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in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

He welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, when he was a month short of his 20th birthday—not just because he was a republican, but also because by removing class barriers it opened up new prospects politically and personally. But when he found himself in revolutionary Paris five years later, 26-year-old general Napoleon faced an alarming world governed by two things he had never had much experience of: money and sex.

The lure of making money briefly eclipsed his military ambitions as he speculated on buying and selling the properties of émigré or guillotined nobles, and importing often-smuggled luxuries such as coffee, sugar and silk stockings. Although his dislike of what he called “men of business” never left him, neither did his determination never to be short of ready cash. When he came to power he always had with him a cassette of gold coins. He also saw money as the key to achieving the goals he set himself, creating new institutions and building public works.

While he was on the retreat from Moscow, a group of generals tried to seize power by announcing he had been killed in battle. The plot failed, but it revealed to Napoleon that his whole edifice of imperial glory had feet of clay. On hearing of his death, nobody reacted as they would have had he been a real monarch—by saying ‘the Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor’ and proclaiming his son’s accession to the throne.

As appalled as he was by Josephine’s promiscuity, Napoleon was entranced by her supposedly aristocratic background. He would be even more excited by that of his second wife, the Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. As she was a great-niece of the late Marie-Antoinette, he would refer to his ‘uncle’ king Louis XVI and reveled in the fact that his father-in-law was the Emperor of Austria.

He continued to build on this image so successfully that he could turn a less-than-glorious episode in Egypt into the stuff of legend and persuade many in France that he was the predestined savior of the nation. This enabled him to seize power and begin rebuilding France from the ruins of the Revolution.

While he was destroying the might of Austria, Russia and Prussia by his spectacular victories at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, he received reports from Paris that people were longing for an end to the fighting so they could get on with their lives. By then, his extraordinary luck, leading from triumph to triumph, had begun to make him believe his own propaganda, that he was the darling of destiny. Yet the aura of glory could not mask an underlying frailty.

His sexual insecurity and distrust of women only deepened his unwillingness or inability to engage with others, hampering his diplomatic relations, which he saw as showdowns in which he had to be seen to win. He could never see that a judicious concession might win him greater advantages; had he prolonged the peace of Amiens by allowing Britain to keep Malta in 1803, for example, he could have used the respite to reinforce his position, rebuild France’s economy and his navy.

He went on fighting a battle that was long lost, desperate for a resounding victory he believed might redeem what, for all the bluster, was his irredeemably low self-esteem. Ironically, it was only after he had lost his throne and was even denied the courtesy of being addressed as a monarch by his British jailers on the island of Saint Helena, that he managed to recover this and project an image of grandeur in defeat that still fascinates people today.

The bill — which would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be sent to mainland China to stand trial — has been withdrawn, but the protests have continued for more than seven months, centered around demands for voting rights and an independent inquiry into police conduct.

The months of unrest have sent the financial hub’s economy reeling, as shops have shuttered during clashes and tourists have stayed away. Hong Kong police gave approval for Sunday’s rally, but not for a march that organizers had also planned. The march didn’t happen, and the protest was curtailed by clashes after police ordered an end to the rally hours before the pre-approved finishing time.

Several young protesters were handcuffed outside the park, as officers made arrests and conducted searches into the evening. One man who refused to be searched retreated into a public restroom that was promptly surrounded by riot police.

The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, on Thursday condemned the attempt, calling it a “dangerous ploy” intended to “disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He accused fellow Republicans of making a political calculation to try to further their careers at the expense of the truth by tapping into Mr. Trump’s “populist base.”

As Mr. Biden racked up victories in November, Mr. Trump indulged in increasingly outlandish fictions, spreading disinformation about the election’s results and encouraging his followers to challenge the vote at every step. In recent weeks, as his legal defeats have stacked up, the president has become more vitriolic in his condemnations of Republicans who fail to support his false claims of having been the true victor in the election, and has lavished praise on those who parrot his accusations.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the election’s outcome.“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”

Nevertheless, more than a month after Mr. Biden’s victory, with increasing numbers in their party marching in lock step with Mr. Trump, some Republicans felt the need on Saturday to explain why they planned to vote to uphold the results of a democratic election.

The vice president, the statement continued, “welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6th.”

Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight, prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.

“A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,” they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.”

Vice President Mike Pence signaled his support as 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

The senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election will not change the outcome. But it guarantees that what would normally be a perfunctory session on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the results of the presidential election will instead become a partisan brawl, in which Republicans amplify specious claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed for weeks even as Mr. Trump has stoked them.

“We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.

But that thought is antithetical to the war Trump wants to wage in America between the suburbs and what he deems problematic “inner cities” and “Democrat-run cities” — code for where concentrations of Black people and other people of color live.

It threatens to strengthen efforts to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color who disproportionately vote for Democrats in the future.

“ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections.” As Jay Willis pointed out in The Washington Post, “Even after Trump’s presidency ends, that message will pave the way for G.O.P. politicians and judges to further one of their party’s and the conservative movement’s most important ongoing projects: restricting voting rights.” He continued: “Trump lost this election, but he can still help Republicans win in the future.”

Trump not only attempted to erase Black votes after they were cast, he attempted to suppress them before they were cast. This is nothing new among conservatives, but Trump has dragged the practice out of the back rooms and into the light of day once again, giving it a telegenic, digitally contagious persona.

As Eric Levitz pointed out in New York Magazine: “The G.O.P. is now a party that has no compunction about nullifying the voting rights of its opposition to retain power. And once a party has liberated itself from the shackles of respecting its detractors’ rights, much else becomes permissible.”

But we don’t talk enough about how for Black people and other racial minorities, this isn’t only about faith. For them, it’s about being able to participate in elections at all.

Republicans plan to challenge the counting of state Electoral College votes. This effort, too, is expected to fail. But it will provide yet another spectacle on a grand stage for the lie that Trump and his sycophantic courtiers have sown: that the political machine in liberal cities full of Blacks, hipsters, gays and gangs stole elections from the real Americans in the hinterlands.

What we are seeing unfold before our eyes is not about building trust in elections, it is anti-patriotic. It is not about ensuring that every legal vote is counted. It’s about attempting to legally limit whose ballots can be counted.

Trump is attempting to drag Jim Crow into the Twitter era.

the Wall Street Journal thinks this is the time to talk about the danger of the Democrats “changing rules at the last minute?” They cannot see—or refuse to see—what is in front of their faces. The president of the United States is attempting to subvert the democratic process. He is calling on his followers to swarm Washington, D.C., on January 6. For what conceivable purpose?

The editorial concluded this way: But the scramble to overturn the will of the voters tarnishes Mr. Trump’s legacy and undermines any designs he has on running in 2024. Republicans who humor him will be giving Democrats license to do the same in the future, and then it might matter.

No, it matters now. Never more than now. It isn’t about the precedent that this might set for some imagined Democratic abuse of the future. The abuse is here. The abuse of power is now. This is a constitutional crisis because one party has decided that it cares more for power than for the American system

Political leadership in Philadelphia has refused to fund non-police based mental health services and crisis response teams,

But with many departments across the country still lacking mental health response teams and training, police are often the only resource for people to call in difficult situations. For this to change, city councils and mayors need to get on board and overhaul the notion that police are the be-all and end-all to our problems, he says.

No matter that weighted exit polling data found that Donald Trump increased his margins among minorities, drawing the support of 32 percent of Hispanics and double-digits among black voters, and Democrats improved their showing among whites.

Say goodbye to the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, “debt-free” college, single-payer health care, the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s border enforcement agencies, or half a dozen other big ideas that loomed ominously over American heads for the better part of two years.

because the consequences of Democratic weakness at the polls on Tuesday fell disproportionately on the party’s moderates in purple districts, there will be fewer voices around in 2021 to push back against what is essentially a tantalizing conspiracy theory.

Progressives can say goodbye to their already tenuous hopes for dramatic reforms to the institutions that govern American political life. There will be no filibuster nuking, no punitive expansion of the federal judiciary, no sweeping institutional reforms to “restructure things to fit our vision.”

where is the good news in all this, you ask? These voices have once again been relegated to the fringes of their respective parties. It’s the quisling moderates and dealmakers they so hate who will soon find themselves in the driver’s seat.

It is unlikely that we will see much productivity under divided government, but that is not the same thing as dysfunctional government—precisely the opposite,

If we’re entering into a period defined by equilibrium in which the federal government is all but paralyzed in the absence of some bipartisan consensus, that would at least be predictable. And predictability has been in short supply these last four years.

Much to the chagrin of the American system’s would-be demolishers, no one assuming the reins of power in Washington seems to have much interest in blowing anything up.

“Conventional mortgages have survived many financial crises, but they may not survive the climate crisis,” said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at Tulane University. “This trend also reflects a systematic financial risk for banks and the U.S. taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill.”

The question that matters, according to researchers, isn’t whether the effects of climate change will start to ripple through the housing market. Rather, it’s how fast those effects will occur and what they will look like.

It’s not only along the nation’s rivers and coasts where climate-induced risk has started to push down home prices. In parts of the West, the growing danger of wildfires is already making it harder for homeowners to get insurance.

as the world warms, that long-term nature of conventional mortgages might not be as desirable as it once was, as rising seas and worsening storms threaten to make some land uninhabitable. A retreat from the 30-year mortgage could also put homeownership out of reach for more Americans.

It could also be one of the most economically significant. During the 2008 financial crisis, a decline in home values helped cripple the financial system and pushed almost 9 million Americans out of work.

In 2016, Freddie Mac’s chief economist at the time, Sean Becketti, warned that losses from flooding both inland and along the coasts are “likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and the Great Recession.”

If climate change makes coastal homes uninsurable, Dr. Becketti wrote, their value could fall to nothing, and unlike the 2008 financial crisis, “homeowners will have no expectation that the values of their homes will ever recover.”

In 30 years from now, if global-warming emissions follow their current trajectory, almost half a million existing homes will be on land that floods at least once a year,

Those homes are valued at $241 billion.

new research shows banks rapidly shifting mortgages with flood risk off their books and over to organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored entities whose debts are backed by taxpayers

the lenders selling off coastal mortgages the fastest are smaller local banks, which are more likely than large national banks to know which neighborhoods face the greatest climate risk.

In 2009, local banks sold off 43 percent of their mortgages in vulnerable zones, Dr. Keenan and Mr. Bradt found, about the same share as other areas. But by 2017, the share had jumped by one-third, to 57 percent, despite staying flat in less vulnerable neighborhoods.

Dr. Keenan found banks protecting themselves in other ways, such as lending less money to home buyers in vulnerable areas, relative to the value of the homes.

a growing share of mortgages had required down payments between 21 percent and 40 percent — what Dr. Keenan called nonconventional loans.

flood insurance isn’t likely to address the problem, Dr. Keenan said, because it doesn’t protect against the risk of a house losing value and ultimately becoming unsellable.

More homeowners are also taking out a type of mortgage that is less financially painful for a borrower to walk away from if a home becomes uninhabitable because of rising seas. These are known as interest-only mortgages — the monthly payment covers only the interest on the loan, and doesn’t reduce the principal owed.

It’s a loan you can never pay off with the regular monthly payments. However, it also means buyers aren’t sinking any more of their own money into the property beyond a down payment. That’s an advantage if you think the property may become unlivable.

he share of homes with fixed-rate, 30-year mortgages has declined sharply — to less than 80 percent, as of 2016 — in areas most exposed to storm surge

More than 10 percent of homeowners in those areas had interest-only loans in 2016, compared with just 2.3 percent in other ZIP Codes.

“What happens when the water starts lapping at these properties, and they get abandoned?” she said.

As for Ned Hallowell, he was shot three times charging with the left wing of the martyred 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, just behind his doomed friend Robert Gould Shaw. With Shaw’s body lying in a sandy ditch with his troops, Ned Hallowell assumed command of the regiment. Assigned the rear guard during a perilous retreat in a battle called Olustee, he and his men spent 20,000 cartridges checking the Confederates and then countermarched to save a train of intermingled black and white wounded soldiers that had broken down. When they couldn’t fix the motor, they attached ropes to the engine cars and manually hauled that bloody train to safety, with Confederate gunfire guttering at their backs.

Then there was that Princeton academic and assistant football coach named Woodrow Wilson, who rewrote the Civil War in volumes of purported American history so racist that they enraged Hallowell because they so “abounded with apologies for slavery.”

The vague phrase “systemic racism” is not just perpetuated by men with badges. It’s also propagated by our false victory narratives. There have been few more powerful cultural narrators than the NFL and the NCAA, with their close association with military triumphalism. They have been terrible teachers of historical truth, lousy with misplaced definitions of valor

Pen Hallowell was alive to hear Harvard football coach W. Cameron Forbes declare in 1900 that American football was “the expression of strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of the dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hope of permanence.”

every well-meaning but unread white athlete, coach, owner, athletic director and sportswriter needs to understand that Pen Hallowell, to whom black lives really did matter, lost his war. And football had no small part in that.

Hallowell tried to fight back in the post-war battle of values. He wrote essays and speeches devoted to the bravery of black soldiers and those conscientious outliers, abolitionists. On Memorial Day in 1896, he gave a remembrance address at Harvard. Sickened by romantic war myths in which the treachery and slave-driving of the Confederacy were painted over as cavalier spirit, Hallowell said, “To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war.”

Yet isn’t that what we have done? We have degraded that war — to the point that we hardly know what real honor is anymore, much less how to coach it on our playing fields.

Degraded it to the point that Pen Hallowell has faded to a relative obscurity, except among war buffs and historians, while the University of Mississippi kept Colonel Reb as a mascot until 2003. Even now frat boys will dress in the costumes of traitors to the flag at cotillions, without the first blush of hot shame

If we want football to be something worth preserving, we should demand that it celebrates the right qualities — and people.

most important is what Hallowell has to teach about courage and protest. “The courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order,” Hallowell wrote. He saw a “higher and rarer courage” in the “long suffering and patient endurance” of the soldiers so invested in their equal pay protest that they fought for 18 months without accepting a cent until they won fair treatment.

Hallowell and his brother are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., with headstones so small they seem like chips compared with Confederate monuments. When Hallowell finally died in 1914, his close friend and compatriot Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called him “the most generously gallant spirit, and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew.” If there was a peerless man who deserves to be on a height, it’s Pen Hallowell. Yet look what we have done to him. Look what we have done to all of us.

2. This Is Us

When we talk about accountability, we’re talking about our president, Donald Trump. That’s proper. He is the man who made the government’s decisions on how to handle the pandemic. The death toll belongs to him.

as always, it’s easy to mistake the symptom for the disease.

After 9/11, America rallied together under a single banner. Republicans and Democrats linked arms. George W. Bush’s approval rating was in the 90s. Both left and right moved out of their comfort zones: Liberals became more hawkish; conservatives began paying attention to the idea of multiculturalism. These shifts weren’t permanent, but they showed that both sides saw their blind spots and knew they had to correct for them.

these moves—call them gestures, if you’re cynical—were born of the realization that what had happened to America was important. That 9/11 mattered. And that a serious country takes serious events seriously.

Garrett Graff has a good piece in the Atlantic about how our nation’s capacity for grief today is different than it was 19 years ago and he mostly blames the pandemic itself and the ways in which it has warped our rituals

Then there’s Donald Trump. He is not just to blame for the government’s response to the coronavirus, but for trying to incite half the country into believing that the coronavirus is a hoax and that the Americans taking the virus seriously are the enemy.

But I don’t blame Trump for all of the division. Because his people—like the guy in that video—aren’t NPC’s. They have minds of their own. They chose to follow his lead. In the same way that some large percentage of Americans wanted Donald Trump, there’s a large percentage who wanted not to rally around each other, but to turn on each other. To retreat into fantasy land. To choose to be unserious.

The worst thing about this anniversary is that, for the first time in 19 years, we have been confronted with incontrovertible evidence that we are a different people than we were on 9/11. A much—much—worse people.

From 2008 to 2012, she served as ambassador to Liberia, before moving on to become the director general of the Foreign Service for about a year.

“If you look at what I have done prior to that,” she said, “there is no question that I am not at all naïve about what the Chinese are doing and I have called them out on a regular basis,” which included her sharp criticism of China at other points in the hearing.

an optimistic speech she had given in October 2019 on Africa’s relationship with both China and the United States.

The speech conspicuously lacked criticism of China’s human-rights record or pattern of predatory-lending practices in developing countries desperate for investment.

Despite the warm response Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s nomination received from diplomats and former State Department officials, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill showed some concern.

Aside from China, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield will have to more broadly strengthen America’s presence at the United Nations, which was scaled back as the Trump administration pursued an “America First” style of diplomacy that devalued multilateral institutions.

And so, for the sake of flag and faith, millions of decent conservative Americans countenanced scandals, wrongs, disloyalty, and crime.

The Trump years demonstrated the very great extent to which presidential cooperation with the law is voluntary, especially if he retains a loyal attorney general, and a sufficient blocking vote in Congress.

It’s illegal for federal employees to overspend on travel to benefit themselves or their colleagues. In 2012, a senior executive at the General Services Administration was sentenced to three months in prison, three months under house arrest, and three years’ parole for taking personal side jaunts and overspending on lavish retreats for his staff.

Yet when Vice President Pence visited Ireland in 2019, he wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by staying not in Dublin, the site of his meetings, but at Trump’s golf course 180 miles away, on the opposite coast of the island.

It is illegal for government employees to use their positions to engage in certain political activities. They are especially forbidden to engage directly in election campaigns while on the government payroll

Trump disregarded the recommendation. Conway mocked the finding to reporters. As one journalist read the recommendation to her, she replied: “Blah, blah, blah. If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

In other democracies, the equivalents of the AAG for the criminal division are career civil servants

in those other countries, the brute political pressure that Trump applied via Attorney General William Barr on the Department of Justice is much less likely to have an effect.

At one point in 2019, Trump simultaneously refused all cooperation with 20 distinct congressional investigations—testing whether there was much Congress could do about it. There proved to be surprisingly little. Congress’s contempt powers lag far behind those of courts

Even outright lying to Congress can prove exceptionally difficult to punish. “Almost no one is prosecuted for lying to Congress,”

“In fact, only six people have been convicted of perjury or related charges in relation to Congress in the last sixty years.”

Some wonder: Why doesn’t Congress act? But there is no “Congress.” There are only the two parties in Congress. The members of the two parties cannot even agree on methods of evidence or standards of behavior.

Republican Representative Ted Yoho from Florida spoke for troublingly many members of his caucus when he said of a fellow member of Congress that he “works for the president; he answers to the president.”

Congress as an institution cannot function on this kind of partisan mentality. There can be no meaningful oversight of the executive branch if the only standards are “Yay, team!” and “Boo, team!

The system that protects all of us has failed because the protectors of that system have failed to protect it for us.

Democracy does not fly on autopilot. If the people responsible for the institutions of democracy will not do the job, the job will not be done. While the job goes undone, the United States and the world careen toward conflict and crisis.

he and other researchers estimated that population heterogeneity shaves the coronavirus herd immunity rate to 43 percent. Others say it might be lower.

Gabriela Gomes, a mathematician at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, has scrutinized European cities overwhelmed by the disease. In a paper she wrote with nine other researchers, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, she arrived at a striking conclusion: Herd immunity could be lower than 20 percent.

many researchers have been reluctant to say whether they believe the worst in some of the hardest-hit cities has already passed. No one knows how long immunity lasts. The virus could mutate.

“I would love that as well. But the reality is that it’s wishful thinking. It’s confirmation bias. We can’t pick evidence we hope is true. We have to be very careful about this because it could blow up in your face very quickly.”

Officials weren’t willing to impose a lockdown. In impoverished Manaus, where many already live on the brink, the mayor said it would lead to social chaos and violence. So Pinheiro Alves spent his off hours trying to jury-rig ventilators.

“There isn’t a concrete explanation,” said Henrique dos Santos Pereira, a scientist at the Federal University of Amazonas. Maybe there’s an unseen biological immunity in the population. Or the city’s relative youth staved off the worst.

“The problem is that we don’t know how many people are susceptible,” dos Santos Pereira said. “In the beginning, we were thinking it was everywhere, but it doesn’t seem like the whole world is susceptible … It is causing us to reconsider the theory of herd immunity.”

Virgílio, the mayor, hopes the scientists are right. The medical system in Manaus has failed once. If a second wave does come, he has little doubt what would happen.“Our capacities would be overwhelmed.”

Since its founding in 2003, 4chan has attracted a unique population of deeply cynical men, once all young, but now aged from their 40s down to their teens, who generally use the board to express their angst through dark humor. People who are unhappy with the circumstances of their life tend to retreat there. The unhappier they are, the longer they stay and the more they post.

The memes about a new civil war spread from /k/ to various groups on Facebook and Reddit, all with names that evoked the terms boogaloo, igloo, or luau. Enthusiasts also congregated in group chats using services such as Discord.

The message board /k/’s culture overlapped heavily with 4chan’s virulently racist politics discussion board /pol/. However, by 2017, the movement that had developed there—the alt-right—had largely imploded, after the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

By 2018, as talk of fascism declined on /pol/, the more libertarian and less overtly racist culture of 4chan’s /k/ and the boogaloo movement began to fill the empty niche.

The co-option of Hawaiian imagery and igloos was inherently cynical and meaningless. There was no connection to the group’s ideology outside of the linguistic resemblance of the word boogaloo to igloo and luau. But this co-option fit the ethos of online spaces perfectly, with a niche group celebrating its anti-government, libertarian views by draping them in colorful jokes and nonsense that could be remixed and reinterpreted endlessly.

The politics of the boogaloo boys are deeply contradictory and varied but can be roughly summed up by a few agreed-upon ideas. They are libertarian, in favor of gun rights, and opposed to government police forces. Many users say they are active-duty service members or military veterans.

As with the alt-right, many boogaloo posts are about men in crisis, humiliated or debased. Intermingled with memes about revolution are nostalgic images and video clips, glitched out to look like old VHS tapes, of what they imagine was the ideal existence: being the patriarch of a middle-class American nuclear family sometime between the 1950s and the 1990s.

The catalyst was similar to what mobilized so many young people on the left: the notion that the government enriched a privileged few at the expense of the people. In this, the boogaloo boys shared the anti-corporatist left’s belief that the government had betrayed public trust by maintaining a growing police force to perpetuate an unjust status quo.

I’m not surprised by the odd mixture of ideologies that the boogaloo movement encompasses. One of my first sources was a chan-going Black man in his 30s, an accelerationist Communist who was friends with a variety of radicals, including many in the alt-right. What these men shared was years of marginalization and a hatred of the present state of society.

As decades of rising inequality produced successive generations who felt they were consigned to the fringes, 4chan became an outlet to express rolling waves of escapist memes and radical anger. Among the left, this uptick in radicals and the corresponding increase in funding for law-enforcement agencies have generated further support for protests aimed at defunding the police and diverting the funds to social programs

But 4chan occupies a unique place on the social web, distinct from more mainstream sites. If 4chan’s history is any indication, it’s extremely likely that some portion of these social-media users and posters on /k/ are federal agents. Having interviewed many young men who ran chan-style sites, I know that state security agencies knock on their doors early and often and ask for comprehensive records.

before most people, including myself, got wind of the boogaloo movement, Rutgers University had generated a “contagion and ideology report” for law-enforcement agencies in February that detailed the group’s online network. Its conclusion: The boogaloo boys are terrorists. Its recommendations: more law enforcement, more surveillance.

Large crowds gathered in communities across the country, even as experts warned people to continue to avoid big gatherings amid the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 500 Minnesota National Guard personnel mobilized to several locations in the Minneapolis area, including banks, grocery stores and pharmacies.

"If you are near the building, for your safety, PLEASE RETREAT in the event the building explodes," a tweet on the city's account said.

Floyd was arrested after he allegedly used a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. Surveillance video from outside a Minneapolis restaurant appears to contradict police claims that he resisted arrest.

The four officers involved in the arrest have been fired but not charged, angering protesters. They gathered in several other cities -- New York, Denver, Phoenix, Memphis and Columbus, Ohio -- to demand their prosecution.

"It's heartbreaking for everybody I know ... everybody I know looks at that video and feels like crying or throwing up, and it's disgusting, it's unacceptable," Mayor Melvin Carter said.

"You can be angry. You can be outraged. I certainly am and I join you in those feelings and demands of #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd," he tweeted. "March for justice and to see it served, but please march in peace."

"We need to wade through all of that evidence and come to a meaningful decision and we are doing that to the best of our ability," Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman said.

"We are going to investigate it as expeditiously, as thoroughly as justice demands," he added. "That video is graphic, horrific and terrible ... I am pleading with individuals to remain calm and let us conduct this investigation."

All four officers involved in the death have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Freeman said.

The officer seen with his knee on Floyd's neck had 18 prior complaints filed against him with the Minneapolis Police Department's Internal Affairs. It's unclear what the internal affairs complaints against Derek Chauvin were for. Officials did not provide additional details.

in the minds of Trump’s supporters lingers the belief that a Biden presidency would usher in a reign of terror. Many of them simply have to believe that. Justifying their fealty to a man who is so obviously a moral wreck requires them to turn Joe Biden and the Democratic Party into an existential threat

As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”

“Motivation conditions cognition,”

Trump is given carte blanche by his supporters because they perceive him as their protector, transforming his ruthlessness from a vice into a virtue.

Many shift the topic immediately back to Democrats, because offering a vigorous moral defense of Donald Trump isn’t an easy task. It’s like asking people to stare directly into the sun; they might do it for an instant, but then they look away

But if you do succeed in keeping the topic on Trump, they often twist themselves into knots in order to defend him, and in some cases they simply deny reality.

That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.

Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.

They are similarly unable to admit they are defending an ethic that is at odds with what they have long championed. They have accepted, excused, and applauded Trump’s behavior and tactics, allowing his ends to justify his means. In important respects, this is antithetical to a virtue ethic.

As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”

if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.

A different plague strain enters Europe through Genoa, brought by another Caffan ship that docks there. The Genoans attack the ship and drive it away, but they are still infected. Italy faces this second strain while already battling the previous one.

Y. pestis also heads east from Sicily into the Persian Empire and through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, and south to Egypt, as well as Cyprus, which is also hit with destruction from an earthquake and deadly tidal wave at the same time.

The plague also moves through Austria and Switzerland, where a fury of anti-Semitic massacres follow it along the Rhine after a rumor spreads that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning wells

The plague awakes an anti-Semitic rage around Europe, causing repeated massacres of Jewish communities, with the first one taking place in Provence, where 40 Jews were murdered.

The plague enters England through the port of Melcombe Regis, in Dorset. As it spreads through the town, some escape by fleeing inland, inadvertently spreading it further.

A group of religious zealots known as the Flagellants first begin to appear in Germany. These groups of anywhere from 50 to 500 hooded and half-naked men march, sing and thrash themselves with lashes until swollen and bloody. Originally the practice of 11th-century Italian monks during an epidemic, they spread out through Europe. Also known for their violent anti-Semitism,

the plague kills 60 percent of the Venetian population.

An English ship brings the Black Death to Norway when it runs aground in Bergen

While waiting on the border to begin the attack, troops became infected, with 5,000 dying. Choosing to retreat, the soldiers bring the disease back to their families and a third of Scotland perishes.

The plague’s spread significantly begins to peter out, possibly thanks to quarantine efforts, after causing the deaths of anywhere between 25 to 50 million people, and leading to the massacres of 210 Jewish communities. All total, Europe has lost about 50 percent of its population.

With the Black Death considered safely behind them, the people of Europe face a changed society

It becomes easier to get work for better wages and the average standard of living rises.

often direct conflict of interest with his job as presiden

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

“There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.

Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

The leak of Mr. Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar: Henceforth, presidents, and presidential candidates, would make their tax returns available for the American people to see.

that he might release the returns if President Barack Obama released his birth certificate.

He often claims that he cannot do so while unde

r audit — an argument refuted by his own I.R.S. commissioner.

Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years. That provision has been the background music to Mr. Trump’s life.

“They say, ‘Trump is getting rich off our nation,’” he said at a rally in Minneapolis last October. “I lose billions being president, and I don’t care. It’s nice to be rich, I guess, but I lose billions.”

“consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.

Hair stylists, table linens, property taxes on a family estate — all have been deducted as business expenses.

he ethical quandaries created by Mr. Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.

how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president.

he president’s conflicts have been most evident with Turkey, where the business community and the authoritarian government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have not hesitated to leverage various Trump enterprises to their advantage.

Some of the largest payments from business groups for events or conferences at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties have come since Mr. Trump became president, the tax records show.

Beyond one-time payments for events or memberships, large corporations also pay rent for space in the few commercial buildings Mr. Trump actually owns.

his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.

each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.