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He recommended misting produce with a very diluted bleach solution (a teaspoon of bleach per gallon of water) and letting it air dry. Or, if you’re nervous about using bleach on something you’ll eat, he said you could use a disinfecting wipe.

Other goods are less risky, but it’s still worth wiping down cardboard boxes of crackers or other packaged items.

the best thing to do is stay away from other people, particularly if you’re part of a vulnerable population.

Hand soap really will protect you.“One thing about this coronavirus,” he said, is that “it’s very susceptible to disinfectants and soap and water.”

if you go to a store, touch a contaminated surface, then touch your hair and then your face, even once between hand-washing, you could become infected.

if you’re really concerned, it might be worth throwing your clothes in the wash and showering after you get back from the store. (Your shoes, he said, are probably fine to bring into the house.)

one thing to watch out for is your reusable grocery bags: “When was the last time you sanitized your favorite bag?

Although state health officials released guidelines for grocery stores saying they should limit how many customers are in a given store and should keep people at least six feet apart even when they’re in line, this is proving to be easier said than done.

he suggested calling the store you’d like to visit before you leave, both to inquire about the wait and what’s in stock.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is adamant that New Zealand will complete four weeks of lockdown — two full 14-day incubation cycles — before letting up. She has, however, given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to work this weekend.

this heavily tourism-reliant country — it gets about 4 million international visitors a year, almost as many as its total population — did the previously unthinkable: It shut its borders to foreigners March 19.

Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office — the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given — announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with a full lockdown being Level 4.

A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.

“It’s inevitable that we will have to shut down anyway, so we would rather it be sharp and short.”

On March 23, a Monday, Ar­dern delivered another statement and gave the country 48 hours to prepare for a Level 4 lockdown. “We currently have 102 cases,” she said. “But so did Italy once.”

From that Wednesday night, everyone had to stay at home for four weeks unless they worked in an essential job, such as health care, or were going to the supermarket or exercising near their home.

From the earliest stages, Ar­dern and her team have spoken in simple language: Stay home. Don’t have contact with anyone outside your household “bubble.” Be kind. We’re all in this together.

there has been a sense of collective purpose. The police phone line for nonemergencies has been overwhelmed with people calling to “dob in,” as we say here, reporting others they think are breaching the rules.

The response has been notably apolitical. The center-right National Party has clearly made a decision not to criticize the government’s response — and in fact to help it.

After peaking at 89 on April 2, the daily number of new cases ticked down to 67 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The vast majority of cases can be linked to international travel, making contact tracing relatively easy, and many are consolidated into identifiable clusters.

The nascent slowdown reflected “a triumph of science and leadership,”

“Other countries have had a gradual ramp-up, but our approach is exactly the opposite,” he said. While other Western countries have tried to slow the disease and “flatten the curve,” New Zealand has tried to stamp it out entirely.

The government won’t be able to allow people free entry into New Zealand until the virus has stopped circulating globally or a vaccine has been developed

with strict border control, restrictions could be gradually relaxed, and life inside New Zealand could return to almost normal.

Ardern has said her government is considering mandatory quarantine for New Zealanders returning to the country post-lockdown. “I really want a watertight system at our border,”

That’s the latest among several recent studies by economists working independently, all arriving at similar findings: A few “superstar firms” have grown to dominate their industries, crowding out competitors and controlling markets to a degree not seen in many decades.

The U.S. had more than 7,000 public companies 20 years ago, the professors say; nowadays, it’s fewer than 4,000.

Consider real-estate services. In 1997, according to Profs. Grullon, Larkin and Michaely, that sector had 42 publicly traded companies; the four largest generated 49% of the group’s total revenue. By 2014, only 20 public firms were left, and the top four— CBRE Group, Jones Lang LaSalle, Realogy Holdings and Wyndham Worldwide—commanded 78% of the group’s combined revenue.

Or look at supermarkets. In 1997, there were 36 publicly traded companies in that industry, with the top four accounting for more than half of total sales. By 2014, only 11 were left. The top four—Kroger, Supervalu, Whole Foods Market and Roundy’s (since acquired by Kroger)—held 89% of the pie.

Let’s look beyond such obvious winner-take-all examples as Apple or Alphabet, the parent of Google.

The winners are also grabbing most of the profits

At the end of 1996, the 25 companies in the S&P 500 with the highest net profit margins—income as a percentage of revenue—earned a median of just under 21 cents on every dollar of sales. Last year, the top 25 such companies earned a median of 39 cents on the dollar.

Two decades ago, the median net margin among all S&P 500 members was 6.7%. By the end of 2016, that had increased to 9.7%.

So while companies as a whole became more profitable over the past 20 years, the winners have become vastly more profitable, nearly doubling the gains they got on each dollar of sales.

Why might it be easier now for winners to take all? Prof. Michaely suggests two theories. Declining enforcement of antitrust rules has led to bigger mergers, less competition and higher profits.

The other is technology. “If you want to compete with Google or Amazon,” he says, “you’ll have to invest not just billions, but tens of billions of dollars.”

Still, history offers a warning. Many times in the past, winners have taken all but seldom for long.

"I'm still basically where Pat Toomey and I have been: The most reasonable responsible gun piece of legislation called Gun Sense, which is basically saying that commercial transactions should be a background checked. Commercial, you don't know a person. If I know a person, no," Manchin said.

The recently passed House bills would expand background checks beyond Manchin-Toomey, which failed to advance in 2013, to include transactions between private parties, at gun shows or over the Internet and would close the so-called Charleston Loophole, by extending the time a licensed gun sales can go through before required background check is completed.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that "this Senate will be different" with Democrats in control as he promised that the chamber would take up debate on gun legislation.

"I don't need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save lives in the future," he said, listing a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as strengthening the background check system by closing loopholes, as areas he would like to see Congress act.

Separately, Toomey of Pennsylvania said passing their legislation through the 50-50 Senate "is going to be difficult" but said there are "discussions underway."

It was a low point in America’s bleak history of political failure in the face of ongoing gun violence. If you can’t get Congress to pass such a rudimentary regulation as security checks on the purchasers of weapons just months after 20 young children have been shot at point-blank range with a military-style rifle, then when is possible?

The mission was custom-made for the then-vice-president. As a father who had lost his daughter Naomi and first wife, Neilia, in a car crash in 1972, he had no dearth of empathy for the Sandy Hook families.

He also had an impressive record on gun reform in the US Senate, having played a leading role in passing the Brady Bill in 1993, which required partial background checks, and having drafted a ban on assault weapons enacted the following year (it expired in 2004).

The question is pertinent now, eight years later, when Biden has vowed yet again to take on the gun lobby. On Tuesday the president called on Congress to “immediately pass” legislation that would close loopholes in the background check system and reimpose the ban on assault weapons – almost exactly the reforms he failed to push through Congress in 2013.

At the time the NRA, with more than 4m members and an iron grip on lawmakers whom it ranked according to their voting records, was widely feared as the most powerful gun lobby in the world.

By all accounts, Biden’s head-to-head with the NRA did not go well. The White House, the lobby group hissed, had “an agenda to attack the second amendment … We will not allow law-abiding gun owners to be blamed for the acts of criminals and madmen.”

“If, by some chance, there could have been some reasonable bill on the floor [of the Senate] by January,” a Senate aide told Politico, there would have been “less time for people to sort of become ambivalent”.

Eight years on, Washington appears stuck in a scene out of Groundhog Day. Universal background checks are being talked about again in the wake of mass shootings, and all eyes are on Biden and the US Senate.

Officers saw the man leave the bathroom and quickly held him for questioning. According to police, his weapons included two long guns and three pistols, all of which were concealed.

Herold asked for a three-month delay before a preliminary hearing, noting the need to assess her client as well as the pending arrival of evidence and records from the ongoing investigation into the shooting — a discovery process she predicted will be "voluminous."

District Judge Thomas Mulvahill agreed to Herold's request after Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty noted that his office will file additional charges against Alissa "in the next couple weeks." While Dougherty did not object to the delay for a mental health assessment, he asked for a shorter time frame, of a month and a half.

The judge did not set a bond for the suspect, meaning he will stay in jail as the case moves to the next steps. Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse after the hearing, Dougherty was asked if he believes a "fair" jury can be convened in Boulder.

Explaining the attempted murder charge Alissa is facing, the prosecutor said the charge refers to a police officer whom the suspect fired at but did not injure. Dougherty also noted that in Colorado, homicide cases commonly take at least a year to be tried to completion.

The case will be assigned to Chief Judge Ingrid Bakke; rather than set a date for the next hearing in the case, Mulvahill told the attorneys from both sides to be in touch with Bakke about the next proceeding.

The suspect is from Arvada, a suburb between Denver and Boulder. Before this week, Alissa had a criminal record that included a guilty plea to a misdemeanor assault charge in 2018. He paid a fine to resolve that case, according to court records.

Alissa surrendered to police after suffering a gunshot wound to his leg. That injury, a "through-and-through" wound, was treated at a hospital before Alissa was taken to the Boulder County Jail. He was taken into custody after removing most of his clothing – jeans, a long-sleeve shirt and a tactical vest – and walking backward toward police, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Along with Alissa's clothes, police recovered "a rifle (possible AR-15)" and a semiautomatic handgun, the court document states.The arrest warrant affidavit for Alissa said he purchased a gun less than a week before the King Soopers shooting, citing official databases that show he bought a Ruger AR-556 on March 16.

The weapon used in the shooting is legally classified as a "pistol" in the U.S., but many people would likely consider it to be a rifle — and the affidavit repeatedly refers to it as one. The gun has the same lower receiver, the shell-like piece that houses the trigger, as AR-15 rifles that have been used in many other mass shootings in the United States.

"Although there are a few reported cases of reinfection, the possibility of co-infection by E484K adds a new factor to the complex interaction between immune response systems and SARS-CoV-2 Spike mutations,"

"Brazil is collapsing,"

drawing a striking contrast to assurances by Brazilian Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello just one day prior. "Our health system is very impacted, but it has not collapsed nor will it collapse," Pazuello had asserted Wednesday, attributing the country's increasing hospitalizations and deaths "mainly to the new variants of the coronavirus."

How long will our economy resist? If it (the economy) collapses it will be a disgrace. What will we have soon? Supermarket invasions, buses on fires, strikes, pickets, work stoppages," he said in a video conference with lawmakers Thursday.

“Gun violence in this country is an epidemic and it’s an international embarrassment,” Biden said last week

Biden’s recently unveiled executive actions include efforts to restrict weapons known as “ghost guns” that can be built using parts and instructions purchased online.

His announcement came after several high-profile mass shootings rocked the nation, including one at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, that killed 10 people and a shooting rampage in the Atlanta, Georgia, area that killed eight people.

While the government subsidizes campus meals, it doesn’t provide food pantries. As the cost of staying fed grows insurmountable for students with little or no income, university administrators have turned to aid groups for help fighting hunger.

Aided by the Paris mayor’s office and the Red Cross, they negotiated donations from supermarkets and food companies like Danone. Now, 250 student volunteers organize pasta, cereal, baguettes, milk, soda, vegetables and sanitary items to give to 1,000 students a week — though the need is five times greater, said Ulysse Guttmann-Faure, a law student and a founder of the group. Students go online to reserve a place in the line.

"Last night was at a scale we haven't seen in Belfast or further afield in Northern Ireland for a number of years," Roberts said. In a tweet, the Police Federation for Northern Ireland called for calm, saying, "These are scenes we hoped had been confined to history."

On Wednesday night, seven police officers were injured

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement set up a power-sharing arrangement between Protestants and Catholics. It largely ended 30 years of political violence in Northern Ireland among Irish republicans, British loyalists and U.K.-armed forces that resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 people.

Since the U.K.'s departure from the European Union at the beginning of the year, Northern Ireland has experienced shortages on grocery shelves that have been blamed on red tape and delays caused by new post-Brexit checks at ports in Northern Ireland. As part of the Brexit agreement, the EU insisted on the checks in exchange for allowing a soft border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

The production and sale of plastic bags that are less than 0.025mm thick will also be banned. The restaurant industry must reduce the use of single-use plastic items by 30%. Hotels have been told that they must not offer free single-use plastic items by 2025.

Thailand announced earlier this year that single-use plastic bags would be banned in major stores, with a complete ban across the entire country in 2021.

Indonesia's capital Jakarta also is banning single-use plastic bags in department stores, supermarkets and traditional markets by June 2020.

The Indonesian island of Bali has also banned single-use plastic.

Despite its far older population, Germany has confirmed fewer than 9,000 coronavirus-linked deaths, compared to almost 120,000 in the United States. (Germany has about one-fourth of the United States’ population.)

Lauterbach cited in particular the work of Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, whose research with colleagues recently suggested that forms of social distancing may have to remain in place into 2022. Lipsitch’s work, Lauterbach said, helped him to convince German Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the pandemic will be “the new normal” for the time being, and it impacted German officials’ thinking on how long their strategy should be in place.

Regarding the effectiveness of face masks, Lauterbach added, “we almost entirely relied on U.S. studies.” Germany was among the first major European countries to make face masks mandatory on public transport and in supermarkets.

even his staunchest critics in Germany were surprised by how even respected U.S. institutions including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) struggled to respond to the crisis.

Some observers fear the damage will be difficult to reverse. “I’ve always thought of the CDC as a reliable and trusted source of information, said Wiles, the New Zealand specialist. “Not anymore.”

Researchers have studied the human tendency to discount preventable harms that arise from nature and to overreact to harms that arise from human action.

The literature predicts that people will take comfort when a coronavirus fatality is attributed to “underlying conditions”—for instance, a patient’s age or chronic maladies—that they do not share

I’m more likely to blame people not of my race for standing too close

Cognitive scientists even have experiments to explain the “declining marginal disutility” that people associate with others’ deaths—the feeling that the difference between no deaths and one death is really bad, but the difference between 110,000 and 111,000 deaths is negligible

Evocatively termed “psychophysical numbing,” this confounding juxtaposition of the mathematical and the existential is where Americans live now.

The literature suggests that I am more confident I’m six feet away from a friend than from a stranger

they will be tempted by the quick dopamine hit associated with shaming those who fail at social distancing

I overestimate my compliance with public-health guidance but underestimate yours

Humans have difficulty calculating exponents, which is particularly crucial to understanding the speed of disease spread.

They struggle to estimate the correct answer to a problem without drifting toward the answer that best serves their own interest.

social-distancing shaming is still useless or even harmful to society. Each judgment is a chance not just to get the math wrong, but to let indignation outstrip empathy

Individual citizens—citizens facing a range of permissible options, receiving confusing public-health messaging, triaging competing ethical commitments—are not the best targets of our practical and moral concern

it is too easy to focus on people making bad choices rather than on people having bad choices. People should practice humility regarding the former and voice outrage about the latter.

At the least, government agencies must promulgate clear, explicit norms and rules to facilitate cooperative choices.

Concrete guidance makes challenges easier to resolve. If masks work, states and communities should require them unequivocally. Cognitive biases are the reason to mark off six-foot spaces on the supermarket floor or circles in the grass at a park.

the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.

In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.

The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.

There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.

Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.

The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.

“This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”

“Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’

“The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”

But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.

Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.

As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?

“They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.

As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”

He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.

from a low level and mostly in the capital, where those with spare cash could enjoy new coffee shops, foreign restaurants and well-stocked supermarkets.

things visibly improved

the boundaries of that “better life” have been gradually curtailed in the more recent years of Mr Kim’s reign.

accompanied by heightened repression inside the country, more control at the borders and the acceleration of the nuclear programme

Aid organisations have not had access for nearly two years, making it especially hard to discern what is going on in the country.

increased penalties for smuggling and for watching foreign entertainment, such as South Korean dramas.

Mr Kim continues to rebuff offers of aid and even covid vaccines. Attempts by South Korea and America to revive a spirit of detente, for instance by negotiating a formal end to the Korean war, have gone unanswered.

Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.

This propensity for what Ms. Schneidewind calls “historical hoarding” means that many Soviet memorials in East Germany contain Stalin’s name nearly 70 years after the dictator was largely purged from public spaces in Russia itself.

Officials say their duty to care for such memorials dates to the so-called Good Neighbor agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1990. Under that measure, each nation committed itself to the upkeep of the other’s war graves on its territory.

Most of the Red Army monuments in Germany are believed to have been built above the graves of Soviet soldiers or prisoners of war. The Russian Embassy has used the pact to draw the German government’s attention to Soviet monuments, including the one in Lützen, that have been damaged or neglected.

“Instead of tearing them down, you should redefine these memorials,” Mr. Nagel said. “You need to explain why they are here, and why you have a different view of them now.”

In Lützen, local residents say they want to keep their Red Army memorial as it is, a tribute to the central place occupied by the pyramid in the town’s public life during Communist rule. Some remember playing around it while attending the nearby kindergarten, and they say they will fight plans to move it to accommodate a proposed new supermarket.

“This is our history, no matter what is going on in world politics,” said the town’s mayor, Uwe Weiss. “We have to take care of it, because it is part of us.”

Aldi’s progression highlights the trend. Its first UK store in 1990 was in a working-class area of Birmingham. Now it has identified Oxford, Harrogate and Tunbridge Wells as its next targets, and claims to have attracted an extra 1.3 million shoppers over the past year, two thirds of whom are ABC1

my resistance has been twofold. First, I’ve wrongly valued being given a choice. I’ve wanted to choose between five different types of plain yoghurt

It’s a fallacy, of course. All that choice really provides is a greater opportunity for the marketeers to manipulate you. The supermarkets have been perfecting the art of upselling you for decades. You don’t stand a chance. The lack of choice on the discounters’ shelves is liberating and means you can get the shop done in a fraction of the time.

The other thing that has put me off the discounters is that the stores are a bit crap.