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The image of Latinos breeding makes them not quite human, parasites among a host people, an enemy within given sanctuary when they should be cast out. The aliens among us are not like us, but, unfairly protected, they breed and bring danger.

The notion later became a staple of Nazi propaganda. From 1944 : “Jewry is the product of the inbreeding of asocial, criminal, sick, degenerate, and rejected elements. . . . [It] leads a rootless, parasitic life at the expense of the host peoples. Its current homeland is largely the criminal neighborhoods of the great cities of the world.”

let’s look at the modern custom in this country of likening immigrants and minorities to breeding animals.

rump appointee Carl Higbie resigned after the publishing of his earlier complaints that black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.”

ep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) has spoken of immigration policy as “allowing any kind of vagrant, or animal . . . to come in.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a Trump ally, described the screening of immigrants: “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog.”

Dan Stein, the president of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform, famously said immigrants are conducting “competitive breeding” to dilute the white majority.

White nationalist Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute frets about white “displacement by the subject race through differential fertility rates and interracial breeding.”

Dive into the fever swamps of the Internet and social media and you will find the conspiracy theory that minorities’ higher birthrates are designed to bring about “white genocide” in America: “We can’t let the Muslims and Mexicans outbreed us . . . Their goal is to come here and breed whites out of existence . . . What they will do is breed like rats and displace white people and white culture. . . . They’re outbreeding us and outvoting us.”

onaway said he hopes to conclude the House Intelligence Committee probe quickly, talk that angers Democrats who believe Republicans are trying to rush the panel’s investigation to a premature conclusion. "The sooner I can get this thing done, the better," he said. "The American people deserve an answer to these questions."

Democrats were also furious earlier this month when Grassley, joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), suggested the FBI consider criminal charges against the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, Christopher Steele, whom they said may have lied to federal officials. Feinstein had been especially angry about the move, and many observers believed her decision to release Simpson’s transcript was an act of payback that suggested a downward spiral for the committee’s leading members. Another Democrat on the intelligence panel, Ron Wyden, offered a more direct warning Thursday as he pushed back against "this idea that gets bandied about" that the committee's Russia investigation should wind down by any certain date.

The Oregon Democrat insisted that Trump’s son-in-law and eldest son should make return appearances before the Senate Intelligence Committee to answer what he called unresolved questions about the Trump organization's finances. “For me, I’m going to push back with everything I have if somebody tries to say this is over without Jared Kushner or Donald Trump Jr. coming to the committee to answer questions,” Wyden said.

while casting aspersions on his uncle’s illegitimate birth, often to his face, Carlos must at times have envied Don Juan’s bastard lineage and sound health

Don Juan of Austria

Another promising candidate was the widowed Mary Stuart, who escaped only to marry the despicable Darnley

Due to the possibility of armed insurrection in the north, Philip decided to visit his rebellious provinces in person

He now became openly vindictive, unstable and sullen, given to insults and unprovoked attacks on imaginary enemies

The threat of a divided royal house, with a maleficent Carlos rallying rebel support to his cause, was totally unacceptable to Philip

his father obviously had every intention of supplanting his rancorous heir-apparent should God give him another son

he intended to leave for Germany and the Netherlands, with or without his father’s permission

he stumbled down a decrepit flight of stairs in the dark, fracturing his skull

The strained relationship between Philip and his only son continued to deteriorate, but despite disturbing signs of the young man’s mental instability, the King remained phlegmatic

The King’s extended absences gave Carlos considerable latitude to prepare his escape

His inability to hold his tongue proved to be Philip’s salvation though at dreadful cost

Carlos rashly confided to Don Juan of Austria that he intended to leave Spain within the next few days. After some initial hesitation, Don Juan rode out to the Escorial on Christmas Day and informed Philip of the Prince’s decision

Meanwhile, Philip had returned to Madrid and was kept fully informed of his son’s designs; incredibly, he still hesitated to act

King Philip and five members of the Council of State made their way to the Prince’s bedchamber. The ingenious system of bolts and locks, which could be operated from his bed, had secretly been dismantled; and the startled Carlos was quickly disarmed. He guiltily assumed they had come to assassinate him, especially when his father seized a document listing the Prince’s enemies, with the King’s name at the head

The King was soon inured to suffering and private tragedies, and came to regard the unfounded attacks of his enemies as part of the burden he had been called upon to bear

Carlos’ mental equilibrium had always been precarious; and now he began to experience hallucinations. No visitors were allowed, and the Prince was kept under close surveillance, though the conditions of his detention were not too onerous

His fragile health was unable to withstand such sustained abuse, and an early death soon became inevitable. Philip resigned himself to his loss, and found spiritual comfort in blessing his dying

The death of the successor to the throne under such mysterious circumstances naturally gave rise to the wildest conjecture

Reasons of state were hinted at, which were assumed to involve a far-flung conspiracy of the son against his obdurate father

Ferdinand’s upbringing was similar to that of the ill-fated Carlos. Born on October 14th, 1784 at the Escorial, the young prince received scant affection from his parents, Charles IV and Maria Luisa, who finally ascended the throne in 1788 after a frustrating wait of twenty-three years

his suspicious nature and resentment towards his parents being evident from an early age

did not deter the calculating priest from further poisoning his charge’s distrustful mind. Ferdinand’s hatred was especially directed against his mother, Queen Maria Luisa

Ferdinand’s fears were not imaginary. In 1795, at the conclusion of an unsuccessful war against revolutionary France, Godoy - the monarchs’ ‘querido Manuel’ - had incredibly been granted the vainglorious title of ‘Prince of the Peace’

Ferdinand justifiably suspected that some machination on the part of his mother and Godoy might prevent his succession to the throne. By late 1807 his situation had become desperate

If the men who surround (Charles IV) here would let him know the character of Your Majesty as I know it, with what desire would not my father seek to tighten the bonds which should unite our two nations

Having already removed Charles’ brother from the throne of Naples, the French Emperor watched the unseemly squabbling among the Spanish Bourbons with a calculating eye to the future

unilateral commitment to refuse to marry ‘whoever she may be, without the consent of Your Majesty from whom alone I await the selection of my bride

Ferdinand’s enthusiasm at being related to the French Emperor was such that Beauharnais suggested that the Prince approach Napoleon directly in writing. Not only is it incredible that the heir-apparent would dare to discuss marriage plans with a foreign head of state; but equally so is the abject tone of the letter

The state in which I have found myself for some time, and which could not be hidden from the great penetration of Your Majesty

But full of hope in finding in Your Majesty’s magnanimity the most powerful protection

persistent rumours that he might appoint himself Regent on the King’s death, spurred the Prince of Asturias to frantic measures

august

The subsequent crisis, though outwardly similar to the events of 1568, was wider in scope and more tragic in its consequences. King Philip, criticized by many for his dispassionate attitude, never forfeited the esteem or the sympathy of the nation. In 1807 the position was the exact reverse; Charles IV at best was pitied as a dupe, while Maria Luisa and her paramour were held responsible for reducing Spain to the role of Napoleon’s subservient ally

Did Napoleon instigate the scheme to sow further dissension within the Spanish royal family, or did Beauharnais initiate it on his own account

Napoleon was delighted to receive Ferdinand’s letter and immediately grasped its mischief-making potential

Charles IV discovered his son’s treasonous correspondence

Godoy whose spies were everywhere

The ensuing scenes are reminiscent of those of 1568. The King angrily entered his son’s room, and was soon in possession not only of the damaging correspondence - apparently the Prince’s terrified gaze betrayed its hiding place - but also of the cipher needed to transcribe the coded letters

The Queen was distraught that Godoy was ill with a fever in Madrid at such a critical moment

The following day Ferdinand was formally placed under arrest with a guard of twenty-four elite soldiers

warning him of Godoy’s boundless ambitions and greed, enumerating his supposed crimes, his abuse of power and the royal confidence, his corruption and immorality

The most damning assertion was that Godoy had besmirched the King’s name and delivered Spain to her enemies

patriots anxious to ensure the orderly succession to the throne in the event of the King’s death

who imagined they had come to deliver their beloved prince from the pernicious influence of the royal favourite

Godoy pointed out to the King that a family reconciliation was imperative to prevent Napoleon from dividing the Spanish royal family. The King stubbornly refused to pardon his son, but finally agreed to let Godoy act as intermediary

Godoy saw his opportunity, and easily prevailed upon the terrified Prince to pen contrite letters to his parents, fully admitting his guilt

The King, moved by paternal compassion, granted his son a royal pardon, but insisted nevertheless that the other ‘conspirators’ be brought to trial and a full enquiry be convened

As Godoy had foreseen, Ferdinand’s immense popularity throughout the nation and the patriotic motives of the accused could only work to the detriment of the Santa Trinidad, as the reigning monarchs and the favourite were caustically referred to by the common people

On January 25th, 1808, to the acclaim of the public and the barely contained fury of the royal couple, the defendants were declared innocent

From the outset Godoy had been opposed to the trial; but this was one of the rare occasions on which both monarchs disregarded his counsel. To compound the initial error

Ferdinand’s defence, based on his right of legitimate succession to the throne, is persuasive as offered by Escoiquiz and the others at their trial. But whatever the provocation and dangers -real or imagined-one cannot forgive Ferdinand’s clandestine appeal to the French Emperor at such a critical moment, when Spain was threatened from outside

Being a King, you know how sacred are the rights of the throne; any approach of an heir apparent to a foreign sovereign is criminal

Napoleon assumed that the conduct and moral fibre of the Spanish royal family was representative of the entire nation

South Africa has been hit by an outbreak of African swine fever, a highly contagious disease that causes fatal haemorrhages in pigs, the Ministry of Agriculture has said.

Leading rights group Amnesty International has called on the Ethiopian government to disband a police unit which is accused of carrying out human rights abuses in the Somali and Oromia regions of the country.

About 40 civil servants and 14 private sector individuals were charged on Monday over the alleged theft of $78m (£59m) from the youth agency.

Lenin and his comrades were European intellectuals who stumbled into power after “years of sitting in isolation and making up schemes for Communist revolution.”

Once they captured a state, however, they were determined to keep it, and a regime founded by chance and based on a lie soon began to believe in its own infallibility. Socialism and communism were just words; the power and survival of the Soviet Communist Party were paramount. No one life was of any particular importance.

this scene captures something about the Soviet regime both at its most mundane and at its most dangerous. Everyone was accountable to everyone else. Any show of public defiance, or even a misplaced comment, could carry severe consequences

at a moment of great peril to millions of Soviet citizens and millions more people around the world, no one was accountable. Every bureaucrat and manager simply repeated the mantra of the gray, authoritarian system that produced them: I had my job. I did my job. I fulfilled my tasks. I did nothing wrong.

This state, run by delusional old men chasing, imprisoning, and shooting millions of their fellow citizens in a “circle of accountability,” controlled thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the United States and its allies. We all lived under the constant threat that the commitment of a group of paranoids to ideas first bruited about in the coffeehouses of Victorian Europe would lead to global extermination.

We should also be grateful for our narrow escape not only from the burning reactors in the marshes of Pripyat, but from a state led by a cabal of dangerous men who, for the better part of a century, hijacked the fate of billions of human beings.

Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.

t says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”

The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.

report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue

Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change

The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb

the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”

He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”

That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”

Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.

Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.

“new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”

the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy. Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated

oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent.

more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030

Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels

Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects

Despite its French origins, the ISD’s analysis has revealed that the theory is becoming more prevalent internationally, with English-speaking countries now accounting for 33% of online discussion.

She said that of the 10 most influential Twitter accounts propagating the ideology, eight were French. The other two were Trump’s account and the extreme-right site Defend Europa.

The study reveals that alternative social media platforms, image boards, fringe forums and encrypted chat channels are instrumental in diffusing influential ideologies that propagate hatred and violence. Far-right propagandists primarily use mainstream platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as avenues to disseminate material to audiences, while fringe platforms remain safe havens for the initiated to radicalise further.

The new media ecosystem has been used, for instance, to promote the fear of a “white genocide”, a topic that is active across unregulated image-board threads on 8chan and 4chan, censorship-free discussion platforms such as Voat, ultra-libertarian social-media sites such as Gab and Minds, and closed-chat channels

Defined as a form of ethnic cleansing through the forced deportation of minority communities, the concept of “remigration” has been a particularly fevered subject. Since 2014, the volume of tweets featuring the word has surged, rising from 66,000 in 2014 to 150,000 in 2018.

Jacob Davey, co-author of the report at ISD, said: “Social media platforms are built to promote clickbait content to get more users liking, sharing and commenting. This research shows how the extreme right is exploiting this to boost hateful content in the form of memes, distorted statistics and pseudo-scientific studies.

“The far right is able to take ownership of the ‘grey zone’ around contentious issues like migration because politicians and society are less willing to take on the role of thought leaders in these areas for fear of public outcry and outrage,” said Ebner.

In the Netherlands, 400 more people died in the next-to-last week of July than normally would have during a typical summer week, the country’s statistics agency said Friday

On the other side of the planet, a heat wave in Japan stretched from July 29 to Aug. 4 and killed at least 57 people, while more than 18,000 others were taken to hospitals, with 100 in serious condition

NHK reported that 45 people in Tokyo had died in a week because of the heat.

A 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that extreme heat events “are the most prominent cause of weather-related human mortality in the U.S., responsible for more deaths annually than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.”

Climate change would cause illnesses such as asthma and hay fever to become more severe, while wildfires and pollution also posed a risk to respiratory health. Rising temperatures would alter the geographic distribution of disease-carrying insects and pests, endangering new populations.

“Climate change is a public health crisis,” Vijay Limaye told The Post. “The science is really strong in telling us that with climate change accelerating, we expect heat waves to be more frequent, more intense and longer.”

“As a nation and as a globe, we are not prepared to confront an ever-mounting heat risk in terms of our health,” he said. For example, while air conditioning was known to save lives, Limaye warned that increased reliance on the technology could have a harmful long-term effect if the energy used for cooling continued to come from fossil fuels.

Yes, billions of dinosaur bodies died and fell to the Earth here in this span, and trillions more dinosaur footsteps pressed into the Earth, but hardly a trace remains today. A cryptic smattering of lakeside footprints represents their entire contribution to the Triassic period. A few bones and footsteps miraculously preserved in New England and Nova Scotia are all that remains from the entire 27-million-year Early Jurassic epoch. No trace of dinosaurs remains whatsoever from the 18-million-year Late Jurassic. A handful of bones from one layer in Maryland represents the entire 45-million-year Early Cretaceous; the Late Cretaceous gives up a Hadrosaurus in New Jersey, and part of a tyrannosaur in Alabama, but mostly comprises unimpressive fragments of bone and teeth that cover the remaining 34 million years of the Earth’s most storied age, until doomsday

So that’s what 180 million years of complete dominance buys you in the fossil record. What, then, will a few decades of industrial civilization get us? This is the central question of the Anthropocene—an epoch that supposedly started, not tens of millions of years ago, but perhaps during the Truman administration

as the example of the dinosaurs shows, the chance that any city-swallowing delta deposit from a window of time only a few centuries wide would be lucky enough to be not only buried and preserved for safekeeping, but then subsequently not destroyed—in the ravenous maw of a subduction zone, or sinking too close to the cleansing metamorphic forge of Earth’s mantle, or mutilated in some m

there exists a better word in geology than epoch to describe our moment in the sun thus far: event. Indeed, there have been many similarly disruptive, rapid, and unusual episodes scattered throughout Earth history—wild climate fluctuations, dramatic sea-level rises and falls, global ocean-chemistry disasters, and biodiversity catastrophes

we’re very likely to return to our regularly scheduled programming and dive back into a punishing Ice Age in the next half-million years. This means that sea level—after shooting up in the coming millennia by our own hand, and potentially burying coastal settlements in sediment (good for fossilization)—will eventually fall hundreds of feet below where it is today, and subject the shallow continental shelves, along with our once submerged cities and magnificent seams of garbage, to the cold winds of erosion (bad for fossilization), where they’ll be mostly reduced to nothing

What else of us could be sampled from this sliver of deep-sea-muck-turned-rock—these Anthropocene clays and shale layers? Pass it through a mass spectrometer and you would see, encoded in its elements, the story of the entire planet in this strange interval, the Great Derangement of the Earth’s systems by civilization. You would see our lightning-fast injection of hundreds of gigatons of light carbon into the atmosphere written in the strange skew of carbon isotopes in this rock—as you do in rocks from the many previous carbon-cycle disasters of Earth history. The massive global-warming pulse created by this carbon disaster would be written in oxygen isotope

The sulfur, nitrogen, thallium, and uranium isotopes in these rocks (to mention just a few) would whisper to you—again, in squiggles on a graph—that the global ocean lost much of its oxygen during this brief but enigmatic interval. Strontium isotopes would tell you that rock weathering dramatically accelerated worldwide for a few tens of thousands of years as sweltering, violent storms attacked the rocks and wore down the continents during a brief, CO2-driven fever.

The most enduring geological legacy, instead, will be the extinctions we cause. The first wave of human-driven extinctions, and the largest hit to terrestrial megafauna since the extinction of the dinosaurs, began tens of thousands of years ago, as people began to spread out into new continents and islands, wiping out everything we tend to think of as “Ice Age” faun

nd then, after all that, find itself, at a given point in the far future, fantastically lucky enough to have been serendipitously pushed up just enough so as to be exposed at the surface, but not too high as to have been quickly destroyed by erosion … is virtually ni

The first major mass extinction, 445 million years ago, took place in multiple pulses across a million years. An event. The second major mass extinction, 70 million years later, took place over 600,000 years—400,000 years longer than the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.

The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our species’ peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism—from the animal kingdom, from nature, from the systems that govern it, and from time itself. This illusion may, in the long run, get us all killed.

he went further and explained why America, at its best, is an inversion of that twisted racial identitarianism: “What this president doesn’t understand is that unlike every other nation on earth, we’re unable to define what constitutes ‘American’ by religion, by ethnicity, or by tribe; you can’t do it. America is an idea. An idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth.”

more importantly, Biden was able to express all this with authority. The speech was a defense of American decency against an indecent commander-in-chief — and it echoed loudly because Biden is, so evidently, a decent human

for 25 minutes or so this week, I felt as if I were living in America again, the America I love and chose to live in, a deeply flawed America, to be sure, marked forever by slavery’s stain, and racism’s endurance, but an America that, at its heart, is a decent country, full of decent people.

decency is the heart of his candidacy. And voting for Joe Biden feels like voting for some things we’ve lost and have one last chance to regain. Normalcy, generosity, civility, experience — and a reminder that, in this current darkness, Trump does not define America.

“Currently, 66 percent of the public says ‘it would be too risky to give U.S. presidents more power to deal directly with many of the country’s problems.’ About three-in-ten adults (29 percent) offer the contrasting opinion that ‘problems could be dealt with more effectively if U.S. presidents didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.’”

Three in ten is not a terrible place to start if you want to become an American autocrat

here’s one demographic in particular that is even more fertile territory: “The share of conservative Republicans who say that presidents could deal with problems more effectively if they ‘didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts’ has doubled since March 2018. Today, about half of conservative Republicans (52 percent) hold this view, compared with 26 percent a year ago.

Brits now favor expanding security over freedom by 65 to 35 percent.

“Across all dimensions, support for security was highest among groups that the Conservative Party now relies on most heavily for its voters: older age groups, pensioners, white voters, and those with lower levels of education.” If you wonder why the Tory Party has shifted away from Thatcherite liberalism to more statist authoritarianism, this is a clue. If they didn’t, they’d disappear

“British politics is undergoing a sea change and it is for security, not freedom. Most voters are not freedom fighters who want more rampant individualism, a small state and lower taxes. They want well-funded public services, security for their family, and a strong community in the place in which they live.”

“66 percent of 25-34 year olds favor ‘strong leaders who do not have to bother with Parliament’ and 26 percent believe democracy is a bad way to run the country.”

“In reality there’s not much empathy,” he said. “It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.”

China has a major incentive to track down potential carriers of the disease. The coronavirus outbreak has put parts of the country under lockdown, brought the world’s second-largest economy to a virtual standstill and erected walls between China and the rest of the world.

Still, even some government officials called for understanding as concerns about prejudice spread. Experts warned such marginalization of an already vulnerable group could prove counterproductive, further damaging public trust and sending those who should be screened and monitored deeper underground.

While networks of volunteers and Christian groups have been vocal about offering help, many local leaders have focused efforts on finding and isolating people from Hubei. On big screens and billboards, propaganda videos and posters warn people to stay inside, wear masks and wash hands.

In the northern province of Hebei, one county offered bounties of 1,000 yuan, or about $140, for each Wuhan person reported by residents. I

In the eastern province of Jiangsu, quarantine turned to imprisonment after authorities used metal poles to barricade shut the door of a family recently returned from Wuhan. To get food, the family relied on neighbors who lowered provisions with a rope down to their back balcony

“They’re only working to separate Wuhan people from Nanjing people,” Mr. Li said. “They don’t care at all if Wuhan people infect each other.”

Across the country, the response from local authorities often resembles the mass mobilizations of the Mao era rather than the technocratic, data-driven wizardry depicted in propaganda about China’s emerging surveillance state. They have also turned to techniques Beijing used to fight the outbreak of SARS, another deadly disease, in 2002 and 2003, when China was much less technologically sophisticated.

Checkpoints to screen people for fevers have popped up at tollbooths, at the front gates of apartment complexes and in hotels, grocery stores and train stations. Often those wielding the thermometer guns don’t hold them close enough to a person’s forehead, generating unusually low temperature readings. Such checks were worthless, for instance, against one man in the western province of Qinghai, whom police are investigating on suspicion that he covered up his symptoms to travel.

“I feel that the villagers are ignorant and the government isn’t helping; instead it’s leaking the information everywhere without telling them that I don’t have any symptoms,”

“Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people,” she told the Guardian, explaining that 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.“Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans.”

“There are too many pressures at the same time on our natural systems and something has to give,” she added. “We are intimately interconnected with nature, whether we like it or not. If we don’t take care of nature, we can’t take care of ourselves. And as we hurtle towards a population of 10 billion people on this planet, we need to go into this future armed with nature as our strongest ally.”

Human infectious disease outbreaks are rising and in recent years there have been Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Rift Valley fever, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), West Nile virus and Zika virus all cross from animals to humans.

Cunningham said other diseases from wildlife had much higher fatality rates in people, such as 50% for Ebola and 60%-75% for Nipah virus, transmitted from bats in south Asia. “Although, you might not think it at the moment, we’ve probably got a bit lucky with [Covid-19],” he said. “So I think we should be taking this as a clear warning shot. It’s a throw of the dice.”

“The animals have been transported over large distances and are crammed together into cages. They are stressed and immunosuppressed and excreting whatever pathogens they have in them,” he said. “With people in large numbers in the market and in intimate contact with the body fluids of these animals, you have an ideal mixing bowl for [disease] emergence. If you wanted a scenario to maximise the chances of [transmission], I couldn’t think of a much better way of doing it.”

Aaron Bernstein, at the Harvard School of Public Health in the US, said the destruction of natural places drives wildlife to live close to people and that climate change was also forcing animals to move: “That creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts.”

The billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is another part of the problem, said John Scanlon, the former secretary general of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

The Covid-19 crisis may provide an opportunity for change, but Cunningham is not convinced it will be taken: “I thought things would have changed after Sars, which was a massive wake up call – the biggest economic impact of any emerging disease to that date,” he said.

His colleagues are furious. At least two House members have tested positive for coronavirus, while a number of others are awaiting test results or in quarantine after coming into contact with an infected person.

Republican congressman Fred Upton of Michigan said he was “driving back to DC to help get this thing over the finish line” while several lawmakers from western states said they were jumping on red-eye flights to make it back in time.

“Members are advised that it is possible this measure will not pass by voice vote,” House majority leader Steny Hoyer wrote in an advisory to members on Thursday night. “Members are encouraged to follow the guidance of their local and state health officials, however if they are able and willing to be in Washington DC by 10am [Friday]. Members are encouraged to do so with caution.”

“We will be monitoring the number of members in the Capitol and on the floor to ensure we maintain safe social distancing at all times,” they added. “Members who are ill with respiratory symptoms or fever are discouraged from attending.”

Members of Congress are racing back to Washington, despite social isolation guidelines, out of fear that a lawmaker could delay a Friday vote on the $2.2tn economic stimulus package designed to rush federal aid to workers, businesses and a healthcare system ravaged by the coronavirus.

The desire by House leaders was to pass the bill with a “voice vote” – when everyone in the chamber shouts “aye” or “no” and the loudest group prevails. But any member of Congress can demand a rollcall vote and require a quorum, forcing at least 216 lawmakers to return to Washington in the midst of a pandemic to ensure the bill passes.

His colleagues are furious. At least two House members have tested positive for coronavirus, while a number of others are awaiting test results or in quarantine after coming into contact with an infected person.

There is no doubt the law has enough support to pass.

The House will convened at 9am ET. There will be three hours of debate on the legislation before they attempt to pass the bill by voice vote.

If a recorded vote is required, the House is planning to enforce strict social distancing guidelines, allowing members on the floor to vote in small groups to avoid crowding.

"It's unacceptable that we're sending medical professionals like lambs to the slaughterhouse without giving anything to protect themselves," said Dr. Marianne Hamra, who works in New Jersey. "Bandanas and scarves? C'mon CDC -- that's completely ridiculous."

Meanwhile, New York has now topped Washington state as the new epicenter of coronavirus cases with at least 20,875 infected, according to CNN's tally of cases.

In New Jersey, 35 physicians and nurses are no longer working at Holy Name Medical Center because they are either have or are suspected of having Covid-19.

"I'm very concerned that if things don't slow down, if the supply chains do not open up, if we don't figure out a way to get the nurses in here from the federal government (and) from the military," he said. "I feel in a week or so from now I may not be able to feel the same way."

A nurse in western Ohio said that, save for one specific unit where Covid-19 patients are supposed to be sent, nurses at the medical center are forbidden from wearing masks -- not just N95 masks, but surgical masks or any masks.

"I don't want to bring anything home to my kids," she said. "I'm a single mom. I signed up to be a frontline worker, but I don't have the equipment to do it."

Milla Kviatkovsky, a hospitalist physician in San Diego, helped launch a petition on Change.org called "US Physicians/Healthcare Workers For Personal Protective Equipment in Covid-19 Pandemic."

Many physicians, she said, worry about the ethical implications of institutions saying it's ok to perform procedures without protective gear when it's never been ok before.

"Are we doing more harm than good by going in there with no equipment and potentially spreading this to so many other people?" she said in an interview with CNN. "Are we taking out the front lines to our defense when we're so early on in the equivalent of a health care war right now?"

Just as a return to even a new normal is unthinkable for the foreseeable future — and well past Easter, Mr. Trump — a complete shutdown and shelter-in-place strategy cannot last for months

A middle-ground approach is the only realistic one — and defining what that looks like means doing our best to keep all such workers safe.

In three to four weeks, there will be a major shortage of chemical reagents for coronavirus testing

When leaders tell the truth about even near-desperate situations, when they lay out a clear and understandable vision, the public might remain frightened, but it will act rationally and actively participate in the preservation of its safety and security.

begin by stating a number of hard truth

The first is that no matter what we do at this stage, numerous hospitals in the United States will be overrun. Many people, including health care workers, will get sick and some will die. And the economy will tank. It’s too late to change any of this now.

It also means leadership. Above all, it means being realistic about what is possible and what is not, and communicating that clearly to the American public.

The second hard truth is that at this stage, any public health response that counts on widespread testing in the United States is doomed to fail.

it simply won’t be available.

Much better, instead, to immediately gear up for epidemic intelligence

illness surveillance, in which epidemiologists survey a sample of doctors’ offices in a given geographic region each day to learn how many patients sought care for illnesses with symptoms of fever, cough and muscle aches.

A third hard truth is that shortages of personal protective equipment — particularly N-95 masks — for health care workers will only get worse in the United States as global need continues to rise precipitously

If you can’t make nearly enough masks to meet the need, then you must conserve the masks you can make. Unfortunately, some hospitals in the United States are not employing science-based methods for conserving these invaluable lifesaving masks.

Making ventilators — machines that breathe for patients who cannot effectively do so on their own — poses an even more formidable challenge

a Medtronic ventilator has about 1,500 parts, supplied by 14 separate countries.

More machines might, at best, be manufactured by the hundreds a month — but not by the thousands, as is needed right now.

a national strategy and leadership are crucial. Otherwise, hospitals, governors and politicians will only vie against one anothe

“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump said

This is exactly the wrong message. The White House must take charge, keeping track of national inventory, purchasing the precious resources and distributing them where they are most needed at the moment.

More than anything, what the United States needs right now is for the president to undertake an intellectual Manhattan Project: gather the best minds in public health, medicine, medical ethics, catastrophe preparedness and response; political leadership; and private-sector manufacturing and the pharmaceutical industry.

The effort against Covid-19 will need to be bear fruit within days — and come up with a comprehensive but realistic blueprint for getting America through the next 12 to 18 months, or however long it takes for a vaccine to become widely available or herd immunity to take hold in the population

The next day, recovering upstairs, the man still had a fever. Doctors ordered a test for the coronavirus. A day later, his results came back positive.

Last week, the Illinois Department of Public Health sent a notice to clinics that only those people “hospitalized with severe acute lower respiratory illness” could be tested for the coronavirus

Today, if every hospital employee who had a close encounter with a COVID-19 patient disappeared for two weeks, the medical workforce would quickly become depleted

The virus has an average incubation period of five days, which means people can spread it in the absence of symptoms

After the man with appendicitis (a patient of one of the doctors I spoke with for this story) tested positive, the hospital implemented such precautions. And staff members who’d cared for him went into two weeks of isolation.

The majority of workers who keep America’s hospitals running don’t have the salary to afford extra bedrooms, much less extra properties

During World War II, Ford and General Motors rallied to the cause by building tanks and manufacturing ammunition instead of car

The ubiquitous curve is being flattened by shutdowns and social distancing, but it is not flat enough. Those who might end up in a hospital, which is to say all of us, can do at least one thing to help relieve pressure on the medical system and its overtaxed, dwindling workforce.

America rolled the dice. For just one example, the federal government has invested only about $500 million annually in the strategic stockpile, maintaining about 12 million N95 masks and 16,600 ventilators. This is enough to equip an area hit by a localized disease outbreak, natural disaster, or terrorist attack. But it is nowhere near what could be necessary in a Disease X pandemic.

In January of this year, some Chinese scientists warned that a Disease X had arrived, based on genetic sequencing they’d performed.

When we spoke by phone late Tuesday night, as he was driving home from the hospital, he sounded tired. I asked him to think back to the Disease X war game

Patients were streaming in nonstop, she said, coughing and sweating, with fevers and "fear in their eyes." The nurse wrote that she cried in the bathroom during her break, peeling off the PPE that left indentations in her face.

The nurse, who said she works in a Covid-19 triage area, said the previous night was "so far the worst I have seen."

'I cried the entire ride home'

"What's very devastating for me is some people we know will not survive," he said, "and since they're not allowed to have visitors, I may be the last face they see and voice they hear ever as I put them to sleep (general anesthesia) prior to being on a ventilator.

Deburghgraeve shared a video with CNN of him donning his PPE, putting on gloves, a protective gown, a face mask and then another mask that looks like a space helmet.

Dr. Cory Deburghgraeve, an anesthesiologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said he's working 94 hours this week. He's the designated "airway anesthesiologist" giving coronavirus patients breathing tubes in a procedure called intubation.

A physician assistant working in an emergency room in Queens, New York, told CNN there was an "every man for themselves" mentality when it came to the PPE at the hospital.

"You have people out on the streets that have masks and meanwhile the hospitals are all running out of masks," said the physician assistant, who CNN is not naming because they feared repercussions for speaking to the media.

The physician assistant said they were told they would have to make their N95 mask last for five days. The PPE is being prioritized, the physician assistant said, for staff working with intubated patients, who are most at risk of infection.

"There's patients everywhere," the physician assistant said

An emergency room physician at a hospital in the New York borough of Queens said doctors and nurses must deal with cramped spaces.

"Stretchers are packed in metal-to-metal, stacked three deep head to toe, with no space ... to walk to patients," the physician said. "When patients deteriorate, you hope you see them from across the room and hope you can move enough stretchers out of the way to get that person to a critical care area."

"I don't have the support that I need, and even just the materials that I need physically to take care of my patients," Smith said. "And it's America and we're supposed to be a first-world country."

It doesn’t require, for instance, quickly lifting quarantines based on outlying projections of low fatality rates, as some return-to-normalcy conservatives have been urging in the last week

Rational hope accepts that the situation is genuinely dark, but then it still looks around for signposts leading up and out. It recognizes that things are likely to get worse, but keeps itself alert to the contexts in which they seem to be getting better

three patterns where I’m finding optimism right now.

First, there is modest hope in data compiled by the smart-thermometer company Kinsa, which claims to be able to identify anomalous, unseasonal fever rates using data from its nationwide user base.

Kinsa’s data show a clear February-and-March anomaly across the U.S., especially in areas known to be affected by the coronavirus. But it also shows that anomaly diminishing as lockdowns and social distancing began

Washington State bent its curve after the initial surge and California’s case rate and death rate trends are a gentle incline — nothing like the New York area’s terrifying spike.

Second, there is hope in the differing course of the pandemic so far in Greater New York versus the Pacific Coast.

the sharp turn suggests that general infection curves can be changed quickly even during a pandemic, and that the policies of the last two weeks might be having a real epidemiological effect.

In the most optimistic case, the spike reflects New York’s unique density and heavy reliance on mass transit

maybe some of the divide reflects policy — the fact that West Coast leaders acted ever-so-slightly more swiftly and with more seriousness of purpose than the feckless Bill de Blasio in New York City.

it suggests that even if you initially fail to spot an outbreak, you can still hope to imitate South Korea rather than northern Italy.

the circumstantial evidence of Western versus Asian epidemic curves and the direct evidence of multiple studies suggest that masking works, and that its widespread adoption can change an epidemic’s course.

These three hopeful signs together hint at a path back toward quasi-normalcy. The current shutdown bends infection curves relatively quickly, outside a few major urban outbreaks. That policy response combines with America’s social-distancing sprawl and car culture and younger-than-Europe age profile to compensate for our initial incompetence and natural insubordination. And then the cheapest, lightest-weight means of slowing transmission becomes ubiquitous in U.S. cities by Memorial or Independence Day.

If they didn’t have the coronavirus before coming to our hospital, they probably do now. So much for gatherings of 10 people or fewer.

Meanwhile, my colleagues tend to patients in the critical-care bay with dipping oxygen levels, patients who can barely speak and may need breathing tubes.

Earlier in the month, we were told that positive-pressure oxygen masks, such as CPAP machines, were risky, as they would aerosolize the virus, increasing health-care workers’ risk of infection

But in recent days, running dangerously low on ventilators, we have attempted using CPAP machines to stave off the need for medically induced comas.

Nevertheless, we need to perform an alarming number of of intubations. Our ventilators are almost all in use, and the ICUs are at capacity.

On Wednesday, I greeted a patient I had discharged only one week prior. When I saw his name pop up on the board, my heart sank. He is just shy of 50, with hardly any past medical history, and he had seemed fine. Now he was gasping for air. His chest X-ray was no relief—COVID-19 for sure. I needed to admit him to the hospital, and set him up with oxygen, heart monitoring, and a bed.

My colleagues and I discuss this pandemic with a sardonic sense of helplessness. Some of us are getting sick. Our reality alters by the moment. Every day, we change our triage system. Each day could be the day that the masks run out. There is much we think but are too afraid to say to one another.

I do not want to see you in my hospital. I do not want you to go to any hospital in the United States. I do not want you to leave your home, except for essential food and supplies. I do not want you to get tested for the coronavirus, unless you need to be admitted to a hospital.

If you have mild symptoms, assume that you have the coronavirus. Stay home, wash your hands, call your doctor. Don’t come to the emergency department just because of a fever or cough. Receiving a test won’t change our recommendation that you remain in self-isolation. We don’t want you to expose yourself to those who definitely do have the virus.

Social distancing, while still crucial, came too late in New York to prevent a crisis. Maybe, just maybe, extreme measures can prevent this from happening in other cities around the country.

the hospital received one piece of good news yesterday. A coronavirus patient was successfully taken off a ventilator after two weeks, a first for our Medical ICU and a victory for the staff and, of course, the patient.