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President Joe Biden can report in his first prime-time address Thursday that a vaccination drive now reaching 2 million people daily has brought America far closer to exiting the pandemic than when he took office 50 days ago.

He is also armed with a newly passed $1.9 trillion Covid-19 rescue package -- his first major legacy achievement -- which represents an ambitious attempt to rebuild the US economy to favor the less well off.

"This bill represents a historic, historic victory for the American people," Biden said Wednesday, touting his rescue plan that finally cleared Congress on Wednesday and pivoting to an address that he said would inform the country what "comes next" in the effort to prevail over the coronavirus.

Researching more famous accounts of UFO sightings and purported alien abductions with students is how he’ll be spending the summer. And with the federal government’s report on “unidentified aerial phenomena” — or UAPs — expected as soon as this week, they’ll have new grainy videos to analyze and debate.

When former President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion funding bill in December, educators were eye-balling the $54 billion in relief funds included for school reopening. But tucked into the more than 5,500 pages of legislative text was a Sen. Marco Rubio-sponsored provision directing Naval intelligence to uncover what they’ve been tracking in the skies. The bill asked for detailed reports of UAPs and knowledge of whether “a potential adversary may have achieved breakthrough aerospace capabilities” that might harm Earth, or at least the U.S. The report, combined with Navy pilots’ recent accounts of aircraft displaying unusual movements, provide fresh material for teachers who find that questions about alien visitors are a great way to engage students in science.

Highly trained military pilots admit they are taking the sightings of these unusual aircraft seriously — and think others should, too. With both Republicans and Democrats interested in the report’s findings and respected news shows like “60 Minutes” following the topic, the possibility that otherworldly beings are patrolling our atmosphere is no longer just the stuff of sci-fi movies and paranormal conventions.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Friday renewing a White House initiative charged with advancing "equity, justice, and opportunity" for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, including coordinating a "comprehensive" federal response to the rise in anti-Asian violence and discrimination.

"... For far too long, systemic barriers to equity, justice, and opportunity have put the American dream out of reach for many AA and NHPI communities, and racism, nativism, and xenophobia against AA and NHPI communities continues to threaten safety and dignity of AA and NHPI families," the White House said in a fact sheet released Friday.

The initiative, led out of the Department of Health and Human Services, aims to ensure the federal government is mitigating Covid-related anti-Asian bias, advancing health equity for AA and NHPI communities, and that they "equitably recover" from the dual crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the anti-Asian attacks.

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced in a recorded message played at a Bitcoin conference in Miami Saturday that next week he will send proposed legislation to the country's congress that would make the cryptocurrency legal tender in the Central American nation.

"Next week I will send to Congress a bill that will make Bitcoin a legal tender in El Salvador," Bukele said. "In the short term this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy and in the medium and long term we hope that this small decision can help us push humanity at least a tiny bit into the right direction."

The U.S. dollar is El Salvador's official currency.

This pivotal moment isn’t just the result of four years of Donald Trump. It’s the culmination of 50 years of social decay.

“The Upswing,” a remarkable new book by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garret

A careful work of social science, the book looks at American life from about 1870 to today across a range of sectors that are usually analyzed in separate academic silos.

he US may be on the cusp of another Covid-19 case surge, one expert says -- a surge that health officials have repeatedly warned about as state leaders eased restrictions and several lifted mask mandates.

"I think we are going to see a surge in the number of infections,"

"I think what helps this time though is that the most vulnerable -- particularly nursing home residents, people who are older -- are now vaccinated. And so we may prevent a spike in hospitalizations and deaths."

There are two ways for the federal government to address income inequality. One is to redistribute more money to people at the bottom of the income ladder. The other is to use the tools of fiscal and monetary policy to drive unemployment low enough to drive up demand and wages for those workers.

Mr. Biden proposed raising the child tax credit 50% to $3,000 or more for the year and making it refundable, meaning families who owe less tax than the credit would get a check for the difference. He would extend and boost enhanced weekly unemployment insurance benefits by $100 from the $300 in December’s stimulus package to $400. He would extend a 15% increase in food stamps through the summer, raise the maximum earned-income tax credit for childless adults by nearly $1,000 and extend it to more people.

Those steps, plus adding $1,400 to the $600-per-adult checks approved in December, would slash the poverty rate from 12.6% to 9%, or by more than 11 million people, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. The number of children in poverty would drop by half, or 5 million.

astrology. According to a 2018 Pew poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe in astrology. That’s more than are members of mainline Protestant churches.

44 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say that astrology is somewhat or very “scientific.”

in 2017 the typical horoscope got 150 percent more traffic than it had the year before.

Joe Biden's campaign dispatched former President Barack Obama to Atlanta on Monday in a bid to finish Democrats' four-year project of turning Georgia blue.

The state is one of three in the Southeast -- along with Florida and North Carolina -- that are all crucial for President Donald Trump to win to keep open his path to 270 electoral votes.

suburban swings in Democrats' favor and a series of close calls there during Trump's presidency have turned Georgia into a battleground.

Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, an affluent area once represented by Newt Gingrich, was considered safely Republican, but Democrats saw a chance to use the special election to register their fury and disgust with the new president.

though, it wasn’t Ossoff who caught my attention. It was the legions of women who’d never been particularly political before, but who were shocked into activism by Trump’s victory.

But I followed several of the women I met as they redoubled their efforts, and in the 2018 midterms, they helped flip the seat to a Democrat

even as it appeared distinctly possible that Senate Republicans would vote anyway to confirm a new justice before the end of the year, regardless of the result of the presidential election in November.

adding that it would be a woman

he pressed his fellow Republicans to act “without delay.”

Home buyers are increasingly using mortgages that make it easier for them to stop making their monthly payments and walk away from the loan if the home floods or becomes unsellable or unlivable.

More banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at risk.

And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about global warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off their own books by selling them to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any of the loans fail.

In recent months, it has threatened to deport international students at places like Harvard who were taking their classes online because of the pandemic. It has accused Yale of discriminating against white and Asian-American applicants and opposed Harvard’s affirmative action policy. Last week, it launched a civil rights investigation of Princeton, based on a letter from the university’s president that expressed concern about systemic racism at the school, and vowed to combat it.

he has depicted many American colleges as engines of “radical left indoctrination” and “propaganda,” questioned their patriotism and called for a review of their tax-exempt status.

“It’s seven weeks until the election, and this is a political attempt by the Trump administration to play to his base by going after an elite educational institution,”

back online a month after Amazon and other tech giants cut off the company for hosting calls for violence around the time of the Capitol riot.

Getting iced out by the tech giants turned Parler into a cause célèbre for conservatives who complained they were being censored, as well as a test case for the openness of the internet.

Parler relied on help from a Russian firm that once worked for the Russian government and a Seattle firm that once supported a neo-Nazi site.

With 20 days to go, most signals favor Joe Biden, but the chain of events that delivered an Electoral College victory to Donald Trump in 2016 still hovers in the rearview mirror.

Since last week, the share of white non-college over 30 registrations in the battleground states has increased by 10 points compared to September 2016, and the Democratic margin dropped 10 points to just 6 points. And there are serious signs of political engagement by white non-college voters who had not cast ballots in previous elections.

“Republicans have swamped Democrats in adding new voters to the rolls, a dramatic GOP improvement over 2016.”

For just the second time in more than seven decades, a Democrat will carry Arizona in a presidential election, a monumental shift for a state that was once a Republican stronghold.

CNN projected on Thursday that President-elect Joe Biden will carry Arizona,

Biden's win in the state that propelled Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater and John McCain to national prominence could foretell problems for the party going forward.

The new Cold War, between the United States and China, is increasingly focused on access to just one industry in one place: computer chips made in Taiwan.

Over the past year, Taiwan has taken a lead in the race to build thinner, faster and more powerful chips, or semiconductors. Its fastest chips are the critical building blocks of rapidly evolving digital industries like artificial intelligence and high-speed computing.

As of now, any country looking to dominate the digital future has to buy these superfast, ultrathin chips from either Taiwan or South Korea. And Taiwan has the edge in both technology and market power.

Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.

“True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”

His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”

On Wednesday, the Spanish Health Ministry reported that the 14-day incidence rate had fallen 20 points to 3,286 per 100,000. This is the second day in a row that this data point has dropped after two months on the rise.

What’s more, while hospitals remain under strain, the situation is far from what it was during other waves.

In response to the surge in coronavirus infections in the leadup to Christmas, the Spanish government announced on December 23 that face masks would once again be mandatory outdoors. At the time, Darias said this measure would be in place “until the epidemiological situation improved.”