"Although there are a few reported cases of reinfection, the possibility of co-infection by E484K adds a new factor to the complex interaction between immune response systems and SARS-CoV-2 Spike mutations,"

"Brazil is collapsing,"

drawing a striking contrast to assurances by Brazilian Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello just one day prior. "Our health system is very impacted, but it has not collapsed nor will it collapse," Pazuello had asserted Wednesday, attributing the country's increasing hospitalizations and deaths "mainly to the new variants of the coronavirus."

How long will our economy resist? If it (the economy) collapses it will be a disgrace. What will we have soon? Supermarket invasions, buses on fires, strikes, pickets, work stoppages," he said in a video conference with lawmakers Thursday.

Saudi Arabia has been targeting Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen since 2015, with the support of the US and other Western allies.

The Saudi-backed Yemeni government has repeatedly denied CNN visas to enter the country's north after coverage last year that exposed Saudi Arabia's dramatic drop in humanitarian funding for the war.

US President Joe Biden announced a new Yemen strategy, giving momentum to the search for a ceasefire and eventual political solution.

"Dealing with Yemen as a country by itself that has its own problems, and cutting it away from the problems of Saudi-Iranian problems ... is very important to lead to peace."

The Obama administration was supportive of Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen in 2015 and offered the Kingdom arms deals worth more than $115 billion total, more than any other US administration in the history of US-Saudi relations, according to a report by the Center for International Policy.

"First of all, President Biden was a partner of President Obama, and during that time they declared that they would join the coalition against our country. They also agreed about and gave the green light for the coalition to continue perpetuating the killing in our country," he said.

2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer acute malnutrition this year, up 16% from 2020.

They were moved into an unfamiliar setting, their belongings whittled down to a few pieces of clothing and mementos thrown in a plastic bag; a new set of masked nurses came in and out of their rooms. Only a handful of residents had cellphones, so Danielle used her own to help residents use FaceTime with family members and friends.

“Nursing homes are really little hospitals, yet they’re not staffed like it. If you asked an I.C.U. nurse to take care of 15 people, she’d laugh at you, but that’s essentially what we have,” Chris Laxton, the executive director of AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, told me.

At the same time, many of these caregivers “are making $12 or $13 an hour,”

workers probably helped spread the virus from facility to facility, home to home.

Under President Trump, C.M.S. had already cut monetary fines for facilities with health and safety violations. Now it called off regular inspections in favor of a narrow, superficial infection-control survey. It also allowed for “temporary nursing assistants” with little training to fill in for certified aides.

But if now is not the time, when, and under what conditions, should nursing homes and assisted-living facilities be held accountable for the welfare of their residents and workers?

Factor in the risk of getting sick and dying, and retention, let alone recruitment, becomes far more difficult. In 2020, direct caregiving may have been the most dangerous job in America.

Joe Biden is about the age of the average nursing home resident. Over the summer, he announced a $775 billion proposal to provide care for children, seniors and people with disabilities. The plan, though notional at this point, would eliminate the 800,000-person waiting list for long-term care under Medicaid and pay for 150,000 new community health workers for seniors. It could also help transform millions of low-wage, high-turnover, often transient gigs into stable careers.

C.M.S. must ensure that the $264 billion paid by Medicaid and Medicare to long-term-care providers actually goes to caregiving, instead of shiny new buildings or executive pay.

To improve residents’ quality of life, the government should mandate that long-term-care facilities have appropriate staffing.

In addition, Mr. Biden must reverse Mr. Trump’s laissez-faire approach to this sector. Both C.M.S. and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be given the resources they need to inspect, investigate and fine providers for health and workplace violations. The incoming administration must also strengthen workers’ rights to organize and protest unsafe conditions under the National Labor Relations Act, as it has already promised to do.

“There are jobs that offer $45 per hour to do Covid testing,” she said. As if to nudge her out the door, her nursing home was recently purchased by a large corporation, nullifying the union contract, and management reneged on the promise of holiday bonuses.

President Trump signed a bill providing $900 billion in stimulus last Sunday, but called for payments to individuals be increased to $2,000 from $600. Ms. Pelosi rallied support for the shift, and the House voted to raise the payments on Monday. Mr. McConnell blocked the effort the following day .

the Senate would “begin a process” to consider bigger payments along with Mr. Trump’s other demands, which include investigations of his baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and the repeal of certain legal protections for tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Criticism about the lack of clarity on the data that the regulator examined came swiftly after the two vaccines were authorized for emergency use.

has been found to be safe.”

Already the effort has faced setbacks. The Serum Institute, an Indian drug maker that struck a deal to produce the Oxford vaccine even before its effectiveness had been proven, has managed to make only about one-tenth of the 400 million doses it had committed to manufacturing before the end of the year.

The Serum Institute says it is on track to increase production of the vaccine, which is known as Covishield in India.

Initially, the Serum Institute signed a pact with AstraZeneca to make one billion doses of the vaccine for low-and-middle-income countries.

Pending approval of the vaccine by the World Health Organization, Serum will begin supplying other developing nations with doses at manufacturing cost, Mr. Sen said.

India plans to begin a vaccination campaign in the first three months of the year that will cover about one-quarter of the population by August. The first 30 million people inoculated will be health care providers, then police and other frontline workers.

India’s first mass vaccination took place in 1802, to fight smallpox. Subsequent efforts suffered from misinformation and slow acceptance.

government officials aimed information campaigns at religious leaders, helping to nearly eradicate the disease.

The government plans to use the framework of its universal immunization program for pregnant women and newborns — one of the largest and cheapest public health interventions in the world.

India may have to double the number of health workers from the current 2.5 million, said Thekkekara Jacob John, a senior virologist in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

“Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,”

But now millions of dollars in grants are on hold after one Mexican-American and two white business owners sued the state, arguing that the fund for Black residents discriminated against them.

Nearly $50 million worth of grants have been awarded, but a court has frozen $8.8 million, the remaining amount minus administrative costs, until the litigation is resolved, a process that could take years.

Supreme Court rulings have established that race-based policies are constitutional only if they achieve a compelling governmental interest and are narrowly tailored to do so.

Politicians, social scientists and jurists have long clashed over how far the government and institutions should go to repair the harm caused by racial discrimination

Oregon’s long history of anti-Black racism has fueled much of the advocacy for the state’s fund. And while other racial groups have said they supported it, critics have argued that Black people are not the only ones who have faced discrimination in the state.

Many of today’s economic and health disparities stem from past policies and practices that were explicitly racist, some social scientists say, arguing that measures aimed at particular races were necessary to undo the damage.

Oregon’s history of racism predates its statehood. As a territory in 1844, it passed a law banning African-Americans from settling there.

Banks and other investors largely avoided doing business in those communities. Residents were also displaced when parts of those neighborhoods were razed at different times to build a highway, a sports arena and a hospital.

Early in the pandemic, various indicators appeared to show that Black businesses were suffering more severely than others. A Stanford University study found that the number of Black business owners nationwide dropped by 41 percent from February to April, compared with a 32 percent decrease for Latinos, 26 percent for Asians and 17 percent for white owners.

“The idea that, in this case, a lumber company could use the 14th Amendment as a weapon to prevent the descendants of slaves from receiving an economic benefit in a time of disaster is utterly inconsistent with the historical context,”

he barred medical workers from leaving the island in February. Or when he announced in March that the island was forbidding entry by nearly all nonresidents.Many of the Taiwanese government’s ideas about dealing with the virus came from “feeling around in the dark,” Mr. Chen said.

Ms. DeVos had almost no experience in public education and was clearly disinterested in the department’s mission. Mr. Cardona worked his way up from teacher to principal to education commissioner of Connecticut.

Given these realities, the new education secretary — whoever he or she turns out to be — should resist calls to put off annual student testing.

The Education Department should also recognize that this pandemic will not be the last one. That means developing a list of best practices and strategic schools plans that can be swiftly rolled out when another medical crisis occurs with a different infectious agent.

the new education commissioner needs to revoke a series of department communiqués that had the effect of letting school districts off the hook for discriminatory disciplinary practices and other potential violations of civil rights law.

The DeVos administration sold out to predatory for-profit colleges and their various abettors within a nanosecond of taking office.

new education secretary can begin rule-making processes where necessary and inform the courts that it will no longer defend against lawsuits filed by state attorneys general and others who have dogged the DeVos department in court for buddying up to the for-profit industry and attacking student borrowers who deserve to have their student loans forgiven because they were defrauded by career education programs.

a lawsuit filed by 22 states and the District of Columbia charging that Ms. DeVos unlawfully rescinded an Obama-era rule that allowed students who had been defrauded by career colleges to have their federal loans forgiven.

Ms. DeVos disregarded a scathing indictment by her department’s career staff, reinstating an accrediting body that had been stripped of its authority for exercising lax oversight.

but intelligence agencies have told Congress that they believe it was carried out by the S.V.R., an elite Russian intelligence agency. A Microsoft “heat map” of infections shows that the vast majority — 80 percent — are in the United States, while Russia shows no infections at all.

Investigators and other officials say they believe the goal of the Russian attack was traditional espionage, the sort the National Security Agency and other agencies regularly conduct on foreign networks.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has deflected the hacking as one of the many daily attacks on the federal government, suggesting China was the biggest offender — the government’s new alert left no doubt the assessment had changed.

“Governments have long spied on each other but there is a growing and critical recognition that there needs to be a clear set of rules that put certain techniques off limits,” Mr. Smith said. “One of the things that needs to be off limits is a broad supply chain attack that creates a vulnerability for the world that other forms of traditional espionage do not.”

“We have forgotten the lessons of 9/11,” Mr. Smith said. “It has not been a great week for information sharing and it turns companies like Microsoft into a sheep dog trying to get these federal agencies come together into a single place and share what they know.”

Some of us were killed.”

President Muhammadu Buhari won election in 2015 vowing to clamp down on Boko Haram and other militant and bandit groups in northern Nigeria.

But despite the government’s claims, Boko Haram and other militant groups still pose a potent threat. And these latest attacks, coming on the heels of a countrywide uprising against police violence, insecurity and bad governance, have exposed the public’s growing discontent with a Nigerian government unable to protect its people.

He is asking the Supreme Court to delay the December 14 Electoral College vote and block the four states from casting their votes in the Electoral College for Mr. Biden. The president-elect won the popular vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, and they all have certified their election results, formalizing Mr. Biden's victory over Mr. Trump.

"Texas's effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact," he wrote. "The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated."

A group of attorneys general from 17 states filed their own friend-of-the-court brief in support of Texas, while the president filed a motion with the Supreme Court asking the join the case.

Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah — requested Thursday to join Texas in the case, while the state of Ohio told the Supreme Court it does not support Paxton's proposed relief.

"Federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to change the legislatively chosen method for appointing presidential electors. And so federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to order legislatures to appoint electors without regard to the results of an already-completed election," they argued. "What is more, the relief that Texas seeks would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the states are sovereigns, free to govern themselves."

Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). The flaw is vulnerability to party politics. It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.

Instead, the president’s worst impulses were neutralized by three pillars of the unwritten constitution. The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution

That is why, throughout this fall, even as Mr. Trump urged his appointees in the Justice Department to openly announce a criminal investigation into the Biden family, they did not comply. None of Mr. Trump’s appointees was willing to openly investigate Joe Biden or his family members, let alone issue an indictment or civil complaint.

Imagine if in response to the provocations of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney had charged Mr. Biden with criminal fraud. Even if Mr. Biden ultimately prevailed in court, publicly fighting such charges during an election would be a political and logistical nightmare. The unwritten constitution blocked this line of attack on the electoral process.

Over the past four years, six of Mr. Trump’s close associates have been convicted and seven were indicted, including his adviser Stephen Bannon, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen. Such prosecutions would be unimaginable in a dictatorship.

Mr. Trump’s plan had the written law on its side. Neither the Constitution nor any congressional statute would have prevented the president from directly ordering active duty military to suppress the protests. The Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use the military or National Guard to suppress civil disorder, providing a broad exception to the general rule barring domestic use of the military.

Republicans were all about balancing the budget and the popular banner of anti-Communism. (Back then, anybody who wanted to raise taxes could get a “commie” categorization just for proposing the idea.)

Then the social right wing — particularly the anti-abortion forces — came up to the front. And the big money people realized they lost nothing financial by making an alliance. Everything is about taking a stand and nothing is about getting stuff done.

he simply consumed all of our mental bandwidth, so that it became all but impossible to think of anyone or anything else.

How about a great new White House agenda focused on raising taxes on the rich and redistributing the money to the poor? I believe I remember hearing someone talk about that — Joe Somebody?

We also need to think about why we are burdening college students with mountainous debt in exchange for increasingly useless college degrees. B.A. now stands for Bankruptcy by Arts. The best thing that could happen educationally is an investment in community colleges that enhances their value, rigor and prestige.

let the Biden administration focus on how to make community colleges work, occasionally reminding Republicans that should have been one of their goals if the Trump years had actually been about upward mobility for the lower-middle class.

the Dow just hit 30,000 at the same time that people are waiting in line for hours at food banks.

I sometimes fear the Trump administration has reduced us, emotionally and intellectually, to a single thought, played like a Gregorian chant on an endless loop: Just. Make. It. Stop.

Or freshman year! I’m not sure it’s ever a good idea for students to go directly from high school to college, and a gap year that entails some form of service would do everyone a lot of good.

After four years of Trump, discussing these things feels a bit like seeing the sun and hearing those chirping birds you were just talking about for the first time in years.

the First Step Act would release more than 3,100 federal prison inmates and said its retroactive sentencing reform had led to nearly 1,700 sentence reductions. The Sentencing Project said last year that Black Americans made up 91 percent of everyone receiving reductions.

Trump reinstituted the federal death penalty. Seven people have been executed this year under the policy — five were white, one was Native American and the other was Black. And there are 55 federal death-row prisoners. Twenty-five are African Americans, 22 are white, seven are Latino and one is Asian.

Under the Trump administration, the Black unemployment rate steadily improved, dropping to 5.4 percent at its bottom in August 2019, compared to 7.5 percent when Trump took office in January 2017. But that achievement is attributable to economic growth that was already revving when Trump took office, economists say.

Black workers did not see employment levels ever go “above the trend.”

The bill is a 10-year renewal of funding. During Obama’s eight years in office, mandatory HBCU funding ranged from almost $80 million to $85 million per year. The same has been true during Trump’s administration.

Even with record-low unemployment rates in 2019, Black Americans still had fewer jobs than their white counterparts — even for those with college or advanced degrees — according to research by EPI.

In April, when unemployment peaked at 14.7 percent — the highest level seen since the Great Depression — the unemployment rate for Black workers was even higher, at 16.7 percent. By September, the share of unemployed Black workers still struggling to find a job only dropped to 12.1 percent.

Many banks limited their initial application pool for the small business rescue Paycheck Protection Program to previous customers, a staff report by the House coronavirus subcommittee found. Democrats and non-profits argue that shut out many minority-owned businesses that lacked business banking relationships from the program, which offered forgivable loans to companies that kept their workers on the payroll.

when the labor market is tight, like it was in first three years of the Trump administration, discrimination tends to decline.

The amount of funding for HBCUs is “the same thing that we had under President Obama.”

creating “more than 8,000 opportunities zones, bringing jobs and opportunities to our inner-city families.”

Opportunity zones “are tax incentives to encourage those with capital gains to invest in low-income and undercapitalized communities,” according to the Tax Policy Center.

A feature of the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, the program was intended to benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income communities. But there’s very little data about what’s actually happening in opportunity zones. There isn’t a full accounting of the number of opportunity zone projects, let alone basic information such as what those projects are, why they’re being pursued and who is benefiting from them.

the vast majority of opportunity zone capital appears to be going into real estate rather than operating businesses, meaning that the opportunity zones aren’t creating sustainable, long-term jobs.

he scrapped an Obama rule requiring localities to track patterns of segregation or lose federal funding.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development replaced the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act with a much weaker rule in July, using a waiver to exempt the new regulation from public-comment requirements. Public comments allow people to weigh in on proposed rules before they’re finalized. But by bypassing that critical step, the agency essentially expedited a months-long process without any public input.

baseless fear of crime and decreased property value as attempted triggers to get at white anxiety about living with people of color — and African Americans in particular — and the idea of integration itself,”

new rule in September overhauling the Obama administration’s 2013 “disparate impact” rule. The new rule would have required plaintiffs to meet a higher threshold to prove unintentional discrimination — known as disparate impact — and given defendants more leeway to rebut the claims.

A federal court intervened this month -- the day before the rule was set to take effect last week -- issuing a preliminary nationwide injunction to bar HUD from implementing the new regulation until the merits of a lawsuit brought by civil rights advocates have been decided.

Mr. Maduro’s survival is, in part, a parable of foreign policy in Mr. Trump’s Washington — where ideologues, donors and lobbyists compete to seize the attention of an inexperienced and highly transactional president, warping and reshaping American diplomacy along the way.

The tug-of-war over Mr. Trump’s Venezuela position pitted Cuban-American activists and Florida politicians, who viewed Mr. Maduro as a proxy and energy supplier for Cuba’s Communist regime, against pro-Trump business interests advocating closer engagement with Mr. Maduro.

“Trump saw Venezuela 110 percent through the prism of Florida’s electoral votes,”

nder Mr. Maduro’s leadership, the economy of the once-wealthy country had cratered, its health system failed and opposition was often met with violence.

‘It’s going to be bad for your image, and he’s going to manipulate you.’”

In summer 2018, Mr. Sargeant flew with an associate to see Mr. Trump at a New York fund-raiser, trying — unsuccessfully — to deliver a letter from Mr. Maduro.

Mr. Gorrín, in turn, helped arrange for Mr. Sargeant to meet state oil company officials in Caracas; when he arrived, he found himself in a session with Mr. Maduro as well. In an interview, Mr. Sargeant said he told Mr. Maduro that Venezuela needed American businesses to help rebuild its economy.

The Venezuelan said that Mr. Ballard connected him to Harry Sargeant III, a billionaire Trump donor from Florida who had worked in Venezuela in the 1990s.

After Mr. Maduro won a second term in an election widely denounced as a sham, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions.

Now, American officials and the Venezuelan opposition needed back channels of their own. According to the opposition leaders, Mr. Gorrín and other intermediaries were asked to convey U.S. offers of leniency to cooperative regime figures.

Mr. Gorrín, whose discussions with regime figures were reported by The Wall Street Journal last year, denied playing any role in the effort, and said he had no contact with Mr. Claver-Carone after their 2017 meeting.

Nothing would come of the effort. After Mr. Stryk and a law firm filed disclosure forms revealing their proposed work for the regime, the blowback was severe. Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, pledged to blackball all the firm’s clients unless it withdrew. It did.

“It is a shame where we are right now,” said Steve Goldstein, a former top State Department aide to Mr. Tillerson. “Maduro should not be the president of Venezuela.”

Republicans are now hoping for a favorable ruling at the federal level, where a judge has called an election-eve hearing for Monday.

Vehicles bearing Trump flags halted traffic on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey; local officials said the motorcade backed up traffic for several miles. In Georgia, a rally for Democrats that had been scheduled was canceled, with organizers citing worries over what they feared was a “large militia presence” drawn by Mr. Trump’s own event nearby.

there were more than 350,000 absentee ballots that had been requested by Democratic voters that had yet to be returned.

“Souls to the Polls”

he F.B.I. was investigating the incident that “in my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,”

Of the three big Northern swing states Mr. Trump won by a hair four years ago, the once reliably blue state of Pennsylvania is the one his advisers believe is most likely within his reach. That’s in large part because of the support of rural voters and Mr. Biden’s call for eventually phasing out fossil fuels, an unpopular stance for many voters in a state with a large natural gas industry.

Mr. Trump entered the final hours of the race in a worse position here than he was four years ago, when Pennsylvania was seen as Hillary Clinton’s firewall.

That lead, however, isn’t enough to make Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans feel fully confident about the state of the race in Pennsylvania. Some of the president’s opponents in recent days have been worried about turnout in the state's rural counties, as well as calls about requested ballots that never arrived.

Pennsylvania’s economy is emerging from the pandemic recession but still has a long road ahead to its pre-crisis state. Like the nation, it has seen a two-track recovery that has left small businesses and low-earning workers behind.

Pennsylvania saw its unemployment rate fall to 8.1 percent in September, according to the Labor Department, nearly identical to the national rate of 7.9 percent. That is a significant improvement from the 16.1 percent unemployment it posted in April. But the state still had 380,000 fewer jobs in September than it did in September of 2019, and there are 18 percent fewer small businesses open here compared to a year ago, according to data compiled by the economists at Opportunity Insights.

She said county officials planned to vigorously challenge the suit, which she described as an act of “voter suppression.”

The case will be heard on Monday morning by Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

Democrats said it threatened to “throw Texas’ election into chaos by invalidating the votes of more than 100,000 eligible Texas voters who cast their ballots”