telling the Post that he’s “not supposed to put my thumb on the Republican side,” the Georgia secretary of state argued that fellow Republicans are only harming themselves by feeding into unfounded allegations that are an attempt to delegitimize the election process, which Raffensperger warned could discourage Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs.

“People need to get a grip on reality,” Raffensperger told the Post.

Raffensperger then reiterated that not only is he facing threats, but his family has taken the brunt as well. Raffensperger told the Post that he and his wife have received many threats over the past few weeks and that there was a break-in at another relative’s home, which prompted him to accept a state security detail.

The Dakotas are a horror story that didn’t have to be, a theater of American disgrace. Want to understand the tendencies — pathologies might be the better word — that made America’s dance with the coronavirus so deadly? Visit the Dakotas.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Jamie Smith, the leader of the Democratic minority in South Dakota’s House of Representatives, told me. He was referring primarily to how politicized such basic safety measures as social distancing and masks became, but also to many South Dakotans’ distrust of science and unshakable belief that the virus wouldn’t come for them.

the most stubborn, he said, have been the loudest. Throughout the pandemic, he said, he was deluged with communications from constituents adamantly opposed to any mask-wearing requirement, which North Dakota didn’t even have. He heard almost nothing from the other side.

Vice President Pence wasn’t following the rules — not about timing, not about interrupting — during Wednesday’s debate. Moderator Susan Page’s efforts at polite shushing, uttering repeated “thank you’s,” was about as effective as a cafeteria monitor trying to halt a food fight. It fell to Harris to remind the vice president, “I’m speaking” — something he already knew but chose to ignore.

If Harris had raised her voice in those moments, she would have been labeled shrill. If she had frowned, she would have been labeled a scold. If she had raised a hand, she would have been called angry or even unhinged.

she smiled as she held her ground — and of course they called it a smirk, a grin that by definition comes off as irritating or smug. But it was more than that. Harris gave Pence “The Look” — and you don’t have to look up that phrase to know exactly what I mean.

Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”

in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.

“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas

In Pennsylvania and other battlegrounds, both parties are succeeding in coaxing infrequent voters off the sidelines. The all-important question is who does it better.

I’m petrified of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi getting power and doing all this stuff that’s going to totally destroy the economy,”

secret weapon,

In 2016, the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, may have exaggerated somewhat when he declared: “The world is laughing at us. They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.” No longer. As counting in the crisis-wracked North American state entered its 10th day, around the world it had become the butt of many jokes. After decades of enduring its hubris and condescension, many are happy to see the self-anointed “shining city on a hill” and self-proclaimed “greatest country in the history of the world” knocked down a peg or two.

For a long time, America has been to the world what Trump has been to America – a bull in a china shop. Rich, entitled, brash, over-confident and often downright stupid, since the end of the cold war the country has traipsed around the world, breaking stuff as it went, throwing its weight around, and playing fast and loose with cherished global norms. Its journalists and moviemakers (and president) rarely missed the opportunity to stress just what an uncivilized “shithole” the rest of the globe was and how much we needed the enlightenment offered by the Peace Corps.

Inevitably perhaps, America’s excesses inspired a rival. Today, America finds itself as a bull in China’s shop. It has slowly been eclipsed in many areas where it was once dominant, especially in trade and lately in technology. And America has reacted much like Trump to the loss of its position as top dog – it is throwing a tantrum. From inciting a trade war to trying to wreck global alliances and treaties, to undermining the multilateral system, the US is showing that it will not go quietly into the sunset.