Before signing the bill, Mr. Northam pointed to Virginia’s 413-year history of capital punishment, during which it executed more than 1,300 inmates, more than any other state. He also noted racial disparities in the use of the death penalty: During the 20th century, he said, 296 of the 377 inmates Virginia executed for murder — or about 79 percent — were Black.

n its final months, the administration executed 13 inmates, more than a fifth of the prisoners that the Bureau of Prisons considered to be on death row. The inauguration of Mr. Biden — who promised during the campaign to work to end federal capital punishment — almost certainly marked the end of that string of executions.

The bill, which the Virginia House and Senate passed last month, stipulates that the sentences of the remaining death row inmates be converted to life in prison without eligibility for parole. The inmates will also not qualify for good conduct allowance, sentence credits or conditional release. Where there were once dozens of prisoners on the state’s death row, now there will be none. The last man to be put to death by the state was William Morva, an escaped prisoner who killed an unarmed hospital security guard and a corporal participating in his manhunt. He was execute

When they passed a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill this month, Democrats in Congress sped past their Republican opposition, using the budgetary reconciliation process to present a case study of what happens when they don’t bend over backward for G.O.P. buy-in.

But at the hearing today, he relished the opportunity to drive home the divide between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. “Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government,” Schumer said, later chanting, “Shame! Shame!” at Republican lawmakers.

But Democrats see an opportunity to press their case for filibuster reform with the For the People Act, a sweeping bill that would establish core national voting rights standards and create independent, nonpartisan commissions to handle the congressional redistricting process.

By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.

And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.

The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.

Is this what returning to life as usual in America means?

The Democratic majority leader of the Colorado State Senate, Stephen Fenberg, suggested as much, and I’m not taking issue with it or him. Quite the opposite. He’s gut-wrenchingly right, and his words, like every one of those 18 victims, should give us enormous pause and fill us with even more shame.

In America we pretty much expect periodic blood baths, and the dearth of them in the year before Atlanta has been chalked up to an atypical lull born of a once-in-a-generation pandemic.

Convinced, after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, that there is no way to win the White House in a diverse electorate with high turnout, Republicans have made it their mission to restrict the vote as much as possible.

The other side of this effort to restrict the vote is a full-court press against the “For the People Act,” which would pre-empt most Republican voter-suppression bills. “It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high,” Jessica Anderson of Heritage Action for America told The Associated Press.

What’s striking about all this is that, far from evidence of Republican decline, the 2020 election is proof of Republican resilience, even strength. Trump won more than 74 million votes last year. He made substantial gains with Hispanic voters — reversing more than a decade of Republican decline — and improved with Black voters too. He lost, yes, but he left his party in better-than-expected shape in both the House and the Senate.

We know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.

In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.

he different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding: As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it. “Given the significant proportion of citizens who own guns,” the authors conclude, “the prospect for policy changes that address gun‐related causes of mass shootings is unlikely.”

Leaders of the Oath Keepers militia and the far-right group the Proud Boys were in communication in the weeks before the Capitol riot and appear to have coordinated some plans for the day of the attack, prosecutors said in court papers.

From the start of the investigation, agents and prosecutors have focused on the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, if for no other reason than the two groups both sent large contingents of members to the Capitol. The organizations have a history of working and appearing together at right-wing street events dating to the early days of the Trump administration.

According to the messages, Mr. Meggs had already been in touch with a leader of the Proud Boys whose name was redacted in the papers. Apparently expecting a conflict with the antifascist activists known as antifa, the two men had devised a plan to catch their left-wing adversaries in a kind of pincer move on the streets. “We will have the proud boys get in front of them,” Mr. Meggs wrote. “The cops will get between antifa and proud boys. We will come in behind antifa and beat the hell out of them.”

“I worry about the day where the vaccine will no longer be free,” the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said this month, referring to the fact that the government is providing coronavirus vaccinations to all Americans at no cost. “What about if we need a third booster?” Dr. Walensky asked. “What happens then? Who’s going to pay for that?”

This question should concern every American and every policymaker in Washington. These vaccines, which are critical to ending the scourge of Covid-19, were developed with government funding and purchased for $10 to $19.50 per dose with taxpayer dollars.

Many experts now predict that Covid-19 booster shots will become a regular part of our lives for years. An increase in the price of coronavirus vaccines would have considerable impact on American health care spending. If Pfizer raised the price of its coronavirus vaccine from $19.50 per dose to $175, a yearly shot for every American adult would cost $44.7 billion and could increase annual U.S. drug spending by 9 percent.

Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike. It would make it easier for moms and dads to hold jobs, and above all it would be a lifeline for many disadvantaged children.

But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them. Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.

o the most historic part of the Biden agenda, to me, is a determined effort to invest in America’s kids and reverse decades of child neglect. Just as Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized conditions for the elderly by instituting Social Security, Biden may be able to do the same for children.

Ms. Todman, 43, said that local residents she knew on the island encouraged her to book a vaccine appointment. At the time, she and her husband, who is 54 and has asthma, were not eligible for a shot in their home state, Georgia. But in St. Croix, every adult is eligible. So she visited the territory’s Department of Health website, saw they had appointments available for the next day, and signed up.

Health authorities and ethicists don’t see a big problem with the vaccine tourism in the U.S. Virgin Islands, given the ample supply of the shots and high levels of vaccine hesitancy among residents there. And the trend may wane as more U.S. states open up their eligibility criteria. Still, wealthy Americans traveling to the Caribbean to secure Covid-19 vaccines is an example of the many ways in which vaccine access across the world is shaped by race, circumstance and privilege.

ome Americans have flown to the island specifically to be vaccinated. “My friends from New Jersey went, and the most probing question they faced was, ‘Will that be Pfizer or Moderna for you?’” said Rob DeRocker, a marketing consultant from Tarrytown, N.Y., who spends winters in St. Croix. “The result has been a mini boom of visitors on an island whose tourism economy, like most others, has been brutalized by the pandemic.”

Some big-name economists argue that the economy will soon overheat because of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief and other spending measures.

When demand for goods and services expands faster than the supply of them, consumers simply bid up the price of finite goods, and businesses bid up wages to try to keep up. This begins a cycle of higher wages fueling higher prices, which in turn fuels higher wages.Such a process began in the mid-1960s and culminated in double-digit inflation in the 1970s. But there are important differences between then and now. For one thing, unions then were more powerful and demanded steep wage increases. For another, a series of one-off events made inflation worse, including the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international currency arrangements and oil embargoes that sent fuel prices soaring.

The overheating worriers, who include prominent Clinton-era policymakers and many conservatives, believe there is a more substantial chance that one of two more pessimistic scenarios will come true. As vast federal spending keeps coursing through the economy, they fear that high inflation will come to be seen as the new normal and that behavior will adjust accordingly.

Last June, as Americans began to emerge from lockdowns and into a new, uncertain stage of the pandemic, Amy Ryan and her family set sail in a 44-foot-long catamaran and headed up the Atlantic coast. They haven’t stopped sailing since.Ms. Ryan’s husband, Casey Ryan, 56, was on a partially paid leave from his job as an airline pilot, based out of Denver. School was remote for their daughters, now 7 and 11. Ms. Ryan, a real estate agent, could manage her team from anywhere. And they could rent out their house in Evergreen, Colo., on Airbnb. The family saw a window open, and they leapt through it.

For many of us, the past 12 months have been lived in a state of suspended animation, with dreams and plans deferred until further notice as we worry about venturing out for even basic excursions. But some people, like the Ryans, took the restrictions — virtual school and remote work — as an opportunity to pick up and go somewhere else. With a good internet connection, a Zoom conference call can happen just as easily on a boat or in the back of a camper as it can in a living room.

n March 12, the Transportation Security Administration screened 1.35 million people, the most passengers on any day since March 15, 2020 — still well below 2019 numbers, but a sign that more Americans are traveling again. Nearly half of Americans say that a desire to travel has played a role in their willingness to get vaccinated, according to a February survey by The Points Guy.But the survey also found that 56 percent of Americans haven’t traveled at all during the pandemic. Public health officials have voiced a growing concern that spring-break travel could lead to another surge in Covid-19 cases and increase the spread of troubling variants.

In navigating those obstacles, Mr. Biden faces a strategic dilemma: how to pass as much of his potentially transformative agenda, as quickly as possible, through the narrow window afforded him by Democrats’ thin margins in the House and Senate.

Liberal economists stress that if he wants to truly upgrade the economy, Mr. Biden needs both.

The “Build Back Better” plan that his economic advisers recommended Mr. Biden pursue this week would lead with those physical investments: a combination of spending and tax incentives on traditional infrastructure, high-growth industry cultivation and carbon-reducing energy investment that documents suggest could top $2 trillion

He appeared at civic events, donated to Republican candidates and ensconced himself in an exclusive country club community northeast of Atlanta where he bought two stately homes, each valued at about $1 million.

Later this year, he will assume the role of head of the World Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce. It is a prestigious post: Taiwan’s government recently produced a 14-minute video of him discussing his life that included a photo of him with the island democracy’s president, Tsai Ing-wen

That chasm exists on a grand scale, where the rise and affluence of some Asian-Americans have painted a false history that hides the trials of their own blue-collar communities. But it can also play out in the universe of a single business, where those at the top prosper, far removed from those doing the day-to-day work.

The most persistent and touching error has been the ever-dashed hope that, as machines are able to do more work, human beings will be freed to do less, and will have more time for culture and contemplation. The greatest imaginative challenge seems to be foreseeing which changes will arrive sooner than expected (computers outplaying chess grandmasters), and which will be surprisingly slow (flying cars). The tech-world saying is that people chronically overestimate what technology can do in a year, and underestimate what it can do in a decade and beyond.

“Genius Makers” is about the people who have built the A.I. world — scientists, engineers, linguists, gamers — more than about the technology itself, or its good and bad effects. The fundamental technical debates and discoveries on which A.I. is based are a background to the individual profiles and corporate-drama scenes Metz presents. The longest running, most consequential debate is between proponents of two different approaches to increasing computerized “intelligence,” which can be oversimplified as “thinking like a person” versus “thinking like a machine.”

Roose links this technological transformation to the many others that societies have undergone. Nearly all have eventually made humanity richer overall — in the long run. But, he writes, “we don’t live in the aggregate or over the long term. We experience major economic shifts as individuals with finite careers and life spans.”“Futureproof” offers suggestions for individual pursuits and for social policy. But the most eloquent parts of the book come when Roose moves from preserving livelihoods to protecting basic humanity.

After the 2008 financial crisis plunged America into a deep recession, both the new Obama administration and the Federal Reserve tried to stimulate the economy, spending hundreds of billions on a variety of programs while buying trillions in bonds. There is now consensus among economists that these efforts were helpful, but it’s also widely believed that they were inadequate (as some of us strenuously argued at the time).

Reflecting this expectation, companies will mark prices up relative to what they would have been if they didn’t expect future inflation — and by so doing, will feed the very inflation they fear. In other words, once expectations of sustained inflation are embedded in the economy, inflation becomes self-perpetuating — and bringing it down can be extremely difficult. That’s what makes stagflation — inflation despite high unemployment — possible.

If they aren’t — and my bet is that they won’t be — then the lesson of 2010-2011 will remain: Don’t panic.Now as then there are people eager to denounce government attempts to help the economy. And it’s certainly possible that the American Rescue Plan will turn out, in retrospect, to have been too much of a good thing. But don’t let the usual suspects seize on a few months’ inflation data as evidence of looming disaster.

Since then, of course, Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine has received emergency authorization. Like the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it appears to be highly protective against hospitalization and death from Covid-19. But because the Johnson & Johnson trial showed lower efficacy in preventing symptomatic Covid, there’s a fairly widespread perception that it’s inferior to the other vaccines.

Thanks to the vaccine trial, I had a similar choice. This month, in a process known as unblinding, the researchers told me that, as I suspected, I’d gotten the placebo. Then I was offered the real thing. For me, it was an easy call. Not knowing when I’ll be eligible in New York, I begged the people conducting the study to let me come in as soon as possible, and got my Johnson & Johnson shot last week.

The gap between 95 percent and 66 percent doesn’t sound that trivial to me, but Jha argued it’s partly an artifact of where and when the vaccines were tested. The Johnson & Johnson trial had arms in South Africa and Brazil, each beset by variants of the virus that can decrease vaccine efficacy. It took place later than the other trials, when more variants were circulating. Even so, there were no hospitalizations or deaths among any vaccinated trial participant.

But Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have put new pressure on Congress and the White House to reduce racial health disparities. And there are few starker examples than this: Black smokers smoke less but die of heart attacks, strokes and other causes linked to tobacco use at higher rates than white smokers do, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 85 percent of Black smokers use Newport, Kool and other menthol brands that are easier to become addicted to and harder to quit than plain tobacco, according to the Food and Drug Administration

Dr. Gardiner and other public health advocates are particularly concerned about the growing popularity of menthol cigars and cigarillos among Black teenagers. The 2020 National Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted by the federal government, found that 6.5 percent of Black students in high school and middle school, smoked cigars and cigarillos compared with 2.5 percent who smoked traditional cigarettes. The F.D.A. says that menthol is the preferred flavor for the cigarillos, which are cheap and mass-produced, unlike premium cigars.

The tobacco industry is in a tricky spot. For several years, the largest companies, Altria and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, now owned by British American Tobacco, have sought to position themselves as transforming their companies into responsible businesses being eager to to preventing young people from smoking and to developing less harmful products. For critics, the industry’s lobbying to protect its menthol brands contradicts that assertion.

One day after the spring break oasis of South Beach descended into chaos, with the police struggling to control overwhelming crowds and making scores of arrests, officials in Miami Beach decided on Sunday to extend an emergency curfew for up to three weeks.

In an emergency meeting, the commission approved maintaining the curfew in the city’s South Beach entertainment district from Thursday through Sunday for three more weeks, which is when spring break typically ends. Officials also kept in place bridge closures on the nights of the curfew along several causeways that connect Miami Beach with the mainland.

The curfew was initially put in place on Saturday for 72 hours. On Sunday, city officials voted unanimously to extend the emergency declaration until Monday, with the city manager empowered to extend it week by week.

For the past year, people trying to go to China have run into some of the world’s most formidable barriers to entry. To stop the coronavirus, China bans tourists and short-term business travelers outright, and it sets tough standards for all other foreigners, even those who have lived there for years.

Other countries have their own travel restrictions, though few are as tight. The United States, for example, bans foreigners traveling directly from China unless they are green card holders or certain immediate family members of American citizens. It also bans foreigners leaving from Europe, as well as Brazil and other countries.

China was the only major economy to grow last year. It knows businesses will find a way to keep their Chinese operations running, with or without expatriates, and it is betting that they will come back when the pandemic eases. At the same time, China’s restrictions highlight the inadequacies of its vaccine rollout, which has been slow compared to those of the United States, Britain and other countries.