Meanwhile, North America’s Pacific Coast was choking under successive waves of fume and ash. As with Australia, the forests, chaparral and grasslands of California, Oregon and Washington State had been rendered explosive by a chain of summers so searing that by mid-August this year, Death Valley’s temperature spiked to 130 degrees Fahrenheit — probably the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth.

So what are we to make of this yin-yang spectacle, with ourselves at nature’s throat in the south and nature at ours up north? Clearly a tremendous intercontinental drama is underway. Having sown the wind with greenhouse gases for centuries, we’re reaping the whirlwind, sometimes quite literally. Add pestilence to this picture of drought, fire and flood and you have a scene straight out of the Book of Revelation, with the coronavirus, as invisible to the naked eye as it is from space, playing the role of the fourth Horseman, sent by nature to counter our continuing assaults on the natural world.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

Mr. Biden tested negative on Friday and said he would be tested again on Sunday. His campaign vowed to make public the results of all future tests.

At least seven people who attended a White House event on Sept. 26 have since tested positive for the coronavirus. Six of them, including the first lady, sat in the first several rows of a Supreme Court nomination ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett in the White House Rose Garden. The seventh was the president himself.

Two people close to the White House said in separate interviews with The New York Times that the president had experienced trouble breathing on Friday and that his blood oxygen level had dropped, prompting his doctors to give him supplemental oxygen at the White House and then to transfer him to Walter Reed.

“Before Trump, we rarely talked about politics,”

one in 10 voters who are registered as a Democrat or Republican are married to someone in the opposite party

Her views are much stronger now: “I’m voting for him because of what he’s done and what he supports and what he fights for.”

in both friendship and dating,

People are increasingly marrying people like themselves in terms of education and earnings potential, and living in places surrounded by others who share their beliefs and lifestyle. These things are correlated with political views.

Women and Democrats are the groups that care most about having the same political views as their romantic partner

two-thirds of Americans said they would not consider dating someone who disagreed with them about the president

hird party (perhaps the Libertarian Party)

That may be where many of us — those of us who were explicitly NeverTrump, and even those who were willing to cut the president a lot more slack — wind up.

He would uphold the election despite the president and despite the mob. And he would pay the price with the political base he once hoped to harness for his own run for the White House.

“Pence had a choice between his constitutional duty and his political future, and he did the right thing,”

The gorillas in San Diego are among the latest animals to become infected with the coronavirus, which has killed more than 375,000 people in the United States, according to an analysis by The New York Times.