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Mostly, animal transport efforts are focused on bringing puerto Rico shelter animals to mainland cities where they can be adopted. The Humane Society of the United States, in some cases working with volunteer pilots from the nonprofit Wings of Rescue, has evacuated more than 1,500 cats and dogs, as well as a few pigs.

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.

Ms. Warren did highlight her status as the top-polling female contender at several points in the debate, ending her closing statement with a reference to the possibility of electing the first woman president.

Warren makes her electability pitch.

One of Ms. Warren’s biggest political obstacles is the perception among some voters that she would face daunting challenges in a general election — both thanks to her boldly progressive outlook, and to societal sexism that many Democrats believe damaged Mrs. Clinton in 2016. @charset "UTF-8"; /*********************** B A S E S T Y L E S ************************/ /************************************* T Y p E : C L A S S M I X I N S **************************************/ /* Headline */ /* Leadin */ /* Byline */ /* Dateline */ /* Alert */ /* Subhed */ /* Body */ /* Caption */ /* Leadin */ /* Credit */ /* Label */ /********** S I Z E S ***********/ /******************** T Y p O G R A p H Y *********************/ .g-headline, .interactive-heading, .g-subhed { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; } .g-alert, .g-alert.g-body, .g-alert_link, .g-byline, .g-caption, .g-caption_bold, .g-caption_heading, .g-chart, .g-credit, .g-credit_bullet, .g-dateline, .g-label, .g-label_white, .g-leadin, #interactive-leadin, .g-refer, .g-refer.g-body, .g-table-text { font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; 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And she invoked her 2012 victory over then-Senator Scott P. Brown, RePublican of Massachusetts, as she declared herself “the only Person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent RePublican anytime in the Past 30 years.”

Klobuchar throws punches.

Yet while she described herself as a winner tethered to the Midwest, somebody whose friends and neighbors hail from flyover country, she didn’t come out of Tuesday’s debate with any significant headlines of her own.

The only vetting of Buttigieg came from the moderator Abby PhilliP on race.

Mr. Buttigieg deftly dodged by suggesting that the black voters who “know me best” — in his native South Bend — chose him twice to lead the city. And he cited recent endorsements from Representative Anthony Brown of Maryland and Mayor Quentin Hart of Waterloo, Iowa, who this week became the two most prominent African-American elected officials to back him.

Biden avoids attacks.

Mr. Biden, who flew under the radar particularly at the last debate, often stayed in his comfort zones — discussing foreign policy and health care — and he was not the center of the kind of memorable exchanges that had dealt his campaign blows earlier in the race.

"If you're President of the United States and if you vote in Florida, and you can't be there, you should be able to send in a ballot," he said last week at a factory in Michigan.

"The President is, after all, the President, which means he's here in Washington; he's unable to cast his vote down in Florida, his state of residence," Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said. "So, for him, that's why he had to do a mail-in vote. But he suPPorts mail-in voting for a reason, when you have a reason that you are unable to be Present."

Early voting in the county began on March 7, and lasted through March 15, the Palm Beach County SuPervisor of Elections confirmed to CNN on Wednesday. Polls were oPen from 10 a.m. to 6 P.m.

In the past, presidents have used a mix of in-person and absentee voting to cast ballots while in office. president Barack Obama, who sought to use his appearances at polling locations to inspire Americans to vote themselves, voted early in Chicago during the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. He voted absentee in other contests. His wife, Michelle Obama, is headlining an effort this year to expand mail-in and early voting.

In the statement, McEnany did not accurately describe the voting system in Florida. According to the Florida Division of Elections, people can vote by mail without offering an excuse -- a more expansive definition than "absentee voting."

On Monday night, fund-raising solicitations from the Trump campaign revealed that 60 percent of donations would be directed to the new entity, “Save America.”

“The president always planned to do this, win or lose,” Mr. Murtaugh said, “so he can support candidates and issues he cares about, such as combating voter fraud.”

Still, a PAC could give the President an off-ramP after a bruising election fight, as well as keeP him as a dominant figure as the next RePublican Presidential Primary races are beginning for a new standard-bearer.

Even as Mr. Biden has gathered more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win, and as he has taken leads of tens of thousands of votes in several battleground states, Mr. Trump has maintained there was voter fraud on a wide scale, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He has directed his campaign to march forward with legal challenges in states like Arizona and Nevada, despite most advisers believing that the race is over and that he should move on.

While the leadership pAC could not help him in such an effort, it could provide an interim vehicle that would let him travel and engage in some political activity, even if he never actually runs again.

A one-war doctrine, on the other hand, invites conflict.

Our presidents were not alone. Much of Conservatism Inc. has become functionally pro-Russia.

much of the American foreign policy establishment decided that it could live in whatever reality it preferred. Their signal accomplishment was killing America’s two-war doctrine.

The goal of the two-war doctrine was to prevent America from having to fight any major wars. Because when you have the ability to fight two conventional ground wars, you deter all of your enemies.

it’s not just the lotus-eating Europeans. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both got rolled by putin. Donald Trump was practically putin’s gofer.

both China and Russia are emboldened to pursue their interests: They know that we are unlikely to respond to aggression because in any given instance we will be paralyzed by the need to be able to deter a second aggressor.

The two-war doctrine was a victim of its own success. It was so effective at deterring large-scale aggression that Americans became convinced it wasn’t needed. That we could pocket the savings and get the same level of security through norms and agreements and economic interdependence.

Here is a thing everyone except Vladimir putin and Xi Jinping seems to have forgotten: Reality is a tank. Not a memorandum. Not a summit. Not a promise.

Over the last 20 years, Americans experienced the very real costs of being the global hegemon and decided that, all things being equal, we’d rather not have the job.We are about to experience the very real costs of not being the hyperpower.

I would like to think the American people will survey the situation and come to the hard conclusion that while it is expensive and arduous to be the enforcer of the international order, it’s ultimately cheaper and safer than the alternative. And that we will then select leaders who will carry out this brief.

But I’ve lived through the last three years, just like you. I’ve watched half of America whine like children over being asked to wear a KN-95 at the grocery store. I’ve seen a third of this country refuse to get a life-saving vaccine because they are so detached from reality.

In my darker moments I suspect that Vladimir putin has taken our measure quite precisely.

The plan includes production of a graphic propaganda video that would show staged explosions and would use corpses and actors depicting grieving mourners, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.The plan, which was revealed in declassified intelligence shared with Ukrainian officials and European allies in recent days, is the latest allegation by the U.S. and Britain that Russia is plotting to use a false pretext to go to war against Ukraine.

He reiterated Turkey’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Meanwhile, Putin met with Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez in Moscow and then sPoke by Phone to Macron, who had a call Wednesday night with U.S. President Joe Biden. Macron then sPoke with Zelenskyy.

The NATO chief said Russian forces in Belarus are likely to rise to 30,000, including special forces, supported by fighter jets and missiles.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed Thursday that Paris is sending trooP reinforcements to Romania under NATO command, as Part of France’s commitment to the alliance and its member states in Eastern EuroPe.

He did not say how many French soldiers will be deployed. The announcement came a day after the U.S. said it was moving troops stationed in Germany to Romania.

Ukraine’s defense minister is urging calm, saying the likelihood of a Russian invasion was “low.”Oleksii Reznikov said the threat of attack has loomed over the country since 2014, the year Russia seized Crimea, but he added: “There are no grounds for panic, fear, flight or packing of bags.”The minister said there are about 115,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s border, including those deployed to Belarus for war games, but he said no battle groups have been detected along Ukraine’s border with Belarus. He also reiterated earlier assurances that Kyiv doesn’t plan to attack rebel-held areas in the war-torn east of Ukraine or Crimea — something the Kremlin has accused Kyiv of plotting.

An ice hockey fan, Putin will also attend Friday’s oPening ceremony of the Winter OlymPics.His talks with Chinese President Xi JinPing on Friday will be their first face-to-face since 2019 and will helP cement a strong Personal relationshiP that has been a key factor behind a growing PartnershiP between the two former Communist rivals.

But Mr Netanyahu said Gen Golan's remarks were "utterly mistaken and unacceptable to me".

Correspondents say right-wing members of Mr Netanyahu's coalition have called for Gen Golan's resignation, accusing him of dishonouring the dead.

The remarks come at a time of heightened tension between Israelis and Palestinians.

There has been debate and controversy over Israelis' response to the attacks.

There has been some public sympathy for the soldier but Mr Yaalon backed the military establishment in prosecuting him.

Thatcher said something else that's particularly interesting in this discussion. She said there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social-- that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests

I want to echo something that FDR once said, When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that comes with a lack of health care.

How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?

Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals.

that the government-- the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that-- you often hear this, I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and they're all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the national media? We hear that maybe they don't know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about character.

I think that what we haven't seen before is an attack on the social contract, Bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example, you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable.

young people can't turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You can't walk on a college campus today and walk into the student union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.

Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse that's not commodified, to be able to think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, they're just simply absent, they're not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified.

It's a death machine. It's a death machine because in my estimation it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no-- they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency-

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino CaPitalism.” Why that metaPhor, zombie Politics? HENRY GIROUX: Because it's a Politics that's informed by the machinery of social and civil death.

This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That's different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

as the social state is crippled, as the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed out and robbed of its potential and its capacities, what takes its place? The punishing state takes its place. You get this notion of incarceration, this, what we call the governing through crime complex where governance now has been ceded to corporations who largely are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations and allowing the state to exercise its power in enormously destructive and limited ways.

we kill the imagination by suggesting that the only kind of rationality that matters, the only kind of learning that matters is utterly instrumental, pragmatist. So what we do is we collapse education into training, and we end up suggesting that not knowing much is somehow a virtue. And I'll and I think what's so disturbing about this is not only do you see it in the popular culture with the lowest common denominator now drives that culture, but you also see it coming from politicians who actually say things that suggest something about the policies they'd like to implement.

Rick Santorum is not-- is kind of a, you know, an obvious figure. But when he stands up in front of a body of Republicans and he says, the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. And I think it's kind of a template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture.

I think intellectuals are-- there are two ways we can describe intellectuals. In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals are people who take pride in ideas. They work with ideas." I mean, they believe that ideas matter. They believe that there's no such thing as common sense, good sense or bad sense, but reflective sense.

how we learn what we learn and what we do with the knowledge that we have is not just for ourselves. It's for the way in which we can expand and deepen the very processes of democracy in general, and address those problems and anti-democratic forces that work against it.

I think the real issue here is, you know, what would it mean to begin to do at least two things?

one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture

Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements

here's the contradiction I hear in what you're saying. That if you write about a turning toward despair and cynicism in politics. Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism? Can you get people who will take on the system when they have been told that the system is so powerful and so overwhelming that they've lost their, as you call it, moral and political agency?

to be different than it is now, rather than romanticizing hope and turning it into something Disney-like, right, it really has to involve the hard work of A) recognizing the structures of domination that we have to face, B) organizing collectively and somehow to change those, and C) believing it can be done, that it's worth the struggle.

I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other.

NewCo will emulate the founders of The Atlantic. At some point "independent from" turned into "objective about." That was the wrong turn, made long ago, by professional journalism, American-style.

You've written that The View From Nowhere is, in part, a defense mechanism against charges of bias originating in partisan politics. If you won't be invoking it, what will your defense be when those charges happen? There are two answers to that. 1) We told you where we're coming from. 2) High standards of verification. You need both.

If it works out as you hope, if things are implemented well, etc., what's the potential payoff for readers? I think it's three things: First, this is a news site that is born into the digital world, but doesn't have to return profits to investors. That's not totally unique

What about ideological diversity? The View from Somewhere obviously permits it. You've said you'll have it. Is that because it is valuable in itself?

When people talk about objectivity in journalism they have many different things in mind. Some of these I have no quarrel with. You could even say I’m a “fan.” For example, if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense. Don’t you? If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad. Is that objectivity? If so, I’m all for it, and I do that myself sometimes. 

By "we can do better than that" I mean: We can insist on the struggle to tell it like it is without also insisting on the View from Nowhere. The two are not connected. It was a mistake to think that they necessarily are. But why was this mistake made? To control people in the newsroom from "above." That's a big part of objectivity. Not truth. Control.

The basic insight is correct: Since "news judgment" is judgment, the product is improved when there are multiple perspectives at the table ... But, if the people who are recruited to the newsroom because they add perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked are also taught that they should leave their politics at the door, or think like professional journalists rather than representatives or their community, or privilege something called "news values" over the priorities they had when they decided to become journalists, then these people are being given a fatally mixed message, if you see what I mean. They are valued for the perspective they bring, and then told that they should transcend that perspective.

Second: It's going to be a technology company as much as a news organization. That should result in better service.

a good formula for innovation is to start with something people want to do and eliminate some of the steps required to do it

The third upside is news with a human voice restored to it. This is the great lesson that blogging gives to journalism

The kidnappings, which were carried out by different groups of fighters jousting for influence and territory in Syria, became more frequent. In June 2013, four French journalists were abducted. In September, the militants grabbed three Spanish journalists.

At first, the abuse did not appear to have a larger purpose. Nor did the jihadists seem to have a plan for their growing number of hostages.Mr. Bontinck said Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie had first been held by the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate. Their guards, an English-speaking trio whom they nicknamed “the Beatles,” seemed to take pleasure in brutalizing them.Later, they were handed over to a group called the Mujahedeen Shura Council, led by French speakers.Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie were moved at least three times before being transferred to a prison underneath the Children’s Hospital of Aleppo.

but as conditions grew more desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.

When Mr. Bontinck was released, he jotted down the phone number of Mr. Foley’s parents and promised to call them. They made plans to meet again.He left thinking that the journalists, like him, would soon be freed.

After months of holding them without making any demands, the jihadists suddenly devised a plan to ransom them. Starting last November, each prisoner was told to hand over the email address of a relative. Mr. Foley gave the address of his younger brother.The group sent a blitz of messages to the families of the hostages.Those who were able to lay the emails side by side could see they had been cut and pasted from the same template.

Within this subset, the person who suffered the cruelest treatment, the former hostages said, was Mr. Foley. In addition to receiving prolonged beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded.

Mr. Foley shared his meager rations. In the cold of the Syrian winter, he offered another prisoner his only blanket.He kept the others entertained, proposing games and activities like Risk, a board game that involves moving imaginary armies across a map: another favorite pastime in the Foley family. The hostages made a chess set out of discarded paper. They re-enacted movies, retelling them scene by scene. And they arranged for members of the group to give lectures on topics they knew well.

By June, the cellblock that had once held at least 23 people had been reduced to just seven. Four of them were Americans, and three were British — all citizens of countries whose governments had refused to pay ransoms.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told the BBC that some residents were going weeks without seeing sunlight because they were too frightened to go out."They go out only whenever they want to bring some food for their children," said ICRC spokeswoman Ingy Sedky.

The rebels in Eastern Ghouta are not one cohesive group. They encompass multiple factions, including jihadists, and in-fighting between them has led to past losses of ground to the Syrian government.

The Syrian government is desperate to regain the territory, and has said its attempts to recapture it can be attributed directly due to the HTS presence there. HTS was excluded from a ceasefire agreed at the UN that has yet to come into effect.

Outbreaks can be influenced by seasonal weather conditions, which affect the numbers of the virus's natural host - the multimammate rat.

Most people catch Lassa fever from anything contaminated with rat urine, faeces, blood or saliva - through eating, drinking or simply handling contaminated objects in the home.

It is likely that a vaccine could be found for Lassa - reducing the possibility of an outbreak becoming a global health emergency - but as with other epidemic diseases that mainly affect poorer countries, progress has stalled.

Vaccine development is a long, complex and costly process. This is especially true for emerging epidemic diseases, where a prototype vaccine can usually only be tested where there is an outbreak.

The relationship between these three countries is unusual to say the least. Iran and Israel are sworn enemies. And Syria is fast becoming the most dangerous front in their bitter rivalry.

The surprising factor in the long-standing Israeli air campaign to limit and, if possible, reverse the entrenchment of pro-Iranian forces in Syria is the passivity of Moscow.

A weak and fragmented Syria would do little to constrain Israel. While the latter sees Iran and its potential quest for an atomic bomb as an existential threat, Iran itself sees Israel's long-range military power as a considerable threat and an obstacle to its regional ambitions.

The Assad regime's growing victories saw a variety of pro-Iranian forces establishing themselves in Syria, from units of the Revolutionary Guard Corps to a variety of militias - a kind of Shia foreign legion, recruited in pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for all foreign forces to be withdrawn from Syria; a demand echoed just a few days ago by his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who said that only Syrian forces should be dePloyed in the south of the country.

Moscow clearly wants to stabilise the situation in Syria enabling the Assad regime to "declare victory".

Just hours before his party announced it would be forming a coalition government, League leader Matteo Salvini posted a video on Facebook appearing to show a man of African origin plucking a pigeon, with the words, "Go home!!!"

On Thursday's visit to the presidential palace, Conte instead proposed Giovanna Tria as finance minister. Tria has been critical of Germany's role in Europe but, unlike Savona, has never expressed the desire to leave the single currency. Savona will enter the government as minister for European affairs.

During the negotiations, the populists ditched some of their most incendiary campaign vows, such as calling for a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro or leave the European Union.

Tensions have also risen between the two parties and the president, peaking as Di Maio called for Mattarella's impeachment earlier this week following his rejection of Conte's choice of finance minister.

In 2015-16, 30% of the guns used in crime that the organisation recovered and tested were "obsolete calibre", meaning they were designed for ammunition no longer produced - in other words, antiques that have been repurposed to be used in crime. This represents a significant rise over the past five years.

Guns or parts of guns are also traded online. In 2015, NCA officers seized a gun that had been sent to a man in the UK in the post, concealed within a radio.

Handguns were the most common type of firearm used to commit offences last year, according to police records.

In England and Wales in 2016-17, there were 31 fatal shootings - or one for every 1.9 million people.

In the US, in contrast, there were 11,000 murders or manslaughters involving a firearm or one death for every 30,000 people.

But concerns are growing in some quarters of the armed forces that the military is not practising physical distancing and could be at risk of spreading coronavirus when it is most needed, while images are circulating on social media of forces personnel conducting physical training in large groups.

An email from a commanding officer in the Royal Engineers seen by the Guardian says: “Where we can respect social distancing in the training environment we should seek to do so.” But it adds: “This will not always be possible, pleased [sic] be relaxed about this.”

Soldiers in the Grenadier Guards have single-person rooms, the army source added, and special arrangements such as staggered mealtimes had been arranged to help distance people while they are on standby at barracks. “Soldiers are used to keeping good hygiene: there are rigorous hand-washing routines for instance,” the source said.

It was impossible in practice to minimise contact with “people living in what are essentially university-style dormitories that have a shared kitchen and shared washing machines and dryers which obviously present considerable risk of cross-contamination. No cleaning equipment has been provided such as hand sanitisers for personal use, so people are having to share their own limited stock.”

An MoD spokesperson said: “We are well prepared for the outbreak of coronavirus, and have well-rehearsed plans in place for dealing with health matters. All our people have been reminded of the guidance issued by public Health England, which is the same advice for the general population.”

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project. “Our experience with vaccine development is that you can’t anticipate where you’re going to stumble,” says Hatchett, meaning that diversity is key. And the stage where any approach is most likely to stumble is clinical or human trials, which, for some of the candidates, are about to get under way.

An illustration of that is a vaccine that was produced in the 1960s against respiratory syncytial virus, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms in children. In clinical trials, this vaccine was found to aggravate those symptoms in infants who went on to catch the virus. A similar effect was observed in animals given an early experimental Sars vaccine. It was later modified to eliminate that problem but, now that it has been repurposed for Sars-CoV-2, it will need to be put through especially stringent safety testing to rule out the risk of enhanced disease.

Once a Covid-19 vaccine has been approved, a further set of challenges will present itself. “Getting a vaccine that’s proven to be safe and effective in humans takes one at best about a third of the way to what’s needed for a global immunisation programme,” says global health expert Jonathan Quick of Duke University in North Carolina, author of The End of Epidemics (2018). “Virus biology and vaccines technology could be the limiting factors, but politics and economics are far more likely to be the barrier to immunisation.”

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines. During the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, for example, vaccine supplies were snapped up by nations that could afford them, leaving poorer ones short. But you could also imagine a scenario where, say, India – a major supplier of vaccines to the developing world – not unreasonably decides to use its vaccine production to protect its own 1.3 billion-strong population first, before exporting any.

• This article was amended on 19 March 2020. An earlier version incorrectly stated that the Sabin Vaccine Institute was collaborating with the Coalition for Epidemic preparedness Innovations (Cepi) on a Covid-19 vaccine.

Paid leave, in general, is an easy sell with voters. Families need it — 72 Percent of mothers and 93 Percent of fathers with children at home are in the labor force — and a large majority of voters suPPort it. But Americans, like their elected rePresentatives, disagree on the details, Particularly how to Pay for it.

The child tax credit is worth up to $2,000 per child. If the Trump-backed bill passed, the average worker with a new child could receive $5,000, and then collect $500 less in child tax credits each year for 10 years. Workers earning less than $11,000 a year, who don’t qualify for the full child tax credit, could also get up to $5,000, and pay it back over 15 years.

Republicans have instead focused on ways to let people borrow from their future federal benefits. One idea, tapping Social Security early, has been unpopular, because it would mean receiving less money in retirement.

But opponents say that it would just delay parents’ financial stressors, because they would collect smaller tax credits for the first decade of their children’s lives, when they still had significant expenses like child care, clothes and food.

“Republicans have really painted themselves into a corner on taxes,” said Kathleen Romig, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and policy priorities, a left-leaning research group. “They know voters want it, constituents need it, but they don’t have anywhere to go for funding except for anything that already exists.”

Trump continues his war of words and measuring of egos with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While I still find the threat of a nuclear strike remote, it grows less and less remote with every passing day and every insult. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Kim Jong-un is irrational and unhinged, but so is Trump.

Don’t say that we weren’t warned.

“Donald Trump is dangerous. But not in the way you think. Many people think he’s dangerous. They say, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want somebody like that with such a hot head with his fingers on the nuclear codes.’ And yeah, that’s certainly true. That’s not the real danger. The real danger is that ironically Donald Trump could destroy America’s chance to be great again.”

Something about all these warnings, while true, felt of another time, like they were happening during the Cold War, rather than tailored for an election about the culture wars. Still, a Fox News poll conducted a month before the election found that voters overwhelmingly trusted Clinton to do a better job making decisions about using nuclear weapons.But enough Americans looked past these warnings, just as they pushed past so many others, to hand Trump the election. After all, the nuclear question was theoretical and academic, right? No, it wasn’t.In fact, after the election, concern about Trump controlling our nuclear arsenal only congealed.

Plenty of PeoPle tried to warn us about this moment, but not enough Americans took heed. To them, this was sky-is-falling hyPerbole. The use of nuclear weaPons was a thing of history and Hollywood. Write A Comment But it is ever so clear that the threat is urgent and real and that the only thing standing between a nuclear strike and us is a set of short fingers that constantly tyPe out Twitter insults.If all this makes you uneasy, good. It should. Also, welcome to the club.