Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former senior adviser on immigration in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said the comparisons to the Trump administration are unfair and not accurate.

This is not "kids in cages," she said, which referred to detention facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Carrizo Springs facility is operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, and it includes educational services and medical care.

"A government agency is not a parent for children," she said. "The reality is that children who are alone need to be accommodated for their safety while the government identifies and reunites them with appropriate sponsors. We don't want to endanger children, and we don't want them held in detention or in facilities that don't meet their best interests."

But most people in the COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy camp are more rational, more measured—informed enough not to believe the crazy talk, but worried enough not to want to be at the head of the line for a new vaccine.

Then too there is a question of effectiveness. Both of the vaccines that have been authorized for emergency use in the U.S., one from Pfizer-BioNTech and one from Moderna, have what Offit calls “ridiculously high efficacy rates—in the 95% range for all [COVID-19] disease and for Moderna’s product 100% for severe disease.”

Armed with numbers like that, however, humans are not always terribly good at calculating risk. On the one hand even an eight in 10,000 chance of contracting facial paralysis does sound scary; on the other hand, about one out every 1,000 American was killed by COVID-19 this past year. The mortal arithmetic here is easy to do—and argues strongly in favor of getting the shots.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both use mRNA—or messenger RNA—to prompt the body to produce a coronavirus spike protein, which then triggers an immune response. That is a novel method for making a vaccine, but the basic research was by no means conducted within the last year. “The technology for the vaccine has actually been in development for more than a decade,”

The Gallup organization has been tracking vaccine attitudes by party since July and has found Democrats consistently more likely to get vaccinated than Independents or Republicans.

But nowhere is the difference starker than among racial and ethnic groups, with 83% of Asian-Americans surveyed expressing an intent to be vaccinated, compared to 63% in the Latinx community and 61% among Whites. In Black American respondents, the numbers fall off the table, with just 42% intending to be vaccinated.

“The main fear I hear [about vaccines] is that someone is injecting coronavirus into my body,” says Stanford. “And I answer in as detailed a way as I can about the mRNA and the protein and how it looks like coronavirus but it’s not.” That kind of clarity, she says, can help a lot.

In all communities, it helps too if doctors and other authorities listen respectfully to public misgivings about vaccines, explaining and re-explaining the science as frequently and patiently as possible. But there is a burden on the vaccine doubters themselves to be open to the medical truth. “Questions are fine as long as you listen to the answers,” Pan says. “So talk to your doctor, go to sources like the CDC and our incredible mainstream medical organizations. Those are the ones you should be getting information from.”

"The events of January 6 were stark reminders that institutional biases, priorities and actions taken out of sync with actionable data resulted in poor decisions," he said. "If we do not learn from these mistakes, the campus will continue to remain vulnerable to unknown and unexpected threats."

The authorization of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine could eventually help expand the supply of COVID-19 shots for Americans. But its availability won't make a huge difference right away.

The Rio Grande Valley is located near the U.S.-Mexico border and is a majority Hispanic region with a large number of undocumented and mixed-status families.

even with the vaccine rollout, Americans will need to stick to safe behavior to keep the virus from surging badly again.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking fact about reaching half a million U.S. deaths, is that the toll is still rising. Though new infections and hospitalizations are slowing after a midwinter peak, the country has a long way to go to end the pandemic.

IHME is now forecasting the U.S. may surpass 600,000 deaths by June.

Heiting says burning that methane is a way of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are currently contributing to climate change. Methane released from dairy farms, for example, has far more global warming potential than the carbon dioxide released when that methane is burned.

So the company would then mix that lower-carbon gas with hydrogen gas, which has no carbon emissions when it's burned.

"This is not going to happen without policy support," she says. "We need production tax credits for renewable natural gas and hydrogen just like we put in place for wind and solar."

"Hydrogen is pretty well suited to solve a lot of problems at once and really be this unifier between renewable energy and our society's energy needs," Ramsey says. "This is a big opportunity for oil and gas companies, but also for electric utilities and renewable developers."

Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. promised to reduce its emissions by about 25% by 2025 compared with 2005 levels. But according to analysts, the country is only on track to achieve about a 17% reduction.

In 2020, there have already been 16 climate-driven disasters that cost at least $1 billion each, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Grid operators say it simply doesn't make sense to pinpoint any one generation source for criticism.

Wind turbines did, in fact, freeze. But so did natural gas wells. And pipelines. And critical pipes at coal and nuclear power plants. And equipment panels.

Blaming wind and solar is a political move, Bird says. What's really needed — in Texas and elsewhere — is better preparation.

American officials have said that the more contagious virus circulating in Britain, B.1.1.7, could become dominant in the United States by March. British government scientists are increasingly finding that variant to be linked to a higher risk of death.

Coronavirus vaccines appear to protect against B.1.1.7, but are less effective against the B.1.351 variant, which has become dominant in South Africa.

“We have a great infrastructure set up, of amazing people, and we will give them to folks efficiently and safely. But the problem is, we still aren’t receiving enough doses soon enough.”

These days, lots of manufacturers offer a rainbow of ink colors. People can even go online and order a bottle. The Food and Drug Administration has not regulated the pigments in tattoo inks so far, but agency officials will investigate and recall tattoo inks if they hear of a specific safety concern, like bacterial contamination that could lead to infections.

Then there's the question of what happens to these inks over time, he says, and whether sunlight or the body can break the chemicals down into byproducts that have their own potential effects.

So, if some tattoo ink components can move through the body, researchers want to know:

Liszewski, who also is a cancer epidemiologist, says it's hard to investigate whether or not tattoo pigments in the body lead to any long-term increased risk of diseases like cancer.

Murkowski said she had upheld her oath as a senator to listen to both Trump's defense team and impeachment managers impartially, but that the facts were clear to her that Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol.

This wasn't Romney's first time harshly criticizing Trump or breaking ranks with his party. He was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump on one article during the former president's first impeachment trial in 2020, and in recent weeks was called "a joke" and a "traitor" by Trump supporters while traveling from Utah to Washington, D.C.

"In my first speech here in the Senate in November 2015, I promised to speak out when a president – even of my own party – exceeds his or her powers," he said. "I cannot go back on my word, and Congress cannot lower our standards on such a grave matter, simply because it is politically convenient. I must vote to convict."

"As a result of President Trump's actions, for the first time in American history, the transfer of presidential power was not peaceful," he said. "A lawless attempt to retain power by a president was one of the founders' greatest fears motivating the inclusion of the impeachment authorities in the U.S. Constitution."

In the end, the vote on Cheney was taken by secret ballot, allowing members to express their feelings with less fear of reprisal. She won the backing of more than two-thirds of her colleagues. Greene lost her committee seats based on the en bloc vote of the Democratic majority, but she was supported by all but 11 of her Republican colleagues.

But if you are talking about the mixture of violence and politics ... if you are talking about people who feel they are entitled to power and are being denied it and choose violence as a way to demand it back ... if you are talking about questions of race and dominance ... all these things have deep roots in American history."

And was this merely an expression of the rough-hewn, frontier-flavored behavior of Americans in the years before the Civil War? No, Freeman argues, it was an instrument for the defense of privilege and political power.

Nationwide, Shaman estimates that about 120 million people have now been infected, just over a third of the U.S. population. The model also provides estimates for each state.

First was the number of people who have tested positive each day since the start of the pandemic. The second was a set of anonymized cellphone location data — provided by the company SafeGraph — that told them, for each day, how much people were intermingling by moving outside of their homes, including, says Shaman, "to places of interest like grocery stores and restaurants."

Amazon has now stabilized, and its growth has surged as more people have turned to e-commerce and the company’s Prime fast-shipping program, which has more than 150 million members. Amazon on Tuesday posted a record $125.6 billion in sales for the fourth quarter, while profits more than doubled to $7.2 billion from a year earlier.

Mr. Bezos will remain Amazon’s biggest shareholder — he owns 10.6 percent of the company, according to filings — and stay on the board of directors

GameStop continued to soar as the Reddit investors stayed bullish on their favorite stock. By Jan. 22, it closed at $65. On Monday, it finished at nearly $77. On Tuesday, it nearly doubled to close at around $148. And Wednesday, it more than doubled, ending at $347.51.

Another member suggested that the Reddit traders were part of a resistance movement of sorts, writing, "[T]his is not a war on billionaires, the wealthy yada yada, but it may well be described as a resistance against injustice, inequality, rigged rules, uneven playing field etc which has been rampant on Wall Street forever."

With the stock market near all-time highs, there had already been worries that a bubble was coming. "The danger, as the dot-com bubble showed, is that Mr. Market can rationalize just about anything and build it into a narrative,"

For the United States to be seen as a country that’s helping vulnerable countries to become resilient and enabling low carbon development, actually fostering low carbon development, would earn us a lot of good will,” said Dr. Gallagher, now a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “It would be a major turnaround.”

The geopolitics of energy had already been changing. The United States had steadily become less dependent on oil from the Middle East, thanks to the shale boom at home. A climate-focused White House stands to accelerate the change