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A clear and consistent position from the US would allow for a whole-of-government response and ensure the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act are fully enforced. These laws sanction parties involved in human rights abuses, identify where goods produced with forced labor are entering the US supply chain, and bans their import.

Biden raised his concerns over the oppression of the Uyghurs which, while a good step, was insufficient when not backed by uniform US policy. What's needed is a comprehensive strategy that holds China accountable for its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and prioritizes ending violence.

While former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rightly declared the crimes against the Uyghurs a genocide, the Trump administration's approach to China and to human rights more broadly was spotty and inconsistent at best.

In addition, a cross-agency response should focus in particular on allegations of gender-based violence perpetrated against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Biden has already established a White House Gender Policy Council and has made clear that he plans to engage with the UN's Women, Peace, and Security agenda (neglected by the Trump administration) to put gender equality and freedom from gender-based violence at the heart of US diplomacy.

Too often in the past, hosting the Olympics has allowed authoritarian regimes to peddle propaganda and gain legitimacy -- from the Nazis in 1936 to the Soviets in 1980 to the Chinese Communist Party in 2008 and Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2014. In response to China's oppression of Uyghur communities and other human rights abuses, over 180 human rights groups and international legislators are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved from Beijing or boycotted altogether.

It’s very bad, both in terms of the size of the affected area and the severity. The latest map from the drought monitor shows that all or nearly all of California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and North Dakota are in drought, and in large areas of those states conditions are “severe” or “exceptional.” Colorado, Idaho, Washington, Montana, South Dakota and southwestern Texas are also affected.

It is true that much of the West is normally hotter and drier than other parts of the country. Much of the Southwest and parts of Southern California are desert. Las Vegas, for example, averages about four inches of rain a year, about a 10th of the national average. Much of the rest of California has a Mediterranean climate, which can be wet in the winter but is hot and dry in summer.

The fall and winter are usually wetter in California and the Pacific Northwest, so that may help. A pattern of summer storms known as the Southwest monsoon may help in Arizona, New Mexico and other areas. But the monsoon is unpredictable — the 2019 and 2020 monsoon seasons brought so little rain they were referred to as “nonsoons,” and are one reason the drought is so severe this year.

"Vaccine hesitancy is a big problem for all of us,"

Up until now, the nationwide vaccine campaign has seen demand outstrip supply, but Mokdad says he believes that will soon change. By May, he believes, "We will have more vaccines than people willing to take the vaccine."

The numbers who may refuse the vaccine remain potentially too high to contain a respiratory virus such as SARS-CoV-2, which requires a large segment of the population to be immune.

But the fall and winter could be a different story. Scarpino says he believes that more contagious variants such as the one first reported in the U.K. will dominate the fall and winter COVID-19 season, raising the herd immunity threshold. Variants with higher transmissibility may require a larger share of the population to be immune before they can be contained.

"What most of us want is a safe return to something that looks more normal," says Samuel Scarpino, who models the coronavirus outbreak at Northeastern University. "That to me means 80% to 85%, probably, vaccinated."

And roughly 20% of the population are children under the age of 16, who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine — making it even more crucial that adults do get vaccinated.

Scarpino and Mokdad say the problem will not be immediately apparent. Both scientists expect COVID-19 cases to drop over the summer months when a combination of vaccinations and warm weather will dramatically slow the virus down. Mokdad says he thinks the improved conditions will paradoxically make vaccination more difficult.

"It's very hard to convince people to take the vaccine in summer, when everything is going good,"

Nobody knows exactly how large, but based on other diseases, researchers believe it is far above the current 32% of the U.S. population that's gotten at least one shot to date.

Moderate rates of vaccination will prevent a nationwide crisis such as that seen during the winter of 2020 and 2021, he says. But he worries regional outbreaks could still overwhelm hospitals, close schools and force local governments to reinstitute restrictions in different parts of the United States, especially in areas where vaccination rates are low.

The reasons for saying "no" to a vaccine are often complex.

"I don't think there's one particular group," says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "I don't think that it works to classify people who are vaccine hesitant all having the same reason for being vaccine hesitant."

Koltai says that misinformation is proliferating right now, often tailored to different groups with different grievances

"You need to speak to these different groups: the minority groups, the Republicans and the other people who feel like they have some distrust in science," she says. Often the best way to do so, she says, is through groups and leaders at a local level who are in favor of vaccination.

Last week, the Biden administration launched a major initiative to try and encourage vaccination by enlisting faith groups, unions and even NASCAR to promote getting vaccinated. It's the kind of broad, grassroots effort experts say can help.

The question is, will it be enough? "We need to vaccinate as much as possible right now, stop the circulation of this virus in the U.S. and elsewhere," Mokdad says. "Then we can control it."

H-E-B issued a statement on Sunday saying that its focus was still on operations after the storm, noting that the weather had been “incredibly difficult” on its employees as well as the rest of the state.

Allegiances to brands are often about more than just the product; they can be a proxy for consumers to telegraph their stances on political or social issues. Yet H-E-B reflects another kind of virtue signaling, one that often supersedes race, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation: a display of Texan identity.H-E-B falls into a class of companies that Texans instantly identify with their state in a way that transcends commerce, particularly for expatriates outside state lines. There is Whataburger, the fast food chain; Blue Bell ice cream; and Buc-ee’s supersized convenience stores. Many a Texan in New York City has spotted an orange-striped bag from Junior’s Cheesecake and thought someone stepped on the E train with a Whataburger.

“That’s what we’ve come to expect of H-E-B,” Professor McAlister added. “It’s from the heart and they’re good at logistics. If their Texans need water, they can get it to them, because it’s their Texans who are thirsty.”

The shelves in many stores were light on inventory, if not entirely bare, especially for water. In a store packed with customers in the Las Palmas neighborhood of San Antonio, notices warned people could only take two gallons of water. “Limits are temporary and necessary for you and your neighbors to find the products you need,” a sign said.

According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's latest model, by March 1, the U.S. may see nearly 439,000 total deaths from COVID-19. But Mokdad and his colleagues have calculated two alternative scenarios, depending on the path the country takes. If governmental mandates to limit the spread are eased, the model predicts more deaths: perhaps 587,000 by March 1.

There has been good news this month, with Pfizer and Moderna each announcing that their experimental vaccines are highly effective in preventing disease – 95% in the case of Pfizer's, and nearly 95% for Moderna's.

"That means that schools and other institutions that serve primarily children may be continue to need to follow the nonpharmaceutical interventions longer than older adult communities, for example, just because they will not be eligible for the vaccine right away," she says.

"We are in a worse place than we were even in the spring, because in the spring it was primarily New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut that were experiencing a strain on their health care systems," Rivers says. "Right now we are seeing intense community transmission really all across the country. And that doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room to make sure that we are able to deploy extra resources to those places."

As the pandemic stretches on, people get tired of being vigilant about masks and social distancing and not gathering with others indoors. Many people have suffered economic pain from the virus and the restrictions that have followed, and are eager for their lives to return to normal.

Public health officials are pleading with Americans not to celebrate Thanksgiving the way they usually do but instead use this occasion to invent new traditions. One idea is to drop off food contactlessly to another household and then share the meal over video.

In an ideal epidemiological scenario, everyone would willingly deploy the full arsenal of COVID precautions, such as masking and forgoing crowded indoor activities, especially during waves. But that kind of all-out response no longer makes sense. “It’s probably not realistic to expect people to take precautions every time, perpetually, or even every winter or fall, unless there is a particularly concerning reason to do that,

when so few people feel that the potential benefit of dodging an infection is worth the inconvenience of precautions, what does it even mean to care about COVID?

people over 50 account for 93 percent of COVID-related deaths in the U.S., even though they represent just 35.7 percent of the population. As long as the death rate remains as high as it is, caring about COVID should mean orienting precautions to protect them.

Barring another Omicron-esque event, we thankfully won’t ever return to a moment where Americans obsess over COVID en masse. But this virus isn’t going away, so we can’t escape having a population that is split between the high-risk minority and the low-risk majority

Right now, Nuzzo told me, the language we use to describe one’s position on COVID is “black-and-white, absolutist—you either care or you don’t.” There is space between those extremes. At least for now, it’s the only way to compromise between the world we have and the world we want.

‘Odds are, people are going to get sick this year,’”

In typical years, flu hospitalizes an estimated 140,000 to 710,000 people in the United States alone; some years, RSV can add on some 200,000 more. “Our baseline has never been great,” Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford, told me. “Tens of thousands of people die every year.”

this time of year, on top of RSV, flu, and COVID, we also have to contend with a maelstrom of other airway viruses—among them, rhinoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, human metapneumovirus, and common-cold coronaviruses.

Illnesses not severe enough to land someone in the hospital could still leave them stuck at home for days or weeks on end, recovering or caring for sick kids—or shuffling back to work

“This is a more serious pathogen that is also more infectious,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. In the past year, COVID-19 has killed some 80,000 Americans—a lighter toll than in the three years prior, but one that still dwarfs that of the worst flu seasons in the past decade.

Globally, the only infectious killer that rivals it in annual-death count is tuberculosis

Rivers also pointed to CDC data that track trends in deaths caused by pneumonia, flu, and COVID-19. Even when SARS-CoV-2 has been at its most muted, Rivers said, more people have been dying—especially during the cooler months—than they were at the pre-pandemic baseline.

This year, for the first time, millions of Americans have access to three lifesaving respiratory-virus vaccines, against flu, COVID, and RSV. Uptake for all three remains sleepy and halting; even the flu shot, the most established, is not performing above its pre-pandemic baseline.

COVID could now surge in the summer, shading into RSV’s autumn rise, before adding to flu’s winter burden, potentially dragging the misery out into spring. “Based on what I know right now, I am considering the season to be longer,” Rivers said.

barring further gargantuan leaps in viral evolution, the disease will continue to slowly mellow out in severity as our collective defenses build; the virus may also pose less of a transmission risk as the period during which people are infectious contracts

even if the dangers of COVID-19 are lilting toward an asymptote, experts still can’t say for sure where that asymptote might be relative to other diseases such as the flu—or how long it might take for the population to get there.

it seems extraordinarily unlikely to ever disappear. For the foreseeable future, “pretty much all years going forward are going to be worse than what we’ve been used to before,”

although a core contingent of Americans might still be more cautious than they were before the pandemic’s start—masking in public, testing before gathering, minding indoor air quality, avoiding others whenever they’re feeling sick—much of the country has readily returned to the pre-COVID mindset.

When I asked Hanage what precautions worthy of a respiratory disease with a death count roughly twice that of flu’s would look like, he rattled off a familiar list: better access to and uptake of vaccines and antivirals, with the vulnerable prioritized; improved surveillance systems to offer  people at high risk a better sense of local-transmission trends; improved access to tests and paid sick leave

Without those changes, excess disease and death will continue, and “we’re saying we’re going to absorb that into our daily lives,” he said.

And that is what is happening.

last year, a CDC survey found that more than 3 percent of American adults were suffering from long COVID—millions of people in the United States alone.

“We get used to things we could probably fix.” The years since COVID arrived set a horrific precedent of death and disease; after that, this season of n+1 sickness might feel like a reprieve. But compare it with a pre-COVID world, and it looks objectively worse. We’re heading toward a new baseline, but it will still have quite a bit in common with the old one: We’re likely to accept it, and all of its horrors, as a matter of course.

And suppose it takes five days between a person’s getting infected and their infecting others. After 30 days, the more transmissible virus is now causing 26, or 64, times as many new cases as the less transmissible one.

Not every case will be mild, though, and even a small hospitalization rate on top of a huge case number will be a big number.

Now, as my colleague Ed Yong reports, Omicron could push a collapsing health-care system further into disaster. Hospitals are already dealing with the flu and other winter viruses. They’re already canceling elective surgeries.

If there are no changes to behavior or policy, this year’s winter wave would peak at about double the hospitalizations of last winter at its worst, and 20 percent more deaths, according to the most pessimistic of projections

The most optimistic projection sees a caseload similar to last winter’s, but hospitalizations and deaths at about half of where they were back then, assuming the vaccines keep up their very high protection against severe illness.

If that holds, it’s a “huge decrease,” Meyers says, and one that matches the assumptions of her team’s grimmer—but not grimmest—projections. When they modeled scenarios where vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization dropped by about that much, they saw a difference of tens of thousands of deaths.

Very preliminary data from South Africa’s largest health insurer suggest that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were 70 percent effective at preventing hospitalization from Omicron infections, down from 93 percent before.

Vaccine protection against severe illness should be more durable than it is against infection, but may still take a hit

The available evidence on Omicron’s inherent severity is likely to be biased in ways that make it appear more promising. First of all, hospitalizations lag infections.

Second, the first people infected may skew young and are thus more likely to have mild cases regardless of the variant

third, some of the mildness attributed to the virus may result instead from existing immunity. In South Africa, where doctors are reporting relatively low hospitalizations compared with previous waves, many cases are probably reinfections

The South Africa health-insurer data suggest that Omicron might carry a 29 percent lower risk of hospitalization than the original virus, when adjusted for risk factors including age, sex, vaccination status, and documented prior infection—but many prior infections may be undocumented, which would make the reduction in risk seem bigger than it really is. (A recent analysis of early U.K. cases found “at most, limited changes in severity compared with Delta.”)

Either way, in the short run, we will have a massive number of Omicron cases on top of a massive number of Delta cases. Together they will infect huge numbers of people, vaccinated or not

State media suggest that the opening ceremony is unlikely to be such a full-throated celebration of China’s greatness as was seen at the launch of the games in 2008, when thousands of costumed troops took part in grandiose performances.

No foreign visitors, other than invited guests, have been let into China to watch the games. Tickets are not being sold to people in the country. Fearful of recent outbreaks of covid-19, the government says it will “organise” people to attend.

They may clap, but not shout. The athletes, their support staff and journalists are being kept in a “closed loop”, isolated from the local community. Dozens of them are testing positive.

Protections make sense when admitting 30,000 foreigners into a country that lacks a highly effective vaccine (because it has not approved foreign jabs), and whose population has acquired no immunity from infections.

Representative Paul Ryan’s fitness routine—he’s a big fan of what’s known as the P90X workout plan—has received three times as much television coverage as the ice loss

“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans,” Romney declared in his convention speech in Tampa, pausing here to give the audience time to chuckle, “and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.

Obama at least got exercised enough to point out, in his convention speech, that “climate change is not a hoax.”

But that was as far as he was willing to go: no more grandiose claims about actually taking action.

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small

when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived.

We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive.

the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938.

It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.

The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror.

If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.

mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag

During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.

Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland’s capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed.

By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

but dozens more have died at sea, including 14 from Wednesday's incident.

Previous rounds of negotiations with North Korea, some lasting years, have all failed to persuade Pyongyang to change course as it has worked to advance its ability to strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons. As recently as a few months ag

North Korea warned it was contemplating a missile attack aimed at the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam.

ushing ahead with increasingly stringent economic sanctions aimed at curbing the country’s access to funds and fuel—and forcing it to abandon its atomic ambitions.

“It would be the first inter-Korean summit at a neutral location, so Moon can avoid the optics of appearing to pay tribute to Kim in Pyongyang,”

Senior U.S. officials have expressed doubts about the opening as a propaganda ploy meant to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, but have publicly said they support South Korean efforts to bring Pyongyang to the negotiating table.

Kim Dong-yub, a professor of security studies at Kyungnam University, said North Korea could work to divide Washington or Seoul by insisting that a security guarantee involve the removal of U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula. “What defines security?” he said. North Korea has said repeatedly in recent years that the only true guarantee of its security was its possession of nuclear weapons. It reiterated the same idea on Tuesday, even as the South Korean delegation prepared to return home to Seoul.

Seoul’s delegation to the North had expected Mr. Kim to raise issues with annual springtime military exercises with the U.S., but the North Korean leader said he understood the need for them and didn’t push the point, a senior Seoul official said. North Korea has complained about the exercises, saying they are a rehearsal for invasion. Pyongyang last month warned the two allies that going ahead with them would go “against the climate of detente on the Korean Peninsula” and spell the end of the current thaw.

The two Koreas agreed to hold a summit between their leaders at the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone that separates the peninsula —rather than in Pyongyang, the site of the two previous inter-Korean summits in 2000 and 2007.

As the restrictions have tightened, North Korea has reached out to the South. Relations between the two began a nascent thaw ahead of the recent Winter Olympics.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told a visiting South Korean delegation that he was willing to hold talks with the U.S. about giving up nuclear weapons and would halt weapons tests during any negotiations, officials in Seoul said Tuesday.

“It is unlikely Kim Jong Un has abandoned his determination to keep nuclear weapons indefinitely,” said Robert J. Einhorn, a former senior State Department official who negotiated with North Korean officials during the Clinton administration.

American officials repeatedly have said North Korea still needs to carry out additional flight tests before it can be confident that it has the capability to strike the U.S. with a long-range, nuclear-armed missile.

Whether negotiations would produce more significant results is questionable.”

Beyond doubts about what Pyongyang will offer at the table, some U.S. officials also worry that North Korea will seek to use negotiations to create divisions between Seoul and Washington and blunt the American-led efforts to maintain tough economic sanctions.

Mr. Kim suggested his country might be willing to participate in the Winter Olympics in South Korea and Mr. Moon responded by proposing inter-Korean talks.

“They may mean it is a long-term objective and we may want them to denuclearize overnight,” said Joel S. Wit, a senior fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins and a former State Department official.

Other difficult issues would include negotiating a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, normalizing relations with the U.S. and determining when economic sanctions against North Korea would be eased and ultimately eliminated.

While the idea of a May summit is seen by many as an encouraging step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula — no sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader — others are puzzled by Washington's marked change in tone.

"It is striking how fast this has moved forward ... This is encouraging news, but it's very important to manage expectations," said Park. "We don't have all the details yet to make an assessment on how viable this process will be."

Formed in 2012, all band members are reportedly hand-picked by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un himself. Their music is a synthesiser-heavy mix of Western classics and Pyongyang propaganda songs including "We Call Him Father" - an ode to Mr Kim. The changing line-up is made up of singers and multi-instrumentalists, playing anything from electric guitars to synthesiser, violin and saxophone. In 2015, the band was rumoured to have been purged, even executed, when it briefly vanished from public view for several weeks.

North and South Korea are set to hold talks with the International Olympics Committee in Switzerland next Saturday to discuss the participation of North Korean athletes at the Games.

Indigenous peoples are more threatened than ever. Residents joust constantly with nature in unpredictable ways, leaving them feeling baffled, unsettled, helpless, depressed and irritated

“Everything is changing, people are trying to figure out how to adapt,” said Afanasiy V. Kudrin, 63, a farmer in Nalimsk, a village of 525 people above the Arctic Circle. “We need the cold to come back, but it just gets warmer and warmer and warmer.”

Climate change is a global phenomenon, but the shifts are especially pronounced in Russia, where permafrost covers some two-thirds of the country at depths ranging up to almost a mile.

“People don’t comprehend the scale of this change, and our government is not even thinking about it,

In a regionwide pattern, the average annual temperature in Yakutsk has risen more than four degrees, to 18.5 F from 14 F, over several decades, said Mr. Fedorov of the permafrost institute.

Warmer winters and longer summers are steadily thawing the frozen earth that covers 90 percent of Yakutia. The top layer that thaws in summer and freezes in winter can extend down as far as 10 feet where three feet used to be the maximum.

Nalimsk hunters once stored their fish and game in a 22-foot deep cave dug out of the permafrost, a kind of natural freezer. Now its thawing walls drip water, and the meat rots.

Even state-run institutions like the permafrost institute lack the means for the complicated field work needed to assess the full extent of permafrost loss. Nor can they gauge other fallout, like how much methane that microbes in the newly thawed ground produce, adding to global warming.

The loss of permafrost also afflicts the capital, Yakutsk. Subsiding ground has damaged about 1,000 buildings, said the mayor, Sardana Avksentieva, while roads and sidewalks require constant repair.