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Pelosi cited Greene's remarks in her criticism of the GOP leadership, calling it "absolutely appalling."

the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives who is willing to overlook, ignore those statements, assigning her to the Education Committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when she has mocked of killing of teenagers in high school at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

"These comments are deeply disturbing and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the congresswoman about them," the spokeswoman said.

Hours after Pelosi's comments, acting U.S. Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman said that in the wake of the agency's security failures, they will ask for new measures, including a permanent fencing system and the availability of "ready, back-up forces in close proximity to the Capitol."

California Rep. Jimmy Gomez said Wednesday that he would introduce a resolution to expel Greene from Congress. Also Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss said that if Greene doesn't resign, she needs to be expelled.

"If you don't understand that calling for the murder of political rivals is a threat to democracy, you shouldn't be allowed to represent one," Auchincloss said in a tweet.

supplemental funding to raise security measures for lawmakers — to address new security concerns among members, especially "when the enemy is within the House of Representatives.

"It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence against on other members of Congress."

"What could they be thinking?" Pelosi told reporters. "Or is 'thinking' too generous a word for what they may be doing?"

The union representing U.S. Capitol Police officers says the force's leadership failed to relay the known threat of violence adequately ahead of the Jan. 6 deadly riot, calling the acting chief's recent admission of prior knowledge of the threat to Congress "a disclosure that has angered and shocked the rank-and-file officers."

By January 4th, the Department knew that the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacists organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We kne

event

other

If you were a privileged white kid in the ’90s who could feel a moral pull to fight for something but didn’t know where to start, looking to the media for inspiration was a dry, dry well

The modern right loves to quote the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a “real” activist, while deriding Black Lives Matter.

But social justice activism as a continuum, a mantle to take up, a moral obligation (particularly for those of us born into comfort and power) was harder to see.

Contemporary activists were human hacky sacks with suspect motives or imperfect methods or any other number of manufactured excuses as to why they weren’t legitimate, weren’t the same as our parents marching to end segregation on the same streets a couple of decades before.

There was always reverence for “real” activists, of course — the heroes of the civil rights movement, the suffragists, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk — people who had lived and died and won great battles before we were born.

Conservatives claim to support social justice in the abstract but hate “social justice warriors.

They’re all for freedom and equality, they say, but sneer at the mechanisms that might actually help get us there as bleeding-heart pandering to the dreaded “politically correct.”

I did not go to the W.T.O. protest partly because my mom told me I couldn’t and partly because I didn’t understand it, but primarily because I’d been taught that when ordinary people, especially young people, try to do activism, they look stupid.

things are different now.

Activism comes so naturally to my girls. They are native to it. They are not afraid of sincerity. They’re at every protest, ones I haven’t even heard about.

this generation wasn’t fed activism as a punch line the way I was, and as Donald Trump emboldens conservative teenagers, my daughters and their friends aren’t cowed — they’re galvanized.

Think of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg

Think of the Parkland school shooting survivors

In the auditorium, my stepdaughter took the mic. “We are tired of the fact that we still have to fight,” she chanted, “for what the white man gets to call his inalienable rights. And it’s not how we fight, it’s that we dare to.” She took a deep breath. “So we, as a people, will keep fighting, whether it’s peaceful or scary, until we reach justice by whatever means necessary.”

The number of plants that have disappeared from the wild is more than twice the number of extinct birds, mammals and amphibians combined. The new figure is also four times the number of extinct plants recorded in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list.

There are thousands of “living dead” plant species, where the last survivors have no chance of reproducing because, for example, only one sex remains or the big animals needed to spread their seeds are extinct.

ew species a year. A sixth mass extinction of life on Earth is under way, according to some scientists. A landmark report in May said human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, with 1 million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction.

mong the other plants lost are the Chile sandalwood, exploited into oblivion for its aromatic wood, and the Saint Helena olive, the last two specimens of which succumbed to a termite attack and fungal infections in 2003.

“We suffer from plant blindness. Animals are cute, important and diverse but I am absolutely shocked how a similar level of awareness and interest is missing for plants. We take them for granted and I don’t think we should.”

Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.”

Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class

The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them

The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays.

If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.

we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.

“I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.

One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness

we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school.

“We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,”

We have to treat America’s cancer.

the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances

In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.

A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.

Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable.

Family structure collapsed.

The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years

The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.

The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did.

Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor.

It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors.

But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making.

If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.

Why did deaths of despair claim Farlan, Zealan, Nathan, Rogena and so many others?

First, well-paying jobs disappeared

Second, there was an explosion of drugs

Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families.

Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools

Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.

Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending,

ob training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.

For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario. As the scholar Victor Tan Chen has showed, the two countries responded differently

The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.

The focus on job placement meant that Canadian workers were ushered more quickly back into workaday society and thus today seem less entangled in drugs and family breakdown.

Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.

We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery.

The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs

Yet it’s not hopeless. America is polarized with ferocious arguments about social issues, but we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children. Here’s what does work.

Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money.

For individuals trying to break an addiction, a first step is to face up to the problem — and that’s what America should do as well

“That’s what leads to Greenwood being called the Black Wall Street. It had restaurants and furriers and jewelry stores and hotels,” John W. Franklin explains, “and the white mobs looted the homes and businesses before they set fire to the community. For years black women would see white women walking down the street in their jewelry and snatch it off.”

More than 35 blocks were destroyed, along with more than 1,200 homes, and some 300 people died, mostly blacks. The National Guard was called out after the governor declared martial law, and imprisoned all blacks that were not already in jail. More than 6,000 people were held, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, some for as long as eight days.

“It was the frustration of poor whites not knowing what to do with a successful black community, and in coalition with the city government were given permission to do what they did.”

“Then whites were deputized and handed weapons, the shooting starts and then it gets out of hand,” Franklin says. “It went on for two days until the entire black community is burned down.”

As in other places, the Tulsa race riot started with newspaper reports that a black man had assaulted a white elevator operator. He was arrested, and Franklin says black World War I vets rushed to the courthouse to prevent a lynching.

“(Survivors) talk about how the city was shut down in the riot,” Gardullo says. “They shut down the phone systems, the railway. . . . They wouldn’t let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community.”

Franklin says he has issues with the words often used to describe the attack that decimated the black community. “The term riot is contentious, because it assumes that black people started the violence, as they were accused of doing by whites,” Franklin says. “We increasingly use the term massacre, or I use the European term, pogrom.”

Many people were not in their homes at the time of the landslide because it was afternoon, she said.

Deadly landslides are common in Indonesia, where deforestation and illegal small-scale gold mining operations often contribute to unstable soil conditions.

The first landslide struck the village hours after a Sriwijaya Air passenger jet crashed into the Java Sea upon takeoff from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, in heavy rains, killing all 62 aboard.

Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,500 islands that straddles the Equator, was once covered by vast rain forests. But over the last half-century, many of the forests have been burned and logged to clear the way for palm plantations and other farmland.

Trump has also set a dangerous precedent for future Presidents to dispute the election results on spurious claims

President Trump has turned a blind eye to the millions of families that are suffering as a result of the pandemic. Despite 18 million cases, more than 330,000 deaths, and millions facing economic hardship, there has been little direction from Washington about what states need to be doing right now to curb the spread of this horrible virus.

Although 1 million Americans have already gotten the Covid-19 vaccine, that falls far short of the administration's goal of inoculating 20 million Americans by the end of December

President Trump's 11th hour decision to blow up the stimulus negotiations has also jeopardized much needed financial relief for millions of Americans. Rather than showing a genuine effort to pressure Senate Republicans to agree to legislation House Democrats passed in May, which would have provided $1,200 checks for individuals and up to $6,000 per household, Trump decided to intervene only after Congress finally agreed on individual payments of $600 -- saying he wanted $2,000 checks instead.

President Trump has also used his remaining time in office to dole out presidential pardons that exemplify the absolute worst use of this constitutional power.

Russia-gate alumni Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felonies including obstruction, threatening a witness and lying under oath; Paul Manafort, who was convicted of eight counts of financial crimes; Alex van der Zwaan, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators; George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI; and Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, were all pardoned, likely as a reward for their loyalty.

Trump also offered presidential relief to corrupt Republican Congressmen Duncan Hunter, who pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to misuse campaign funds, Steve Stockman, who was convicted of a number of felonies including fraud and money laundering, and Chris Collins, who was serving time on charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and making a false statement -- along with Charles Kushner, the father of son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was sentenced to two years in federal prison for retaliating against a federal witness, evading taxes and lying to the Federal Election Commission.

Four Blackwater guards were also pardoned after a lengthy trial found them guilty of killing 14 Iraqis in 2007.

Given all that has happened during this transition, some commentators wonder whether Congress should reduce the time between election and inauguration even more

This transition has given us more than enough reason to revisit our election laws, provide more clarity about the Electoral College certification process, and rein in the executive power that a lame duck President can wield.

I’m the daughter of a career military man. My patriotism is unwavering. I stand for the national anthem. I wear red, white and blue for every national holiday. I respect every branch of the military and those who have served. Most importantly, I hold my country in my heart and thank God every single day that I’m an American.

I’m a survivor of domestic violence and pervasive sexism that has periodically and unjustly crushed my American dreams for over five decades. Yet I still yearn for my freedom and am linked to others who have been unjustly judged, abused and oppressed. The promise of freedom and equality in our founding and our people’s struggles needs a rebirth that stretches deeper and farther than ever before. I love this land, its beauty, its bounty and all the wild creatures I have seen when visiting wild spaces. We need to embrace the protection of life and liberty for the planet, our fellow creatures and all of humanity. — Kara Steffensen, Eugene, Ore.

To me, love of country is to be gladly anchored to values and customs that are shared by fellow citizens. It is to yearn to try shrimp and grits in South Carolina, seeing a game at Fenway, taking in some jazz in Chicago and watching waves crash against a West Coast shore.

Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.

It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets

We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease.

Activists regularly challenge criticisms of “cancel culture” by saying: “Come on, we’re just some people with Twitter accounts, up against governments and corporate behemoths.”

In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.

we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established.

“Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.”

Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.

the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications

But when you look at the economic incentives, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back

Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.

If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is

When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.

Remember the iron law of woke institutions: For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive … and no economic radicalism at all. The latter is where activists need to apply their pressure.

Without policies like Medicare For All and a Green New Deal, working class people will continue to die. Compromise will not save them.

Biden’s platform instead includes a want to not “demonize” the wealthy and have “no one’s standard of living change,” as he told rich donors at a fundraiser last June.

And as much as Democrats want me to, I do not believe in voting for the “lesser” of two rapists.

He also authored the 1994 crime bill, which led to mass incarceration of disproportionately black and brown Americans. Just a few months ago, Biden gave a speech in Iowa claiming “poor kids are just as bright as white kids.”

Any Democrat who dismisses these allegations as uncredible or illegitimate is a hypocrite.

he notably neglects those who suffered the most as a result of the administration’s mass deportations, record civilian drone strikes and infamous Wall Street bailout.

We must not forget that Biden voted for the Iraq war, voted for NAFTA, has consistently supported corporate bailouts and opposes Medicare for All amid a pandemic (one that he has been largely absent from)

Biden was nowhere to be found. The only coronavirus response policy he has been vocal about, other than criticizing President Donald Trump, is advocating to hold in-person elections and putting thousands at risk.

After all, Biden voted to confirm both conservative judges Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia. More importantly, Biden was the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman during the Anita Hill hearings where Clarence Thomas, now the most conservative justice on the Court, was accused of sexual misconduct.

But those key Bernie-Trump voters were never Democrats in the first place – they were self-identifying independents and traditional non-voters who distrust establishment politicians.

But neither have I, and neither have the sexual assault survivors or former incarcerated people whose lives were affected by Biden’s decisions.

Trump is a dangerous figure, but he exists only by virtue of the prevailing establishment and status quo. He is a symptom of the late capitalist neoliberalism that the Democratic establishment embodies

By continuously voting for the lesser of two evils, I have effectively taken away the power of my own vote and allowed our country to move further to the right.

It’s almost impossible to decipher which path the UK government has chosen.

Without these measures in place, the past seven weeks of lockdown will have been completely pointless. As quarantine measures are lifted, the virus will continue to spread, the number of daily cases will rise and a second peak will become inevitable

this debate misses a more fundamental point: containment (the first path) is the best strategy for public health, the economy and society. The decision in early March to shift from containing to mitigating the virus was disastrous on all three of these fronts

Now, the key challenge facing the government is to replace this lockdown with a package of public health interventions involving mass testing, surveillance and real-time data to identify clusters of the virus and quarantine those who are infected.

The confusion turns on an internal struggle between two opposing camps. The first seems to think the government should attempt to get over the worst of the pandemic by allowing the virus to spread through the population, albeit at a slower pace to ease the strain on the NHS, and by creating more hospital and mortuary capacity to cope with a spike in deaths. The second camp wants to drive down the number of coronavirus cases and reduce the rate of infection – or R – to as close to zero as possible. It recognises the uniquely dangerous nature of this virus, and the emerging evidence that it can cause long-term health complications in survivors and that immunity may only be temporary.

Everyone agrees that we need to get out of the lockdown as soon as possible, but doing so will require massive investment in public health infrastructure. Countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia have already built this capacity

why has the government made such little progress in building the public health infrastructure necessary to control the virus and ease the lockdown? You could be forgiven for thinking that the lockdown was simply a way to reassure the public that the government was “doing something”. We need to be asking: what measures has the government put in place to ensure we’re in a better position to release the lockdown and prevent a second wave?

Everyone wants to know when the lockdown will end and life will go back to “normal”. The better question to ask is how we ease lockdown measures in the coming months and years while preventing a second wave of infections and keeping R well below one

There are a number of endings to this story. First, an accessible and affordable vaccine could become available within the next 18 months; second, the government could embark on a resource-intensive and gruelling campaign to eliminate the virus, particularly if emerging data proves coronavirus is as dangerous as diseases such as smallpox and polio; or third, antiviral therapies could become available to treat Covid-19 that make it a mild illness, so the population would gradually and safely build up natural herd immunity.

on our current path we seem destined for a disastrous ending. Lifting lockdown without the public health infrastructure in place to contain the virus will allow Covid-19 to spread through the population unchecked. The result could be a Darwinian culling of the elderly and vulnerable, and an individual gamble for those exposed to the virus. This should be avoided at all costs.

Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died,

It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.

“People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”

The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that.

Many survivors had to wear painful metal braces on their paralyzed legs or had to be placed in so-called iron lungs, which helped them breathe

In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies.

On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study.Salk’s vaccine was given to 420,000 children. A placebo was given to 200,000. And 1.2 million were given nothing.

She had started at NIH in 1937, had headed testing of vaccines for influenza, and in 1954 was asked to help test the Salk polio vaccine. The pressure was intense. “For weeks she and her staff worked around-the-clock, seven days a week,” O’Hern wrote.“This was a product that had never been made before, and they were going to use it right away,” Eddy had said.She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys.“What do you think is wrong with these monkeys?” she asked a colleague, Offit recounted.“They were given polio,” the colleague replied.“No,” Eddy said. “They were given the … vaccine.”

ost scientists say that people who have had Covid-19 gain some immunity to the virus that causes it. What they don’t know is whether that protection lasts a few months, a few years or a lifetime.

The immune system wards off infections by producing antibodies that fight invaders. A range of hereditary and environmental factors, including diet and sleep patterns, typically affect the strength and longevity of those defenses.

Immunity also depends on the pathogen. For example, infection by the virus that causes measles confers lifelong immunity. Others, like the influenza virus, can mutate so rapidly that protective antibodies might not recognize them during a reinfection.

The novel coronavirus mutates more slowly than the influenza virus. That gives researchers hope that any natural immunity, or vaccine, would offer more lasting protection. Even if someone gets sick again, researchers believe a second infection might be milder than the first.

Data are scant, but preliminary research shows antibodies can emerge within days or several weeks of the onset of symptoms. A study involving 34 hospitalized cases in China found that two patients, both in their 80s, produced antibodies within three days of symptom onset. The rest produced them two weeks after symptoms first surfaced.

A group of Chinese researchers reported in March that they had infected four rhesus macaques, allowed them to recover and then tried to reinfect two of them with the same strain of the virus. Neither became sick again.

Then why are some people testing positive again? South Korean health officials are refraining from labeling them as “reinfections.” Korean doctors involved in a continuing government review believe that those patients likely harbored low levels of the virus that diagnostic polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests failed to pick up. In later stages of the disease, the virus settles into the lungs where it can elude detection. The virus, they say, hadn’t been fully cleared from the body.

ow do I know I’ve fully recovered? Clinicians have mixed views on what constitutes recovery because long-term data aren’t yet available. Guidelines vary across the globe, and even within countries. In a peer-reviewed study published last month, researchers in Hong Kong detected the virus in the feces of Covid-19 survivors even as their respiratory samples tested negative. Viral fragments can linger in the body after symptoms disappear, but it doesn’t mean that a person is infectious, or that the disease will make a comeback.

Officials conducting rescue missions say the level of damage brings to mind Hurricane Mitch, which spurred a mass exodus from Central America to the United States more than two decades ago.

“The devastation is beyond compare,” said Adm. Craig S. Faller, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, which has been delivering aid to survivors of the storm. “When you think about Covid, plus the double punch of these two massive, major hurricanes back to back — there are some estimates of up to a decade just to recover.”

In Guatemala and Honduras, the authorities readily admit they cannot begin to address the misery wrought by the storms.

“Hunger, poverty and destruction do not have years to wait,” said President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, pleading for more foreign aid.

“We are facing an imminent health crisis,” said Sofía Letona, the director of Antigua to the Rescue, an aid group, “Not just because of Eta and Iota, but also because these communities are completely unprotected from a second wave of Covid.”

The boulders blanketing Quejá today are almost as tall as the electricity wires. The only road into the village is encased in mud so thick and wet that its residents leave holes in it the shape of legs.

People started leaving here for the United States only a few years ago, but Ms. Cal Sis is certain more will follow. “They are determined, now that they’ve lost almost everything,” she said.

Mr. Suc is now looking for anywhere else to go. He has no idea how he could make it to the United States, but he’s ready to try.“Yes, we’re thinking about migrating,” he said, eyeing the dwindling bag of corn he has left to feed his family. “Because, to give our children bread? We have nothing.”

a modern-day Svengali.”

compared himself to Einstein and Gandhi while touting Nxivm as a “community guided by humanitarian principles that seek to empower people.”

he created a secret master-slave group for women within Nxivm called DOS, where stick-thin devotees were branded with his initials above their genitals, made to wear dog collars and submit to unwanted sex with Raniere and other members, the feds said.

who went by the title “The Vanguard” — preyed on the young as he committed what the FBI called “serious crimes against humanity.”

part of his bizarre plan to use her as some kind of “vessel” to supposedly achieve immortality — and took porno shots of her, according to testimony at his trial.

Many were then branded with a cauterizing pen in ceremonies videotaped by other members to prove their loyalty to the group, some women said.

“The world closed in on me,” she recalled. “Every degree of freedom I had was lost.”

In June 2019, the jury took under five hours to convict Raniere of all of the seven counts against him, including for sex-trafficking, racketeering, child pornography and forced labor. He faces 15 years to life on the charges.

The sentencing comes amid heightened interest in the case, with two recent docu-series — HBO’s “The Vow” and Starz’ “Seduced” — featuring survivors telling their stories.

Raniere, who did not testify at his trial, has also vowed to protest his innocence.

"While commonly plotted as points on maps, earthquakes of this size are more appropriately described as slip over a larger fault area," the USGS said. It added that a 7.0 magnitude quake would normally have a fault area of 50 by 20 kilometers — about 31 by 12 miles.

If this does drive the evolution of the virus, we may have to regularly update the vaccines, as we do for flu, to keep up.

The concern was that antibodies from the blood of survivors was less effective at attacking that variant of virus.