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Let’s start with the For The People Act. The bill would implement nationwide automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration and online registration (did you know there are still states where you can’t register to vote online?). It would limit the use of voter purges — a common tactic in which states throw people off the rolls under the guise of reducing duplication and errors — and restore voting rights to Americans with a past criminal conviction. As far as federal elections go, it would secure at least two weeks of early voting in all states, expand vote-by-mail options and restrict secretaries of state from overseeing elections in which they are on the ballot (they’re looking at you, Brian Kemp).

The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is more specific: It’s aimed at restoring the Voting Rights Act, after the Supreme Court gutted it in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. To that end, it rewrites the V.R.A. to target states with current records of racial discrimination, not just past records; tightens the focus on electoral changes that have traditionally been used to disenfranchise minority voters, like voter ID laws; and empowers the attorney general to send federal observers wherever there’s a threat of racial discrimination in voting.

But while Democrats are debating the best way to make sure Republicans can be heard in the Senate, Republicans in the states are passing legislation meant to silence Democratic voters across the country. The attack on the Capitol failed on Jan. 6, but that doesn’t mean the quiet war the G.O.P. is waging on democracy won’t succeed. There are ways the filibuster can be reformed to ensure that the Senate minority has a voice. But it would be obscene to let the Republican Party use the language of minority rights to deprive actual minorities of the right to vote.

The first spike in anti-Asian hate crimes occurred in March and April last year. However, it occurred alongside a rise in Covid-19 cases and ongoing negative associations of Asian Americans with the virus, the analysis noted.

A separate study revealed that the use of “China virus” language to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by GOP officials and conservative outlets, has already resulted in a shift in how many people in the U.S. perceive Asian Americans. The significant uptick in discriminatory coronavirus speech that occurred on March 8 — the day Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., tweeted about the “Wuhan virus,” which coincided with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview the day before on "Fox and Friends" in which he referred to the "China virus" — was followed by a rapid reversal of a decadelong decline in anti-Asian bias.

"Many of these Chinatowns are in places that are low income and also suffering economically. So that might be one set of explanations as to why this phenomenon is taking this particular shape," he said. "On top of that, we live in an age of viral social media, and … especially the shock value of some of these videos increases awareness and maybe anxiety in the community.

But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.

The law stretches far beyond Covid-19 relief. There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations. There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.

I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon.

As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.

There was a premise through American history that if you worked hard you would earn economic security. That’s not as true for millennials and Gen-Z, or many other people across America.

The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.

The Covid-19 relief law that was just enacted is one of the most important pieces of legislation of our lifetimes. As Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, the poorest fifth of households will see their income rise by 20 percent; a family of four with one working and one unemployed parent will receive $12,460 in benefits. Child poverty will be cut in half.

This has been one of the most quietly consequential weeks in recent American politics.

There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations.

There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.

As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.

the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans,

Somehow low-key Joe Biden gets yawns when he promotes progressive policies that would generate howls if promoted by a President Sanders or a President Warren.

This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction, it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting

Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them

Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems.

These realities have created a different emotional climate that the pandemic has magnified — a climate of insecurity and precarity. These realities have also produced an intellectual revolution.

It was assumed, even only a decade ago, that the Fed could not just print money with abandon. It was assumed that the government could not wrack up huge debt without spurring inflation and crippling debt payment costs. Both of these concerns have been thrown out the window by large numbers of thinkers

We are now experiencing monetary and fiscal policies that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. This is like the moment when the G.O.P. abandoned fiscal conservatism for the go-go excitement of supply-side economics

The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.

This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.

With the wind at their backs, Democrats are concluding that Biden’s decision to eschew bipartisanship to pass a relief package is better than Barack Obama’s attempts to attract it

Republicans have learned that in this new era it’s foolish to fight Democrats on redistribution policy, but they can win elections by fighting culture wars.

But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time

It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this.

At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.

And for ambitious Republican officials, the political calculation remains stark: To the extent that Republican voters care at all about foreign policy issues, many have come to embrace Mr. Trump’s nationalistic views on issues like trade, overseas military ventures and even Russia.

Mr. Graham, who made an unsuccessful run for president and was always overshadowed by Mr. McCain as a Republican voice on foreign policy, spoke for more than half an hour at a news conference on Wednesday, walking listeners through a history of the Afghan conflict.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, warned that pulling out the troops would be a “grave mistake.”

“Apparently, we’re to help our adversaries ring in the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor.

“We don’t want to engage in nation building, we don’t want to engage in endless police actions,” said John McLaughlin, who also conducted polling for Mr. Trump.

And Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has ambitions of developing a new policy framework for the party, praised the decision.

“To say that there is a single Republican foreign policy position is to miss what’s been happening within the conservative movement on these issue for the last 20 years,” said Lanhee Chen, a Hoover Institution scholar and policy adviser to a number of prominent Republican officials.

Foreign policy, particularly withdrawing from Afghanistan, was one of the few areas where Republican elected officials were willing to publicly criticize Mr. Trump.

Yet chances that Republicans will achieve a complete restoration of the traditional party platform seem low, particularly if Mr. Trump continues to flex his political power among his base.

When asked about the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, 58 percent of Republicans surveyed said the outbreak showed the United States should be less reliant on other countries, compared with just 18 percent of Democrats who said the same.

For Republicans, the shift inward comes as their long dominance over issues of national security and international affairs is waning. Mr. Trump rejected Republican foreign policy orthodoxy but largely struggled to articulate a cohesive countervailing view beyond a vague notion of putting America first.

Mr. Pompeo, who recently became the co-chairman of a new foreign policy group at the Nixon Foundation that aims to reassert “conservative realism,” said he supported Mr. Biden’s decision.

Of course, as the Fox News hosts pointed out, had Mr. Trump won re-election, the troops would have been coming home next month — with the full support of Mr. Pompeo, if not many other Republican leaders.

When I asked a high school senior I know about what was missing in his diversity, equity and inclusion training at his private school, he said that often what was left out was “a basic focus on decency and empathy.” Kids want to know how to talk to their friends openly, he said, and they just don’t want to be jerks.

Private schools find themselves now at an existential moment. Over the past few decades, as they have become dominated by wealthier and wealthier families, they have found themselves more and more beholden to the habits of modern corporate culture, which has had a long love affair with consultants and the outsourcing of difficult problems.

The problem, though, is that consultants often present a blanket approach that fails to recognize the particulars of an institutional culture; the language deployed from one school (or company) to another is scarcely any different. Everything begins to sound as though it has its origins in Oz — inauthentic and alienating.

The roots of all this chaos extend, more or less, to late last summer, as parents from Chilmark to Amagansett laid down their tennis gear, poured their Negronis and banged out angry emails to administrators and trustees, apoplectic that a $55,000 annual tuition might not guarantee that their children would receive in-person daily learning. Once the academic year got underway — with far more live classroom instruction than the city’s public schools — there were new dissatisfactions to nurture.

Over the summer, Black alumni and parents at some of the country’s most prestigious independent schools took to Instagram to document deeply troubling experiences with prejudice at the hands of teachers, students, families. Many stories came not from the long-ago past but from the annals of recent history.

Whether consultants were directly involved or not, it soon became clear that not all parents were on board with the new order

The new programming seemed designed to divide and provoke guilt, they maintained, forcing white children to feel bad about being white.

After the letter became public, Mr. Davison, the head of school, put together a committee to bring voices from all sides of the debate together

Mr. Rossi’s letter argued that students and teachers at Grace did not feel free to challenge a new language or ideology. When he did, he was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs,”

In a conversation I had with Mr. Davison last weekend, he was very frank about the imperfect nature of the changes at Grace. “We were in the process of developing programming faster than they we ever had before,’’ he told me. “Whenever you build something quickly, you don’t always see all the pieces. The ones who are going to help you build it the most quickly are the true believers,” he said. But the truest believers are not always those in the best position to advance change without fear. “We need to be better at communicating those things. We need to get more opinion.”

he was joined by a math teacher named Paul Rossi, who had composed a letter of his own, seemingly to the nation at large, laying out his objections to the way that his employer, the Grace Church School in Lower Manhattan, was going about the business of changing its culture around race. Mr. Rossi’s note lacked the hysterical tone of Mr. Gutmann’s. It raised valid concerns about the squelching of free thought.

Thanks to Fox News and all the other outlets dedicated to the notion that elite liberal institutions have abandoned any hope of sanity in the name of social revolution, Mr. Gutmann soon became a minor celebrity on the right — which might have been the whole point.

Within a period of roughly 92 hours during the week of April 11, the news coming from the Ivy League training grounds hit observers with the pace of an angry linebacker tearing in from the blindside.

Many of the most influential figures in Republican politics have decided that breaking with Mr. Trump would so alienate the base of the party that it would make election victories impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s essentially what Senator Graham was saying when he recently went on Fox News and posed this question to his Republican colleagues: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.”

This means that the new Republican establishment will accede to pretty much anything Mr. Trump demands in order to keep good relations with him. And we know what the former president’s main demand is — insisting he was cheated out of a second term.

Today the Republican Party is less a political party than a political freak show. It is being sustained by insidious lies. And people who love America, starting with conservatives, should say so

therwise, if the Republican Party’s downward spiral isn’t reversed, it will descend even further into a frightening world of illusion.

"Jews are the targets of the majority of hate crimes committed in the United States against any religious group, including attacks on houses of worship and Jewish community centers," the bill states.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler similarly raised eyebrows for declaring that the theory is "suddenly credible." 

"This is what defunding the police looks like," Abbott wrote in a tweet. "Austin is incapable of timely responding to a victim shot in the head."

Chauvin was convicted in April on state charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd's death. Experts say he will likely face no more than 30 years in prison when he is sentenced June 25. If convicted in the federal case, any federal sentence would be served at the same time as his state sentence.

UFOs may have mundane identities, like weather balloons or drones. But some sightings don't have accepted explanations.

In March, former President Donald Trump's director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe said that the intelligence community was aware of many incidents of “unidentified aerial phenomena” and that such events occurred “all over the world," he said during a Fox News interview.

Incidents of UFOs have captured the public imagination for decades. The revelations in the upcoming report from federal agencies are likely to show there has been considerable interest in UFOs throughout government agencies as well. 

The report is likely to add further details to the findings of a 2017 New York Times report that revealed multiple Navy pilots had seen UFOs while in flight. The Pentagon later declassified video of the incidents, which showed high-speed objects with no clear propulsion outpacing the officers' jets.

Lawmakers included an order for the UFO report in the December omnibus spending and coronavirus relief package.

Officials have cautioned that analysts did not immediately speculate that aliens were responsible for the phenomena. Instead, Pentagon and intelligence officials are most concerned that such objects are next-generation technology from American competitors such as China and consequently pose a national security concern.

Rubio, the ranking member and former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, continued that many of his Senate colleagues are “very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up." The senator, however, doesn't think the question is a laughing matter. "I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”

America’s presence on the council, alongside these nations, only legitimizes the hypocritical abuses that have plagued this body for years. For the sake of those suffering under repressive regimes, President Biden must make the right choice and stand for human rights. 

The bottom line is this: returning to the UNHRC would require a dramatic overhaul of this corrupt body to implement its founding mission. Oppressed peoples around the world are watching in the hopes that America will stand with them and against their oppressors.  

Negotiations continue in Vienna to see if both the U.S. and Iran can re-enter the deal, which limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Iran and the U.S. aren’t directly negotiating, however.

He also acknowledged Iran’s upcoming June 18 presidential election could mean new faces at the negotiating table. So far, Grossi has been dealing with the administration of the relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani, which clinched the nuclear deal. Analysts believe hard-liners have an edge going into the vote.

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi was able to negotiate a last-minute deal in February, however, under which promised the IAEA it would hold onto footage shot by its surveillance cameras and would hand them over if diplomats reached a deal in Vienna to lift the sanctions it faces. Otherwise, Tehran said it would delete the images.

The ultimate goal of the deal is to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, something it insists it doesn’t want to do. Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb, but nowhere near the amount it had before the nuclear deal was signed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deployed Border Police forces Wednesday, saying that Israel will "stop the anarchy and restore governance to the cities of Israel, with an iron fist if needed, with all forces needed and all authorities required."

In a statement Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Baltimore field office said the bureau was aware of the charges and is fully cooperating with the investigation.

In a 911 call released in January, a witness said the agent had warned the man to back away, but the man ignored the command and instead prepared to fight him, the Washington Post reported.

The blog, called "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump," was launched May 4 and came months after the former President had been banned from Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR).

"This is meant to be a temporary way of getting my thoughts and ideas out to the public without the Fake News spin, but the website is not a platform," he said.