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"I have to say it's frustrating when they spend all of their time disparaging what we did. They say we didn't have a plan. We had 65 plans," said Paul Mango, a former Trump administration official who helped oversee the operation.

"He's impatient," Fauci said of the President. "He asks specific questions, 'Well, what about this? Why aren't we doing this? Are we doing the best in that?' In a non-confrontative way, but more of a way that's positively trying to get the best out of everybody."

But Biden met that goal on day 58 and upped the ante -- doubling the target to 200 million shots in 100 days, and then exceeding that number as well.

We have to always start with access, making sure that people can get vaccinated in places where they are comfortable and where they trust the people who are vaccinating them," says Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of the White House Covid-19 Equity Task Force.

In April, the Food and Drug Administration and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended temporarily pausing use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after rare, one-in-a-million, cases of blood clots were found. The Biden team insisted this would not affect their supply or vaccination targets, and the vaccine is now back in use.

In 100 days, the US has gone from being heavily criticized for its Covid-19 response -- with over 570,000 recorded deaths, the highest number in the world -- to the envy of the world on vaccinations, with an inoculation rate more than four times the global average.

"I don't think that people understand what's in it for them," said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University who is a CNN medical analyst. Wen said she also thinks the administration should have prioritized teachers for vaccination earlier in order to help schools open sooner.

So in recent years, scientists started creating structures that resemble human embryos in the lab by using chemical signals to coax cells into forming themselves into entities that look like very primitive human embryos.

Now, Wu's team and another international team of scientists have gone further than ever before. They created hollow balls of cells that closely resemble embryos at the stage when they usually implant in the womb, which are known as blastocysts. The new laboratory-made embryos have been dubbed "blastoids."

Now with this technique we can make hundreds of these structures. So this will allow us to scale up our understanding of very early human development. We think this will be very important." Some other scientists are hailing the research.

The goal of the experiments is to gain important insights into early human development and find new ways to prevent birth defects and miscarriages and treat fertility problems.But the research, which was published in two separate papers Wednesday in the journal Nature Portfolio, raises sensitive moral and ethical concerns.

The two experiments started with different cells to get similar results. Wu's group created his blastoids from human embryonic stem cells, and from "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are made from adult cells. Polo's group started with adult skin cells.

Hyun agrees the research is very important and could lead to a many other advances. But Hyun says it's important to come up with clear guidelines about how scientists can responsibly be permitted to pursue this kind of research.

Hyun favors revising a guideline known as the 14-day rule, which prohibits experiments on human embryos in the lab beyond two weeks of their existence. Hyun says exceptions should be allowed under certain carefully reviewed conditions.

But others worry about easing the 14-day rule.That could mean "we could just keep growing these sort-of humans in a test tube and not even considering the fact that they're so close to being human, right?"

In fact, another team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel figured out how to grow mouse embryos outside the womb — a step toward creating an "artificial womb," according to report published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, “We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay”? What if these new activists embraced women’s sports and invested in female athletes, instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?

The debate around transgender rights in sports feels sometimes like fighting over bunk beds on the Titanic. In almost every case, as soon as money and power are involved, women’s sports take a back seat to men’s.

Women’s sports get attention when there’s an egregious slight against us, such as when the world champion women’s national soccer team sued for pay equal to the men’s team, which failed to qualify for the World Cup.

That means we get less coverage of us simply playing sports. When the journalist Brenna Greene looked for photos from the women’s basketball tournament this week, she found the N.C.A.A. hadn’t posted any.

Male players’ generous March Madness accommodations do not make news, because they are expected. That is because the men’s tournament gets extensive coverage, with the N.C.A.A. earning more than 20 times as much from the television rights for the men’s tournament as from its separate contract that includes rights to the women’s event. The system is set up this way. Investment follows, and inequality grows.

The only time I remember seeing an elite women’s track race on a front page in recent years is when one of the women in the race was framed as a threat.

It was not a coincidence that the athlete — Caster Semenya, a champion intersex sprinter from South Africa — is Black. Images of her competing incubated the American campaign against trans participation in sport, which is also racist.

If things were fair, any time we raved about LeBron James or Usain Bolt, we would also be watching Candace Parker pirouette with a basketball and Allyson Felix sprinting toward an unfathomable fifth Olympics.

At the last Olympics — where resources are equally divided among men’s and women’s teams — women earned more than half of American medals. You could argue that we deserve more resources, not less. And yet many Americans wring their hands over transgender inclusion. They are missing the point.

Alabama is one of 20 states that have introduced bills that would prohibit gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.

Alabama's bill is one of the toughest. It would make it a felony to provide transition-related medical treatment, such as puberty blockers, hormones or surgery, to transgender minors.

Hall was assigned female at birth. But, he says, when he hit puberty around fifth grade, "That's when I started to fully get uncomfortable with, like, the way that I looked or the way that I felt. Like, in my head I looked a different way than I looked in the mirror."

This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling bills that prohibit trans medical care, or that ban trans girls from women's sports teams, "dangerous."

The Alabama legislation is called the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act.

It passed overwhelmingly in the state Senate, by a vote of 23-4, and could go before the full House as early as this week.

At a House health committee hearing this month, lawmakers heard an impassioned plea from Sgt. David Fuller with the Gadsden, Ala., police department, who is father to a transgender girl.

Those who treat transgender youth say remarks like these are not just factually wrong; they also stigmatize an already marginalized and vulnerable population.

The swift progress of the trans medical care ban through the Alabama legislature has caused anxiety for families like theirs.

She points out that in their Birmingham clinic, no minor child is making the decision for treatment on their own. There is a detailed informed-consent process, and the child, their parents and the entire medical team all have to agree on a treatment plan.

But if the Alabama bill becomes law, she and her medical team could be charged with class C felonies for prescribing puberty blockers or hormones.

That means they could face up to 10 years in prison.

LGBTQ advocacy groups are gearing up for immediate court challenges if any of the medical care bans bubbling up around the country become law.

For Hall, Alabama's legislation would deny something essential: the person he knows himself to be. And, he says, the notion that he's a "gender-confused child" who's just "going through a phase" causes real pain.

The disease would ravage Wuhan before it was brought under control in March. The city was locked down on Jan. 23 with little or no warning. The hardships endured and lives lost became a source of both sorrow and pride for residents once the 76-day lockdown was lifted on April 8.

Scientists initially suspected the virus came from wild animals sold in the market.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology maintains an extensive archive of genetic sequences of bat coronaviruses built in the wake of the 2003 SARS pandemic, which spread from China to many countries.

China has firmly rejected calls for an independent outside investigation. The head of the WHO recently expressed impatience with how long China took to make necessary arrangements for the expert team's visit.

China stifled independent reports about the outbreak and has published little information on its search for the origins of the virus. An AP investigation found that the government has strictly controlled all scientific research related to the outbreak and forbids researchers from speaking to the press.

As the president and his aides deliberate over pardons, Mr. Trump has also been increasingly focused on another legal matter in his final days in office: his defense team for his Senate impeachment trial.

Mr. Broidy was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in October and accused of failing to report work for which he was paid at least $6 million by the man accused of masterminding the alleged fraud, Jho Low, to try to influence the Justice Department investigation into the scandal.

Mr. Trump’s legal authority to pardon himself is dubious; a 1974 legal memorandum said the president can’t pardon himself, but some legal scholars disagree and the matter has never been tested in

The two men met on Sunday, and the former New York mayor isn’t currently expected to be part of the president’s team, another person familiar with the plan said, though the person cautioned: “Never say never.”

The team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Mr Trump's personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, said they were challenging the impeachment on both procedural and constitutional grounds, claiming that the president did nothing wrong and had not been treated fairly.

"This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away," it added.

The filing on Saturday came a day after Mr Trump finalised his defence team, which includes special prosecutors from former President Bill Clinton's impeachment.

They said the president should be convicted and removed from office "to avoid serious and long term damage to our democratic values and the nation's security."

President Trump is accused of pressuring Ukraine to dig up damaging information on one of his main Democratic challengers for the presidency in 2020, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.

Mr Trump is also accused of obstructing Congress by refusing to co-operate with the congressional inquiry.

A two-thirds majority of 67 votes in the 100-seat Senate is required to convict and oust Mr Trump. But because there are only 47 Democrats (and 53 Republicans), the president is widely expected to be cleared.

A simple majority of senators - 51 - could also vote to end the trial should they wish.

The team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Mr Trump's personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, said they were challenging the impeachment on both procedural and constitutional grounds, claiming that the president did nothing wrong and had not been treated fairly.

In their own 111-page filing on Saturday, Democratic lawmakers leading the case against Mr Trump summarised arguments made during weeks of testimony in the impeachment investigation last year. They said the president should be convicted and removed from office "to avoid serious and long term damage to our democratic values and the nation's security."

Alejandro Mayorkas, who was a deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, is the first Latino and immigrant nominated as DHS secretary

Mayorkas was born in Havana, Cuba, and his family fled as political refugees to Miami.

he worked on the development and implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and headed the department's response to the Ebola and Zika health crises.

Avril Haines is tapped to serve as director of national intelligence, and if confirmed, she would become the first woman to lead the intelligence community.

She previously was deputy national security adviser and deputy director of the CIA, the first woman to hold the position

Additionally, former Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the negotiations over the Paris climate accords, has been named as special presidential envoy for climate to sit on the National Security Council. It will be the first time the NSC has included a member solely devoted to the issue of climate change.

Jake Sullivan, another close Biden aide, has been announced for the position of national security adviser in the new administration.

Sullivan previously was the former vice president's national security adviser and worked at the State Department under Hillary Clinton.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield for the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The role would mark Thomas-Greenfield's return to public service after retiring from her 35-year career with the Foreign Service in 2017.

Biden is elevating the ambassadorship to a Cabinet-level position. The announcement also puts a Black woman in a highly visible role.

The staffing announcements come after reporting that Biden had selected longtime adviser Antony Blinken for the coveted secretary of state post. Blinken was deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.

Four of the six roles require Senate confirmation, with Sullivan's and Kerry's positions not needing such a vote.

"These individuals are equally as experienced and crisis-tested as they are innovative and imaginative," Biden said in a statement.

they also reflect the idea that we cannot meet the profound challenges of this new moment with old thinking and unchanged habits — or without diversity of background and perspective. It's why I've selected them."

And dozens of House Democrats are urging Biden to name their colleague, Rep. Deb Haaland, as interior secretary. She would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

Before the season began, those who championed the return of college football argued that having players return to their team was a safer option than having them sit at home.

Just as the federal government left the coronavirus response up to individual states, the NCAA never instituted a broad, comprehensive plan for playing football safely. The governing body for college sports merely offered suggestions and left individual conferences on their own

While the NCAA could have done far more, university presidents ultimately decide which chances their teams will and will not take. Athletic departments and schools more generally have become dependent on the income generated by college football. For the leading powers in the sport, going without millions of dollars in television money was never likely.

Despite what the authorities in college football may think, history will not look back on this season and give them points for trudging through a pandemic and unnecessarily jeopardizing the safety of unpaid players who are unable to fight against a system that specializes in exploiting them. History will wonder whether this messy, muddled, and repeatedly interrupted season was worth all the risk

the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach

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if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.

Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out

In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.

is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”

“It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling

Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores

It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression

enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.

“The biggest danger that we face as a sector

If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic

for many white-collar workers, the remote-work experiment shows no sign of ending — a trend that could depress the commercial real-estate market and business travel long after a vaccine is available.

Consolidation, in turn, tends to increase income and wealth inequality, in part because the largest companies are run by highly paid executives, typically based in major metro areas, and the companies’ stock is disproportionately owned by the affluent.

“My basic fear,” Heather Boushey, a leading progressive economist, said, “is that it leads to a rule by the oligarchs.”

“Even Republicans — younger Republicans — have recognized that the center of gravity is shifting on the relationship between the state and the market.” The virus, he added, “will only accelerate that.”

That agenda is shaping up to have two defining features

The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave

The second is acting on climate change, which could cause even more global misery than the coronavirus. “Climate change cannot be solved by the private sector,”

while Mr. Obama’s team had only a couple of months to plan for taking office amid a national crisis, Mr. Biden’s team would have almost a year. “There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” Ms. Boushey added. “And there is a lot more runway.”

If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.

Biden and Trump are heading into their final planned showdown of the 2020 campaign, with 12 days to go until Election Day. And their respective teams are studying the first debate, which delved into chaos as Trump continually interrupted Biden.

Kellyanne Conway, who was part of the team that helped prepare the President for the first debate inside the White House map room, says she warned him not to interrupt too much.

Conway and other Trump advisers are renewing their argument to him ahead of the last debate that the more Trump let's Biden speak, the worse it is for Biden.

"Biden gets flummoxed fairly easily when he's trying to remember a contrived or practiced phrase or soundbite and let him do that. Let him have the airtime all to himself so people can really see what happens with Joe Biden when he's left just with them, the audience at home and Joe Biden's thoughts," Conway said.

"People who don't like hearing about plans and who want to see a food fight may end up being disappointed, but that's what Joe Biden wants to talk about is the specifics related to what he's going to do for people," said former Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who helped prepare Biden for debates against Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Warren and is also a CNN contributor.

The economy is the one issue polls consistently show the President competitive with Biden in the eyes of voters.

Trump sources say they really hope he avoids hitting his new favorite target, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is one of the most popular figures in America right now. One source told CNN this week that Trump was told in private conversations that hitting Fauci as he has been doing is "the dumbest thing in the history of politics."

"Definitely more levity, even though there's gravity right now in our country," is what Conway recommends for the President.

Ronald Reagan famously took concerns that he was too old for a second term head on, by saying "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience," he said, speaking of Walter Mondale, who even broke into laughter.

"'You know Joe, I'll promise in my second term I'll tweet less, but you have to tax less. Are you willing to make that?'" said Conway, pretending to be the President at the debate.

Also, if Trump brings up Hunter Biden's business dealings in China, advisers are hoping that Biden pivots to a New York Times report this week that revealed the President has a Chinese bank account and may even pay taxes to the government there.

"We know that he continues to do business with China because he has a secret Chinese bank account. How is that possible?" asked the former president.

"I should have said this is a clownish undertaking instead of calling him a clown," Biden said.

Aides say they believe Biden's direct to camera approach worked well for him during the first debate, and are hoping he can do more of that, saying it helped him to not just tune out Trump, but more importantly to connect with voters.

The Senate was initially going to recess, but now the trial will not break for the Sabbath and is expected to continue Friday evening and Saturday.

Democrats, including President Joe Biden, see acquittal as the assured outcome and don't want the trial to further impede the new President's agenda.

Trump himself, who has revolved through multiple legal teams as he prepares for the trial, is more concerned about the effect the trial may have on his public image, according to one person who has discussed the matter with him, rather than the potential outcome

The former president has kept a low profile since making a dramatic exit from Washington in the hours before Biden was sworn in and has been eager for his trial to end so he can start his post-presidency life, which people close to him have said is likely to include paid speeches overseas and domestic rallies targeting those who crossed him politically

His defense team was assembled a little more than a week ago after the five attorneys initially brought on to represent him all left days before legal briefs were due, which one person described as a mutual decision while another said it was over a difference in strategy.

The two attorneys arrived in Washington with their staffs Monday to conduct a walkthrough on the Senate floor where they will make their client's case. The walkthrough was almost identical to the one that happened a year ago, although instead of working out of the vice president's Senate office, Trump's team will set up shop in a sizable room next door to it for this trial.

Like he did during his first impeachment, Trump is expected to watch his attorneys on television from his private quarters at Mar-a-Lago

Trump watched nearly every minute of the first trial, becoming so consumed with his team's performance that aides later used the impeachment proceedings as an excuse for why he was distracted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The former president has not been as closely involved with the defense as he was the last time around. He was been more "checked out" than expected because he's confident he will be acquitted, one person told CNN.

He then unveiled a peculiar defense strategy, arguing that objecting to the outcome of an election and attempting to block certification is a regular practice in American politics.

But the Democrats' objections back then to some electoral votes came nowhere near the legislative or political effort to overturn the election that Trump and his Republican allies staged around the 2020 presidential election.

"Please come to order," Biden said at the time. "The objection cannot be received."

"To litigate questions of election integrity within this system is not incitement," van der Veen said. "It is the democratic system working as the founders and lawmakers have designed."

The House Democrats argue that Trump knowingly and willing whipped up a frenzied pro-Trump crowd and urged them to lay siege to the seat of American government to block lawmakers from certifying Biden's electoral victory and keep Trump in power.

House impeachment managers argued that if senators don't convict Trump, he may incite further violence.

17 Republicans would have to vote with all 50 Democrats to reach the two-thirds threshold to convict and effectively bar Trump from holding federal office in the future. That outcome, however, seems unlikely.

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing,"

Democratic senators came away from a conference call Tuesday morning with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer under the belief that a final vote on conviction could occur Sunday or Monday if there are no witnesses, according to multiple senators on the call.House managers have not yet requested witnesses but are preserving that option in case they need witnesses' testimony to rebut an argument made by the Trump team, which would extend the length of the trial into at least next week. The timing is also a bit uncertain because it's unclear how much time the Trump team will use, but they're not expected to use their full 16 hours.

The case would be like a "violent crime criminal prosecution," one aide said.

The historic impeachment trial has a number of firsts: It's the first time in US history a president will be tried in the Senate court of impeachment for a second time. And it's the first time that a former president will face the prospect of conviction and disbarment of office.

Trump's team will have two hours to respond to the managers later Tuesday before the Senate will vote on the constitutionality of the trial for a former president.

the House managers and Trump's lawyers will each get two hours to debate the constitutionality of the trial, and then the Senate will vote on the matter. While that vote could halt the trial if the Senate voted it was unconstitutional, a similar procedural vote forced by GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky failed 55-45 last month.

while Democrats are sure to win this vote, the constitutionality question looms over the entirety of the trial, because Republicans have coalesced around the argument as a reason to acquit Trump. Conviction requires two-thirds majority, or at least 17 Republican senators to join all members of the Democratic caucus.

Democrats have argued there's plenty of precedent to hold the trial for Trump, who was impeached by the House while he was still in office.

"The Framers' intent, the text of the Constitution, and prior Congressional practice all confirm that President Trump must stand trial for his constitutional crimes committed in office," the House managers wrote in a legal brief Monday. "Presidents swear a sacred oath that binds them from their first day in office through their very last. There is no 'January Exception' to the Constitution that allows Presidents to abuse power in their final days without accountability."

Trump's lawyers and many Republican senators, however, say they believe the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president.

Last month, five Republican senators voted against Paul's motion to dismiss the trial, and it's not clear if there have been any shifts. In a key sign showing the hurdles for convicting the former President, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of Senate GOP leadership, said Monday he believes the proceedings are unconstitutional and he's seen nothing that will change his mind so far.

"I don't know of anyone that their mind is not made up ahead of the impeachment trial," said Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican. "The first question on the issue of constitutionality, that drives a lot of it and everything else. I think people are pretty locked down."

After Tuesday's debate and vote, the House managers will have 16 hours over two days to make their presentation beginning Wednesday, followed by two days for Trump's lawyers. Senators will then have four hours to ask questions submitted in writing to both sides, and the Senate could debate and vote on whether to subpoena witnesses, though it remains unclear whether any will be sought at trial.

Dogged by skepticism and inconsistent funding, these coronavirus researchers were stymied from developing treatments and vaccines for SARS—many of which could have been helpful in the current crisis.

funding declines hobbled individual investigators who weren’t part of these larger consortia. Pharmaceutical companies that develop vaccines and therapies scaled back on coronavirus research, too. Within a few years after the SARS outbreak, public health funding agencies both in the United States and abroad “no longer regarded coronaviruses as a high public health threat compared to other diseases,” Saif wrote in an email.

to some experts whose business it is to hunt potential pathogens before they spill over into human populations, the many years spent not girding for a serious coronavirus outbreak were tragically—and unnecessarily—wasted.

“We were out there on the ground after SARS, working on coronaviruses with Chinese colleagues in collaboration,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York–based nonprofit group that took part in a large federally funded effort, called Predict, to hunt for new pandemic viruses in wildlife in 31 countries, including China. That program was famously defunded last fall, just before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began.

“But we were the only group of western scientists,” Daszak added. “How can we be the only people looking for these viruses when there was such a clear and present danger?”

when SARS emerged in late 2002, there was initially “general disbelief among medical people that a coronavirus could be the basis of such a huge outbreak.”

As that epidemic spread, an influx of new researchers crowded the field. More grants were awarded, and funding started to climb. “Everyone wanted to know where the virus had come from,” said Ralph Baric, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Initial findings pointed to wild civets and raccoon dogs sold for meat and pelts, respectively, in Chinese markets. Later evidence began to implicate horseshoe bats as the original source of the infections. Some researchers whose pre-SARS careers had been grounded in basic coronavirus biology began working on therapies and vaccines—and they made steady progress for several years.

Another similarly affected researcher was Brenda Hogue, a virologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Hogue had devoted her career to studying coronaviruses, focusing on the protein machinery that drives their assembly. After SARS, she and her colleagues turned part of their attention toward developing a vaccine. But when the funding dropped off in 2008, she said, the vaccine went into limbo “and we put our efforts into other directions.”

Then on May 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese government was responding in kind, “by stalling international efforts to find the source of the [SARS-CoV-2] virus amid an escalating U.S. push to blame China for the pandemic.”

To demonstrate that a particular virus is actually harmful to people, scientists need to isolate and culture the microbe and show it infects human cells in the lab

Led by virologist Zheng-Li Shi, the Wuhan team reported in 2013 that this particular virus, called WIV1, binds with ACE2 in civet and human cells, and then replicates efficiently inside them. “That was the red flag,” Saif said. Earlier evidence suggested that direct contact with these bats could lead to viral spillover in humans. “Now there was proof of that.”

The bats had been trapped in a cave in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. At least seven other SARS-like strains were present in that same colony, leading the researchers to speculate that bat coronaviruses remained “a substantial global threat to public health.”

They created a hybrid microbe by attaching the spike protein from SHC014 to the genetic backbone of a SARS-like virus that was previously adapted to grow in mice. Called a chimera—an organism containing cells with more than one genotype—this lab-made microbe had no problem binding with ACE2 and infecting human cells. Baric’s research team concluded that like WIV1, any SARS-like viruses outfitted with the SHC014 spike could pose cross-species threats to people.

Baric acknowledged the risky nature of the research but emphasized the safety protocols. “In general, we don’t know the transmissibility or virulence potential of any bat viruses or chimeras,” Baric said in an email message. “Hence it’s best to keep and work with them under biosafety level 3 laboratory conditions to maximize safety.”

Baric also pointed out that a chimera would display a genetic signature “that says what it is.” The adjoining parts of a chimera segregate discreetly in a logical pattern.

A genetic analysis of the chimera produced in his lab, for instance, “would come out to be mouse-adapted SARS everywhere but the spike, which is SHC014.” Similar logical patterns are absent in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that the virus that causes COVID-19 evolved naturally.

ven as Baric and others were generating lab evidence that more SARS-like viruses were poised for human emergence, another outbreak—in pigs, not people—provided another strong and recent signal: Some 25,000 piglets were killed by a coronavirus in the Guangdong province of China, starting in 2016. That virus, too, was found in horseshoe bats, and Buchmeier described the outbreak as both a major cross-species spillover and a warning shot that was never really picked up by the broader public-health community.

The EcoHealth Alliance, which had been part of the Predict effort, maintained its own collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds supplied by the National Institutes of Health. But on April 24, the Trump administration—which is investigating whether SARS-CoV-2 escaped accidentally from the Wuhan Institute, an allegation that’s been broadly discredited—directed the NIH to cut off that support.

hen cases of those diseases fell off, public-health responders shifted to other viral emergencies such as Ebola and Zika, and coronavirus research funding dropped sharply.

To disease experts, the bickering is a worrying—perhaps even astonishing—indicator that at least some global leaders still aren’t hearing what they have to say about the threat of coronaviruses, and Baric asserted that the ongoing pandemic exposes the need for better communication between countries, not less. “That is absolutely key,” he said. “Critical information needs to be passed as quickly as possible.”

Many other warnings would follow.Indeed, evidence of a looming and more deadly coronavirus pandemic had been building for years. Yet experts who specialize in coronaviruses—a large family of pathogens, found especially in birds and mammals, that can cross over to humans from other mammals and cause varying degrees of illness—struggled to convince a broader audience of the risk

the number of coronavirus-research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health—which had increased from a low of 28 in 2002 to a peak of 103 in 2008—went into a tailspin.

Though support for coronavirus research spiked a bit with the MERS outbreak in 2012, the increase was short-lived. Since that outbreak was quickly contained, the disease didn’t raise wider concerns and grant opportunities declined further.

Ironically, just as funding for drugs and vaccines was drying up, evidence that other coronavirus threats lurked in wildlife was only getting stronger

Ten years would pass, however, before researchers could show there were other SARS-like viruses in nature that also bind with ACE2. The evidence came from a team based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Those students, he says, "ought to be benefited. And by the way, a majority of those students are African American, and that's an issue that can't be ignored in this discussion either."

Popular sports bring in money for other athletic programs But at the same time, Roberts notes the NCAA system has benefited students who have scholarships to play other sports

The case before the Supreme Court involves 126 teams that play big-time football and men's and women's basketball. But for all of college sports, Roberts and other sports law experts say, the lower courts have left these issues in a legal mess.

California, for instance, passed a law last year effectively requiring schools to allow athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses. After the law was enacted, the NCAA abruptly reversed its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early next year.

its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early nex

images

A Supreme Court decision siding with the NCAA would likely fortify the NCAA's effort to maintain tighter restrictions on benefits for big-time college and basketball players. A decision holding that the NCAA has gone too far would likely lead to more benefits for players whose hard work and frequent injuries allow the schools they play for to reap billions in TV and other revenue.

While that revenue sometimes benefits lesser-known sports and players at those schools, many experts say it more often benefits coaches and assistant coaches who are paid tens of millions of dollars, and allows schools to spend millions on mammoth stadiums and lavish locker rooms.

Last week 60 minutes reported that "at least 30 universities have cut almost 100 programs: soccer, squash, golf, gymnastics. Football powerhouse Clemson cut men's track and field. Stanford eliminated 11 sports. Schools are honoring existing scholarships, but more than 1,500 student-athletes, both men and women, will no longer have a team to compete for."

Zig-zagging through this legal minefield will be difficult for the Supreme Court, to say the least. And it may well issue a narrow opinion that still leaves most of these questions unresolved. But the fact that the justices decided to take on the this case, when it has dodged similar ones in the past, indicates they are at least serious about the issues.

years of painstakingly worded treaties, high-level visits and cutting-edge disease surveillance—all meant to encourage good-faith cooperation—have only bitten around the edges of the problem.

“It can’t demand entry into a country because they think something bad is happening.”

Nearly 200 countries were counting on an agency whose budget—roughly $2.4 billion in 2020—is less than a sixth of the Maryland Department of Health’s. Its donors, largely Western governments, earmark most of that money for causes other than pandemic preparedness.

In 2018 and 2019, about 8% of the WHO’s budget went to activities related to pandemic preparedness

the agency’s bureaucratic structure, diplomatic protocol and funding were no match for a pandemic as widespread and fast-moving as Covid-19.

To write its recommendations, the WHO solicits outside experts, which can be a slow process.

It took those experts more than four months to agree that widespread mask-wearing helps, and that people who are talking, shouting or singing can expel the virus through tiny particles that linger in the air. In that time, about half a million people died.

As months rolled on, it became clear that governments were reluctant to allow the U.N. to scold, shame or investigate them.

In particular, The Wall Street Journal found:

* China appears to have violated international law requiring governments to swiftly inform the WHO and keep it in the loop about an alarming infectious-disease cluster

—there are no clear consequences for violations

* The WHO lost a critical week waiting for an advisory panel to recommend a global public-health emergency, because some of its members were overly hopeful that the new disease wasn’t easily transmissible from one person to another.

* The institution overestimated how prepared some wealthy countries were, while focusing on developing countries, where much of its ordinary assistance is directed

Public-health leaders say the WHO plays a critical role in global health, leading responses to epidemics and setting health policies and standards for the world. It coordinates a multinational effort every year to pick the exact strains that go into the seasonal flu vaccine, and has provided public guidance and advice on Covid-19 when many governments were silent.

The world’s public-health agency was born weak, created in 1948 over U.S. and U.K. reluctance. For decades, it was legally barred from responding to diseases that it learned about from the news. Countries were required to report outbreaks of only four diseases to the WHO: yellow fever, plague, cholera and smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980.

Nearly three times that amount was budgeted for eradicating polio, a top priority for the WHO’s two largest contributors: the U.S. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

SARS convinced governments to retool the WHO. The next year, delegates arrived in the Geneva palace where the League of Nations once met to resolve a centuries-old paradox: Countries don’t report outbreaks, because they fear—correctly—their neighbors will respond by blocking travel and trade.

“Everybody pushed back. No sovereign country wants to have this.”

China wanted an exemption from immediately reporting SARS outbreaks. The U.S. argued it couldn’t compel its 50 states to cooperate with the treaty. Iran blocked American proposals to make the WHO focus on bioterrorism. Cuba had an hourslong list of objections.

Around 3:15 a.m. on the last day, exhausted delegates ran out of time. The treaty they approved, called the International Health Regulations, imagined that each country would quickly and honestly report, then contain, any alarming outbreaks

In return, the treaty discouraged restrictions on travel and trade. There would be no consequences for reporting an outbreak—yet no way to punish a country for hiding one.

The treaty’s key chokepoint: Before declaring a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, the WHO’s director-general would consult a multinational emergency committee and give the country in question a chance to argue against such a declaration.

Delegates agreed this could give some future virus a head start but decided it was more important to discourage the WHO from making any unilateral announcements that could hurt their economies.

On Jan. 22, a committee of 15 scientists haggled for hours over Chinese data and a handful of cases in other countries. Clearly, the virus was spreading between people in China, though there was no evidence of that in other countries. The question now: Was it mainly spreading from very sick people in hospitals and homes—or more widely?

On Jan. 3, representatives of China’s National Health Commission arrived at the WHO office in Beijing. The NHC acknowledged a cluster of pneumonia cases, but didn’t confirm that the new pathogen was a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew.

That same day, the NHC issued an internal notice ordering laboratories to hand over or destroy testing samples and forbade anyone from publishing unauthorized research on the virus.

China’s failure to notify the WHO of the cluster of illnesses is a violation of the International Health Regulations

China also flouted the IHR by not disclosing all key information it had to the WHO

The WHO said it’s up to member states to decide whether a country has complied with international health law, and that the coming review will address those issues.

While Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome and posted it publicly, the government was less forthcoming about how patients might be catching the virus.

WHO scientists pored over data they did get, and consulted with experts from national health agencies, including the CDC, which has 33 staff detailed to the WHO.

Then a 61-year-old woman was hospitalized in Thailand on Jan. 13.

The next day, Dr. van Kerkhove told reporters: “It’s certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission.” MERS and SARS, both coronaviruses, were transmissible among people in close quarters. Epidemiological investigations were under way, she said.

Over the next few years, emergency committees struggled over how to determine whether an outbreak was a PHEIC. It took months to declare emergencies for two deadly Ebola epidemics

The committee met over two days, but was split. They mostly agreed on one point: The information from China “was a little too imprecise to very clearly state that it was time” to recommend an emergency declaration,

On Jan. 28, Dr. Tedros and the WHO team arrived for their meeting with Mr. Xi

Leaning across three wooden coffee tables, Dr. Tedros pressed for cooperation. In the absence of information, countries might react out of fear and restrict travel to China, he repeated several times throughout the trip. Mr. Xi agreed to allow a WHO-led international team of experts to visit. It took until mid-February to make arrangements and get the team there.

China also agreed to provide more data, and Dr. Tedros departed, leaving Dr. Briand behind with a list of mysteries to solve. How contagious was the virus? How much were children or pregnant women at risk? How were cases linked? This was vital information needed to assess the global risk, Dr. Briand said

Back in Geneva, Dr. Tedros reconvened the emergency committee. By now it was clear there was human-to-human transmission in other countries. When it met on Jan. 30, the committee got the information the WHO had been seeking. This time the committee recommended and Dr. Tedros declared a global public-health emergency.

President Trump and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo both assured constituents their health systems would perform well. The U.K.’s chief medical officer described the WHO’s advice as largely directed at poor and middle-income countries. As for keeping borders open, by then many governments had already closed them to visitors from China.

The WHO shifted focus to the developing world, where it believed Covid-19 would exact the heaviest toll. To its surprise, cases shot up just across the border, in northern Italy.

Lessons learned

If there were one thing the WHO might have done differently, it would be to offer wealthier countries the type of assistance with public-health interventions that the WHO provides the developing world

the WHO’s warning system of declaring a global public-health emergency needs to change. Some want to see a warning system more like a traffic light—with color-coded alarms for outbreaks, based on how worried the public should be

Emergency committees need clearer criteria for declaring a global public-health emergency and should publicly explain their thinking

The WHO should have more powers to intervene in countries to head off a health crisis

the WHO’s health emergencies unit should report to the director-general and not member states, and its budget should be protected so it doesn’t have to compete with other programs for money.

Implementing many of those ideas would require herding diplomats back for another monthslong slog of treaty revisions. If and when such talks begin, new governments will likely be in place, and political priorities will float elsewher

“Unfortunately, I’m very cynical about this,” he said. “We are living through cycles of panic and neglect. We’ve been through all of this before.”

One of the hostages was released shortly after 5 p.m. and FBI crisis negotiators continued to communicate with the man in the synagogue Saturday night.

A spokesman for Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said in a statement Sunday: “We are aware of the death of a British man in Texas and are in contact with the local authorities.” He did not say whether he was referring to suspect.

The hostages, all of whom were adults, were not physically harmed and did not require medical attention, officials said. “Prayers answered. All hostages are out alive and safe,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a tweet.

Three senior law enforcement officials briefed on the situation said the man told authorities he wanted the release of Aafia Siddiqui from federal prison. They also said the hostage taker had the rabbi in Colleyville call a rabbi in New York City to say he was being held hostage and that the man wanted his “sister” Siddiqui freed.

New York City Police Department counter-terrorism teams were seen Saturday at the synagogue connected to the New York rabbi who received the call.

John Floyd, board chair of CAIR Houston and longtime legal counsel for Siddiqui’s brother, said in a statement that his client is not responsible for the situation, is not near Dallas-Fort Worth and that hostage taker has nothing to do with Siddiqui.

“We want the assailant to know that his actions are wicked and directly undermine those of us who are seeking justice for Dr. Aafia,” Floyd said in a statement.

It was unclear how many people were in the synagogue when police received the first disturbance call Saturday morning. On a Facebook livestream of the congregation’s Shabbat morning service, a man could be heard speaking, at times cursing and sounding angry.

Miller, the Colleyville police chief, said officials began receiving reports that a “gunman” had entered the synagogue and had taken four hostages. Local authorities responded and evacuated nearby homes.

DeSarno, the FBI special agent in charge, said hostage negotiators had contact for long periods of time with the man, and credited their work, as well as that of the nearly 200 state, federal and local law enforcement officers, with the resolution.

Virginia, descended on Colleyville as the situation unfolded. Miller said Saturday night that the rabbi of the congregation is a close friend and that the situation was very personal. He added that he saw hope in how the community came together during the crisis.

Late Saturday night, Biden thanked those who worked to bring the four hostages home to their families.

Congregation Beth Israel, affiliated with Judaism's Reform movement, began in 1998 as a chavurah or a small group of Jewish people who gather for prayer services, according to its website. The group officially established a synagogue in Colleyville in July 1999, and began services at its current location in 2005.

The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.

The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.

The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

The PLA had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists on a study of the Mers coronavirus and was working with them at the time of the outbreak.

Suspicion fell on him after the pandemic because he produced a patent for a Covid vaccine with remarkable speed in February 2020, little more than a month after the outbreak of the virus had first been admitted to the world by China.

In May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died, a fact mentioned only in passing in a Chinese-media report and in a scientific paper that placed the word “deceased” in brackets after his name. Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.

However, there was a no-go area: the Moijang mine. Seven of Hughes’s team headed to the mine in June 2020, including Camping Huang, the PhD student who had investigated the miners’ mystery illness soon after they died.

The investigators also saw communications intercepts that allegedly show three Wuhan institute researchers working at its level 3 laboratory on coronavirus gain-of-function work had fallen sick with coronavirus symptoms in the second week of November 2019, when many experts believe the pandemic began. One of the researchers’ family members later died.

An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important “oral and written” instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding “a complex and grave situation”.

A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid. At the time, the authorities were eager to play down the suggestion that the city’s Huanan seafood market was the source of the outbreak; the study was used to show that the initial hotspots in December and January were several miles away.

When the study was first published, the Wuhan institute was not marked on the map it provided. So a report by the US Senate did just that — and found the institute right next to the biggest hotspot in the month before the province was locked down on January 23. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.

Even before the West was told a mysterious virus was killing people in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities were beginning an information clampdown.

In the first months of the pandemic, there was a strong desire among Chinese scientists to head off to the bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.

One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.

When they arrived, they were told the Moijang mine was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours.

Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. “We did provide documentation to show we were there legally,” said Hughes. “But there was just too much fear and so they didn’t release those samples.”

Most coronavirus experts in China, she said, were too fearful of the consequences to examine Covid’s origins. “They haven’t touched it because of the risks associated with working on it.