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The Senate is expected to amend the House bill on the $1,400-per-person stimulus payments to tighten eligibility.

Individuals earning less than $75,000 a year and married couples earning less than $150,000 will receive $1,400 per person, including children. That will get money to about 90% of households.

The checks will phase out faster than previous rounds, completely cutting off individuals who earn more than $80,000 a year and married couples earning more than $160,000 -- regardless of how many children they have.

Unlike the previous two rounds, adult dependents -- including college students -- are expected to be eligible for the payments

In an effort to combat poverty, it would expand the child tax credit to $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each child under age 18. Currently, qualifying families can receive a credit of up to $2,000 per child under age 17.

Out-of-work Americans will start running out of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation benefits in mid-March, when provisions in December's $900 billion relief package begin phasing out. The $300 enhancement also ends in mid-March.

The parliamentarian ruled in late February that increasing the hourly threshold does not meet a strict set of guidelines needed to move forward in the reconciliation process, which would allow Senate Democrats to pass the relief bill with a simple majority and no Republican votes.The House legislation would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 in stages. It would also guarantee that tipped workers, youth workers and workers with disabilities are paid the full federal minimum wage.

Some senators were looking to make some changes to the House bill, including reducing the federal boost to unemployment benefits to $300 a week and extending the duration of pandemic jobless programs by another month. But these efforts have not progressed.The House bill calls for extending two key pandemic unemployment programs through August 29. It would also increase the federal weekly boost to $400, from the current $300, and continue it for the same time period.

The House plan would extend the 15% increase in food stamp benefits through September, instead of having it expire at the end of June.It also contains $880 million for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, to help increase participation and temporarily improve benefits, among other measures. Biden called for investing $3 billion in the program.

The legislation would send roughly $19.1 billion to state and local governments to help low-income households cover back rent, rent assistance and utility bills. About $10 billion would be authorized to help struggling homeowners pay their mortgages, utilities and property taxes. It would provide another $5 billion to help states and localities assist those at risk of experiencing homelessness.

The legislation would provide $350 billion to state and local governments, as well as tribes and territories. States and the District of Columbia would receive $195.3 billion, while local governments would be sent $130.2 billion to be divided evenly between cities and counties. Tribes would get $20 billion and territories $4.5 billion.

Unlike Biden's proposal, the House bill would not reinstate mandatory paid family and sick leave approved in a previous Covid relief package. But it does continue to provide tax credits to employers who voluntarily choose to offer the benefit through October 1.

The bill would provide nearly $130 billion to K-12 schools to help students return to the classroom. Schools would be allowed to use the money to update their ventilation systems, reduce class sizes to help implement social distancing, buy personal protective equipment and hire support staff. It would require that schools use at least 20% of the money to address learning loss by providing extended days or summer school, for example.

The House bill now includes nearly $40 billion for colleges. Institutions would be required to spend at least half the money to provide emergency financial aid grants to students.

The bill would also provide $39 billion to child care providers. The amount a provider receives would be based on operating expenses and is available to pay employees and rent, help families struggling to pay the cost, and purchase personal protective equipment and other supplies.

Enrollees would pay no more than 8.5% of their income towards coverage, down from nearly 10% now. Also, those earning more than the current cap of 400% of the federal poverty level -- about $51,000 for an individual and $104,800 for a family of four in 2021 -- would become eligible for help.

The bill would provide $15 billion to the Emergency Injury Disaster Loan program, which provides long-term, low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration. Severely impacted small businesses with fewer than 10 workers will be given priority for some of the money. It also provides $25 billion for a new grant program specifically for bars and restaurants. Eligible businesses may receive up to $10 million and can use the money for a variety of expenses, including payroll, mortgage and rent, utilities and food and beverages.

The House bill provides $14 billion to research, develop, distribute, administer and strengthen confidence in vaccines. It would also put $46 billion towards testing, contact tracing and mitigation, including investing in laboratory capacity, community-based testing sites and mobile testing units, particularly in medically underserved areas.It would also allocate $7.6 billion to hire 100,000 public health workers to support coronavirus response.The legislation also provides $50 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with some of the funds going toward expanding vaccination efforts.The President's plan called for investing $20 billion in a national vaccination program.

The other measure passed on Thursday would require buyers shopping for firearms online or at gun shows to have their backgrounds vetted before they could receive the weapon. They are not currently required to do so, although in-person buyers, who make up the majority of such transactions, are.

Mr. Trump has also begun to echo Mr. Barr’s assertions. In an interview on Fox on Friday, he said that the decision to investigate his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia “was an overthrow attempt at the presidency.”

Now that the claim that Mr. Trump never pressured Mr. Zelensky no longer holds, “the argument has got to be a ‘so what’ argument — Bill Barr’s argument that the president did all these things, but this is what a president can do,” said Stuart Gerson, a Checks & Balances member who was a senior campaign adviser to George Bush and a Justice Department official in his administration.

“The Republicans in the Senate and in the House think they’re in a Parliament, and their responsibility is to a prime minister to whom they owe party loyalty,” Mr. Gerson said. “That’s not the American tradition. One can recognize substantial executive power, but that doesn’t mean the legislative branch should be dead.”

Mr. Barr has argued that his view of presidential power stems directly from the Constitution. It delineates the responsibilities of the three branches of government, he has said, rather than allowing the legislature and the judiciary to check the powers of the president as two of three co-equal governing powers.

That interpretation of history “has no factual basis,” Checks & Balances wrote in its statement, including the claim that “the founders shared in any respect his vision of an unchecked president, and his assertion that this view was dominant until it came under attack from courts and Congress a few decades ago.”

The group said that the “only imaginable basis” for Mr. Barr’s conclusion that Mr. Trump did not obstruct the Russia investigation “was his legal view that the president is given total control over all investigations by the Constitution.”

Mr. Fried suggested that Mr. Barr’s interpretation of the law set a dangerous precedent. “Conservatism is respect for the rule of law. It is respect for tradition,” he said. “The people who claim they’re conservatives today are demanding loyalty to this completely lawless, ignorant, foul-mouthed president.”

Mr. Gerson echoed that sentiment. “It’s important for conservatives to speak up,” he said. “This administration is anything but conservative.”

Sanders on wages of US childcare workersSanders said America's childcare system "is an embarrassment, it is unaffordable," claiming that childcare workers take home lower paychecks than people working at McDonald's. "Childcare workers are making wages lower than McDonald's workers," Sanders said. Facts First: While some childcare workers undoubtedly make less than some McDonald's workers, US government data from 2018 shows that childcare workers took home a higher mean hourly salary than fast food workers.

Biden claimed President Donald Trump "weakened" sanctions against Pyongyang in his pursuit of meetings with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. "The President showed up, met with him, gave him legitimacy, weakened the sanctions we have against him," Biden said. Facts First: Trump has not weakened the sanctions his administration has placed on North Korea to date, and has in fact ratcheted them up from the Obama administration. Although Trump did once spark mass confusion among his aides when he tweeted he was ordering the removal of sanctions on Pyongyang that had not yet been imposed or even announced.

During an exchange about electability and whether a woman can win the presidency, Warren compared the political careers of the men on the debate stage with the women. "Can a woman beat Donald Trump?" Warren said. "Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost ten elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they've been in are the women. Amy and me." Facts First: Warren has the facts right. She and Klobuchar are undefeated, and their male opponents have lost a total of 10 elections during their political careers. But Warren's talking point ignores the fact that Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg have also prevailed in more than two dozen elections since 1970.

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg asserted during the debate on Tuesday that the Trump administration admitted that the Iran nuclear deal was working before pulling out of it. Buttigieg said, "By gutting the Iran nuclear deal, one that, by the way, the Trump administration itself admitted was working, certified that it was preventing progress toward a nuclear Iran, by gutting that, they have made the region more dangerous and set off the chain of events that we are now dealing with as it escalates even closer to the brink of outright war." Facts First: This is basically true. By repeatedly recertifying the nuclear deal and waiving sanctions against Tehran as a result, the Trump administration effectively acknowledged that Iran was abiding by the terms of the deal even as the President publicly criticized it.

Sanders repeated his claim that NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China have cost the US "some 4 million jobs." "I am sick and tired," said Sanders as he drew a contrast with former Vice President Joe Biden, pointing to large multinational corporations that he says have reaped the benefits.Facts First: This is likely an overestimate of the impact trade agreements can have on the country's employment.

Biden repeated his false claim that he opposed the war in Iraq from the moment the war began. Biden said he made a "mistake" in casting a 2002 vote, as a senator from Delaware, to give President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. But he said he cast the vote because the Bush administration had said "they were just going to get inspectors" into Iraq to check for weapons of mass destruction -- and that, once Bush actually went to war, he became immediately opposed: "From that point on, I was in the position of making the case that it was a big, big mistake." Facts First: As fact checkers have repeatedly noted, Biden did not oppose the war in Iraq from the point it started in March 2003. He did begin calling his 2002 vote a "mistake" in 2005, two years into the war, but he was a vocal public supporter of the war in 2003 and 2004. And he made clear in 2002 and 2003, both before and after the war started, that he had known he was voting to authorize a possible war, not only to try to get inspectors into Iraq

Biden said that President Donald Trump "flat-out lied" when he claimed the US killed Iran's top military general because he was targeting four US embassies. "Quite frankly, I think he's flat-out lied about saying that the reason he went after -- the reason he made the strike was because our embassies were about to be bombed," Biden said. Facts First: Trump has yet to provide evidence backing up his claim that Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani was actively planning new attacks against four US embassies and top administration officials have struggled to defend the President's comments. But there is no way to know if Trump "flat-out lied" without seeing the underlying intelligence, which remains classified.

Biden's written plan proposes "banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters," not ending all new fracking anywhere or ending all existing fracking on public lands and waters.

There is some basis for the Trump campaign's continued attacks against Biden's stance on fracking. During the July 2019 Democratic primary debate, CNN's Dana Bash asked whether there would be "any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration?" to which Biden responded, "No, we would -- we would work it out. We would make sure it's eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either -- any fossil fuel.

During the final presidential debate, Trump referenced these past remarks from Biden, prompting the former vice president to falsely insist he never said he opposed fracking.

While it's untrue for Biden to say he never voiced an opposition towards fracking, it's also inaccurate for Trump to claim Biden's current plan is to end fracking if elected.

Trump repeatedly attacked the validity of the election results, tweeting that this was a "RIGGED ELECTION," a "Rigged and Corrupt Election" and a "Rigged Election Hoax." He also tweeted that this was the "most fraudulent Election in history" and that the results are "fake."

None of this is true. The election was not rigged, and there is no evidence of any fraud large enough to have changed the outcome.

Again, not true. Election Day glitches are unfortunate but normal, and there is no evidence of anybody trying to use voting technology to steal votes.

Trump tweeted that there are "millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats."

This is false. There is no evidence that millions of ballots were altered by Democrats. In fact, there is not currently evidence that ballots were improperly altered by anyone.

Trump tweeted, "All of the mechanical 'glitches' that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes."

"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history."

There is no evidence of people voting after the election was over.

Trump quoted a 1994 article about absentee ballot fraud in a state Senate election in Philadelphia in 1993;

Trump repeatedly criticized Georgia's ongoing audit of the presidential election there, in which all ballots are being recounted by hand. Trump tweeted, "The Fake recount going on in Georgia means nothing because they are not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified. Break the unconstitutional Consent Decree!"

Trump then tweeted, "Wow. This is exactly what happened to us. Great courage by judge!"

There is no evidence of a fraud scheme in Philadelphia in the 2020 election.

Trump tweeted, "700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!"

This is nonsense.

a Trump campaign lawyer has admitted in court that the campaign's observers were permitted to watch in Philadelphia. And even if, hypothetically, Trump observers had been improperly barred, nothing in the Constitution would make Trump the automatic winner of a state in which he trails by more than 65,000 votes as counting continues.

"NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed."

Trump campaign observers were permitted wherever Biden campaign observers were permitted.

Trump claimed that the election was "stolen" in part by a voting equipment and software company, Dominion Voting Systems, he suggested is biased against him and also has "bum equipment."

There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by Dominion and no evidence that any issues with Dominion's technology affected vote counts

Again, the Trump administration said in the statement last week: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

Trump alleged that there was "voting after the Election was over."

The Georgia audit is not fake in any way. While it's true that the state's recount process does not involve signature verification, voters' signatures were verified twice before the ballots were included in the count in the first place

Georgia residents' signatures are verified twice, first when they request an absentee ballot and second when they submit the ballot.

o individual ballot could be connected to an individual signature in a recount, even if someone wanted to violate the bedrock American principle of the secret ballot.

The "Consent Decree" Trump was complaining about is a March legal settlement, between the state and the Democratic Party, that did not prevent signature verification. Rather, it set rules for how and when Georgia voters must be contacted about ballots rejected because of signature issues (and other issues), so that they have time to fix these problems before the count is finalized.

in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.

The bigger and more important failure was Congress. 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.

The problem is chronic, but over the last four years it became virulent. Confronted with a president who was heedless of rules, Senate Republicans, in ways large and small, let him do what he wanted.

They allowed acting appointees to run the federal government. They allowed him to claim a right to attack Iran without congressional approval. The impeachment process was reduced to nothing but a party-line vote. The Senate became a rubber stamp for executive overreach.

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 (even though the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch).

The second is the traditional political neutrality of the military (even though the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces).

The third is the personal integrity of state elections officials.

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.

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.

Prosecutorial independence was not limited to refusing to indict Mr. Trump’s political adversaries; it also extended to indicting his allies. 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.

On June 1, as protests and counterprotests occasioned by the killing of George Floyd became violent and destructive, Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House and denounced what he called “acts of domestic terror.” He said he would “deploy the United States military” if necessary to “defend the life and property” of U.S. citizens.

an unwritten norm has long held that the president should not dictate law enforcement decisions in general, and criminal prosecutions in particular.

Mr. Trump’s plans ran afoul not of the law, but of an unwritten rule. In a few days, the active duty troops gathered around Washington were sent home. Though briefly tested, the norm had held.

Despite the pressure, Mr. Raffensperger and the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, held steady, along with an overwhelming majority of state elections officials around the country. They have refused to “discover” voting fraud without good evidence of it. Party loyalty — at this point — seems not to have fatally corrupted the vote-counting process.

Might this welcome result be credited to constitutional design? Not really. The states are an important part of the constitutional design, and the document does give them a central role to play in federal elections. But what seems to have mattered most, in terms of ensuring the integrity of the voting process, was less the constitutional structure and more the personal integrity of the state elections officials. Their professional commitment to a fair vote may have spared the Republic an existential crisis.

Madison famously wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Cynical minds have read this line to mean that we should never trust people and should rely only on structural controls on government power.

The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials.

as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.

Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”

More than a quarter of those with incomes between the middle of the income distribution and the 75th percentile will probably run short.

The standard prescription is that Americans should put more money aside in investments. The recommendation, however, glosses over a critical driver of unpreparedness: Wall Street is bleeding savers dry.

“A greater part of the problem is the failure of investors to earn their fair share of market returns.”

His observation suggests a different policy prescription: shoring up Americans’ retirement requires, first of all, aligning the interests of investment advisers and their clients.

Actively managed mutual funds, in which many workers invest their retirement savings, are enormously costly.

Altogether, costs add up to 2.27 percent per year, Mr. Bogle estimates.

By contrast, a passive index fund, like Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund, costs merely 0.06 percent a year in all.

Assuming an annual market return of 7 percent, he says, a 30-year-old worker who made $30,000 a year and received a 3 percent annual raise could retire at age 70 with $927,000 in the pot by saving 10 percent of her wages every year in a passive index fund. (Such a nest egg, at the standard withdrawal rate of 4 percent, would generate an inflation-adjusted $37,000 a year more or less indefinitely.) If she put it in a typical actively managed fund, she would end up with only $561,000.

In 1979, almost two in five private sector workers had a defined-benefit pension that would pay out a check until they died. Today only 14 percent do. Almost one in three, by contrast, must make do with a retirement savings account alone to supplement their Social Security check.

nobody was paying attention to the safeguards that might be needed when corporate retirement funds managed by sophisticated professionals were replaced by individual 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts.

“Wall Street makes no money on low-cost index funds,” said David F. Swensen, who runs the investment portfolio for Yale. “That is the problem.”

Harvard and colleagues from M.I.T. and the University of Hamburg sent “mystery shoppers” to visit financial advisers. They found that advisers mostly recommended investment strategies that fit their own financial interests. They reinforced their clients’ misguided biases, encouraging them to chase returns and advising against low-cost options like low-fee index funds.

For all their flaws, 401(k) plans have a fiduciary responsibility to act in participants’ best interest. Managers of I.R.A.s, by contrast, are not legally bound to put their clients’ interests first. They must offer “suitable” products — a much squishier standard.

The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers argues that “conflicted advice” by advisers who get payments from the funds they recommend reduces the annual returns to investment by 1 percentage point, a more modest penalty than Mr. Bogle’s analysis

In 2010, the Labor Department proposed imposing fiduciary responsibility on I.R.A. advisers. The resistance from Wall Street was so fierce that the Obama administration was forced to back down. Last month, the administration tried again.

Unlike regulations in Canada and some Western European countries, which have essentially banned kickbacks from funds to investment advisers, the Obama administration’s proposed rule does not directly attack conflicts of interest.

After World War II, getting the world's five remaining great powers (the United States, United Kingdom, France, China and the Soviet Union) to consent to this newfangled United Nations system required granting them veto power so they'd be comfortable with it

Putin has also been supplying Assad with heavy weapons. It's a bit rich for him to decry violence or outside involvement at this point.

Many of his points are defensible and have been made by American analysts, such as the risk to U.S.-Iran negotiations and the fear that strikes would exacerbate extremism

But what rankles many analysts about this paragraph is that it ignores Putin's own role in enabling the already quite awful violence, as well as the extremism it's inspired.

If the United Nations can survive the unilateral Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, among many other wars large and small, it will survive cruise missile strikes on Syria.

Still, the concern about Syria breeding extremist violence is likely an earnest one for Putin, who surely knows that some Chechens have been fighting in Syria and could very plausibly cause trouble back home in Russia.

There is no one in the world better positioned than Vladimir Putin to force Assad to the negotiating table. Instead, Putin has shown every indication that he wishes for Assad to defeat the rebels totally and outright, as his father Hafez al-Assad did in 1982 when he crushed an uprising in Hama.

Russia has blocked the United Nations from simply condemning Assad's attacks on civilians or the use of chemical weapons in Syria, much less taking action to punish or stop those crimes.

and a real dilemma for Obama, given that he is attempting to portray strikes against Syria as meant to uphold international law against the use of chemical weapons.

An investigation by Human Rights Watch pointed to the Assad regime as responsible. The United Nations investigation, while not permitted to formally assign blame, is expected to amass lots of evidence indicating Assad regime responsibility -- a story that broke mere minutes after Putin's op-ed went online.

utin knows the memory of Iraq is weighing heavily on the United States right now and wants to r

emind us why. Russia, for its part, vehemently opposes Western intervention in foreign countries, which it sees as a continuation of Western imperialism and an indirect threat to Russia itself.

Let's follow through on the Russian plan to have Syria give up its chemical weapons in exchange for the United States not attacking. And Obama is clearly interested.

"American exceptionalism" is a complicated idea but it basically boils down to a combination of simple nationalism and a belief that the United States can and should play a special role in shaping the world.

Putin's Russia has obviously lost the ability to play the role of a superpower, but he still cultivates a sense of nationalism and national greatness.

It's a reminder to American readers that Russia is a predominantly Christian nation. And it could also be, as World Politics Review editor Matt Peterson pointed out to me, an implicit argument for sovereignty, that all nations are equal and so no one country should go interfering with another.

It’s easier to appreciate the simmering pot when you’re looking at it from the outside

India conducted airstrikes against Pakistan. After I learned about them, I tried to follow the currents of misinformation in the unfolding conflict between two nuclear-armed nations on the brink of hot war.

What I found was alarming; it should terrify the world, not just Indians and Pakistanis. Whether you got your news from outlets based in India or Pakistan during the conflict, you would have struggled to find your way through a miasma of lies. The lies flitted across all media: there was lying on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp; there was lying on TV; there were lies from politicians; there were lies from citizens.

just about everyone, including many journalists, played fast and loose with facts. Many discussions were tinged with rumor and supposition. Pictures were doctored, doctored pictures were shared and aired, and real pictures were dismissed as doctored.

Many of the lies were directed and weren’t innocent slip-ups in the fog of war but efforts to discredit the enemy, to boost nationalistic pride, to shame anyone who failed to toe a jingoistic line. The lies fit a pattern, clamoring for war, and on both sides they suggested a society that had slipped the bonds of rationality and fallen completely to the post-fact order.

If you dive into the tireless fact-checking sites policing the region, you’ll find scores more lies from last week, some that flow across both sides of the conflict and many so intricate they defy easy explanation.

And you will be filled with a sense of despair.

The Indian government recently introduced a set of draconian digital restrictions meant, it says, to reduce misinformation. But when mendacity crosses all media and all social institutions, when it becomes embedded in the culture, focusing on digital platforms misses the point.

In India, Pakistan and everywhere else, addressing digital mendacity will require a complete social overhaul. “The battle is going to be long and difficult,” Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist who runs the Indian fact-checking site Boom, told me. The information war is a forever war. We’re just getting started.

"I am speaking with a number of my Republican colleagues who did not support our bill in the past, but are reconsidering the bill now," Toomey said. "We need more support, obviously. The last time we had this vote we didn't get the 60 that we need so we're trying to find a way to get there."

The Schengen Area is a group of 26 European countries that extend visa-free travel to their citizens. Ireland and the United Kingdom are not in the Schengen Area, and Airbnb has not announced whether they will be covered by the new policy.

A previous statement announced that reservations in mainland China booked on or before January 28, with a check in date of April 1 or before, would qualify for penalty-free bookings under the extenuating circumstances policy.

If you're coming from South Korea, you may also cancel some bookings penalty free. Reservations are eligible if they were booked on or before February 25, with a check-in date of March 23 or before.

Even if you're not coming from or going to an area that automatically qualifies for a refund, though, it might be possible to get your money back.

Penalty-free refunds will be extended to any hosts or guests who must cancel reservations to comply with disease control restrictions, or to perform coronavirus-related medical or disease-control duties.

They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.

Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.

Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.

More Americans may die than the White House admits.

The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000.

The institute’s projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.

Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.

Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.

A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.

China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.

The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.

In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos.

Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.

China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were.

The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.

The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.

it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.

Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.

The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.

Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance

On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.

Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.

In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.

Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.

On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns.

China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’s incubation period.

Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.

Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control

But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.

Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.

Immunity will become a societal advantage.

Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.

“It will be a frightening schism,” Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”

Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense

Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them.

As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection

My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,”

It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.

The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.

Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.

once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.

To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.

“If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,”

In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.

There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears.

Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards

Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.

In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.

The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.

China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.

There will not be a vaccine soon.

any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.

the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.

for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.

A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.

It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.

Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.

“Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.

The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.

if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.

“People have to start thinking big,” Dr. Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”

Treatments are likely to arrive first.

The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.

as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.

Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.

Goodbye, ‘America First.’

A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.

And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.

This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted.

“If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,”

If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said.“What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”

Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.

In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.

He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.

In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.

If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change

The most revealing false claim: The flu mortality rate

VirusesAwareness of Ebola in 2014Comparing the coronavirus outbreak with the Ebola situation of 2014, Trump said, "At that time, nobody had ever even heard of Ebola." -- February 25 press conference in New Delhi, India "Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody had ever heard of anything like this." -- February 26 coronavirus press conference Facts First: Some Americans certainly didn't know a whole lot about Ebola before 2014, but the claims that "nobody" had ever even heard of Ebola and that "nobody" knew anything about it are absurd. Ebola was discovered in 1976. It had been the subject of considerable media coverage in the next three decades, not to mention scientific study.

Gupta, CNN chief medical correspondent, told Trump at a press conference, "Mr. President, you talked about the flu and then in comparison to the coronavirus. The flu has a fatality ratio of about 0.1%." Trump said, "Correct." But Trump later disputed the figure, saying, "And the flu is higher than that. The flu is much higher than that." -- February 26 coronavirus press conferenceFacts First: Even if Trump meant that the flu has a "much higher" fatality rate than 0.1% -- rather than meaning that the flu's mortality rate is "much higher" than that of the novel coronavirus -- he was wrong. The mortality rate for seasonal flu is "about 0.1%, 0.2% at the most," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health -- who appeared with Trump at this same news conference -- told this to USA Today in mid-February, echoing the comments of other experts and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data since 2010.