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While shunning the state media and declining an interview for this story, Ms. Sanders has quietly reached out to state Republican lawmakers to discuss state policy and convey her desire to work with them, according to Mr. Garner.

The area is booming, will gain about a half-dozen new state legislative seats in redistricting, and is becoming more diverse. As the local business alliance, the Northwest Arkansas Council, notes, from 1990 and 2019, the nonwhite population of the region grew from less than 5 percent to over 28 percent.

She's already been stripped of her committee assignments by a vote in the House, rendering her an essentially ineffective legislator, but she's largely gone undisciplined by party leadership in Washington, DC, as congressional Republicans bow to Trump.

Unbowed by reprimands from her GOP colleagues, she made a fresh comparison between Democrats and Nazis, claimed that the cartels "love" President Joe Biden during a discourse on immigration, and then did a racist impression in what she described as her "really bad Mexican accent."

nside the Oakwood Cafe that morning, 78-year-old Phil Neff, who supported Trump, paid for his breakfast amid the morning bustle. Afterward, he told CNN he believes that Greene "has more interest in herself than serving the community," but added with a note of resignation: "That's what the people chose."

"I don't think anybody should be comparing anything for the Nazis and the Holocaust. It's different worlds," White said during an interview in Rome, Georgia, hours before Greene's rally. "She has been ineffective, and she'll continue to be ineffective as long as she is as controversial as she is. She doesn't garner support of other Republicans."

But Greene also has plenty of defenders within the Republican base -- despite her past embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, racist and Islamophobic rhetoric, and past Facebook comments and videos unearthed by CNN's KFile in which she indicated support for executing prominent Democrats.

In the few short months she's been in Congress, Greene has created major headaches for her party, not just by lobbing her inflammatory criticisms at Democrats, but also by undermining Republican leaders in the GOP conference.

But just as Republican voters often excused Trump's outlandish statements as proof of his authenticity, some voters in this conservative Georgia district praise Greene for her candor.

"I don't necessarily agree with that statement," Deal said in an interview in Rome with CNN's Martin Savidge when asked about Greene's comparisons between mask requirements and the Holocaust. "But I do agree with her right to say it."

"It does feel like people are getting some of the rights taken away that they're used to," Shults said.Sandra Campbell, another Georgia voter, said she believes Greene and Trump are representative of the "real America."

This is not the Great Depression today, but we face the worst economic crisis since that time, plus about 4,000 Americans dying daily from the worst pandemic in a century, plus an insurrection incited by the lame-duck president, plus an undercurrent of national delusion that fuels division and violence

This is Big Policy. You might even call it Rooseveltian.

To me, the single most exciting element of the Biden proposal is one that has garnered little attention: a pathbreaking plan that would drastically cut child poverty.

Perhaps a third example is the New Deal itself. Results of Roosevelt’s boldness included Social Security, rural electrification, jobs programs, networks of hiking trails, the G.I. Bill of Rights and a 35-year burst of inclusive growth that arguably made the United States the richest country in the history of the world.

The main drawback — the 14th Amendment's lack of a removal clause — could be remedied through well-deserved impeachment, though Trump's departure in a week will make this issue moot.

Invoking the 14th Amendment could well garner more Republican support. On Monday evening, GOP Rep. Tom Reed of New York published an op-ed in The New York Times making his case for avoiding impeachment. "Work with us on constitutionally viable alternatives," Reed pleaded. Those include "censure, criminal proceedings, and actions under the 14th Amendment."

Realistically, pursuing this path would also rule out an already unlikely impeachment conviction in the Senate, yet with Democrats moving forward on the early stages of impeachment, leadership might be uninterested in shifting approaches.

"The language in Section Three applies to anybody who has made an oath to the Constitution and then violates that oath," Eric Foner, a Civil War historian and Columbia University professor emeritus, told The Washington Post. "It's pretty simple."

The case for applying the language to Trump may also be clearer than that of impeachment, because the 14th Amendment's permanent ban on future public service emphasizes for all future generations the severity of Trump's treachery and doesn't require the Senate to take a separate vote, as during the impeachment process.

That's not to say there won't be challenges to invoking the 14th Amendment. Any effort to hold Trump accountable is likely to face strong Republican opposition, though the extremity of Trump's conduct seems to be fracturing party loyalties.

But there's an underlying point that should be carefully considered: The 14th Amendment was crafted in times of division not entirely unlike our own.

It can be dispiriting to see that the threat of violent antidemocratic terrorism is as real in our enlightened modernity as it was in the wake of the Civil War.

Pelosi cited Greene's remarks in her criticism of the GOP leadership, calling it "absolutely appalling."

the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives who is willing to overlook, ignore those statements, assigning her to the Education Committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when she has mocked of killing of teenagers in high school at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

"These comments are deeply disturbing and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the congresswoman about them," the spokeswoman said.

Hours after Pelosi's comments, acting U.S. Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman said that in the wake of the agency's security failures, they will ask for new measures, including a permanent fencing system and the availability of "ready, back-up forces in close proximity to the Capitol."

California Rep. Jimmy Gomez said Wednesday that he would introduce a resolution to expel Greene from Congress. Also Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss said that if Greene doesn't resign, she needs to be expelled.

"If you don't understand that calling for the murder of political rivals is a threat to democracy, you shouldn't be allowed to represent one," Auchincloss said in a tweet.

supplemental funding to raise security measures for lawmakers — to address new security concerns among members, especially "when the enemy is within the House of Representatives.

"It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence against on other members of Congress."

"What could they be thinking?" Pelosi told reporters. "Or is 'thinking' too generous a word for what they may be doing?"

The union representing U.S. Capitol Police officers says the force's leadership failed to relay the known threat of violence adequately ahead of the Jan. 6 deadly riot, calling the acting chief's recent admission of prior knowledge of the threat to Congress "a disclosure that has angered and shocked the rank-and-file officers."

By January 4th, the Department knew that the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacists organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We kne

event

other

As protesters clapped and chanted "disclose, divest and reinvest,

Harvard senior Caleb Schwartz, one of the protest organizers who was arrested on Saturday, told NPR the mood on the field was joyful, despite the possibility of arrest.

"That moment, when we saw people running onto the field was just really incredible," he said

"We know that we don't have a lot of time to act to curb the effects of climate change, and the longer it takes for our universities to acknowledge their role in the climate crisis and accept responsibility,

Schwartz says the Harvard-Yale rivalry game has been played since 1875, and organizers knew alumni from all over the world would be tuning in.

"We will win this fight, and we will get the university to divest,"

Harvard and Yale are not the first universities to face criticism over fossil fuel investments.

The first campus divestment movements started at Swarthmore College in 2011.

"Yale stands firmly for the right to free expression.

Today, students from Harvard and Yale expressed their views and delayed the start of the second half of the football game

Saturday's protest during a marque rivalry football game attracted widespread attention, including tweets of support from several Democratic presidential candidates including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In a statement, the student groups behind the protest, Fossil Free Yale, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition and Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, wrote:

The protest garnered so much interest, that Schwartz changed his bus ticket back to Cambridge on Saturday so he could stay and field the deluge of media inquiries.

News organizations and journalists' advocates are challenging restrictive new ground rules for reporters assigned to cover the Senate impeachment trial.

Correspondents who submit to an official credentialing process are granted broad access throughout the Capitol complex and usually encounter few restrictions in talking with members of Congress or others.

now Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger has imposed new requirements for the impeachment trial,

Reporters are being confined to small cordoned-off sections in areas where unrestricted access was typically standard.

They are being prevented from walking with senators to continue conversations — even when the senator involved is willingly participating.

Taken together, the new rules effectively prevent members of the press from reaching many senators.

Elsewhere, as in the White House or the State Department, for example, reporters' movements are controlled more closely, and access to principals can be severely limited.

Stenger and the Capitol Police may fear that the additional attention drawn to the Senate impeachment trial may increase risks to members of Congress.

Nearly 60 news organizations including NPR signed a letter organized by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on Thursday urging Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to relax the new restrictions on reporters.

Patricia Gallagher Newberry, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, faulted the new Senate restrictions because they deny reporters the ability to fully cover a once-in-a-generation spectacle.

"These restrictions set a horrible precedent and reinforce the lie that the news media is dangerous and the 'enemy of the people

News organizations that assign correspondents to the Capitol — including NPR — are continuing to negotiate ground rules with Stenger (the sergeant-at-arms) and the Capitol Police.

Reporters Challenge New Restrictions In Trying To Cover Senate Impeachment Trial

After nearly three decades supporting Republican presidential candidates -- the last Democrat Georgia supported was Bill Clinton in 1992 -- its vote for Biden seemed like a surprise, but it came after a remarkable grassroots campaign to get new voters to the polls and years of demographic shifts that have created a more diverse population.

Barack Obama turned two previously red southern states blue in 2008. But while Virginia has stayed in the Democratic column in each successive presidential election and now seems as reliably blue as any other US state, North Carolina veered back to Republicans, although it has remained at the top of Democrats' target list.

The outcome of the twin Senate runoffs in Georgia on January 5 will hold some indication and test the turnout operation Stacey Abrams undertook with her organization The New Georgia Project after she narrowly lost the 2018 governor's race there.

"We have seen dramatic turnout among communities that typically are not at the top of mind for candidates. We have seen them be engaged, be encouraged and we have seen them turn out," Abrams told CNN on Election Day in November.

What we have seen in the last decade is that in statewide elections in Georgia is that Democrats have been increasing their margins. They've been garnering more votes. They've been narrowing the gap between them and the Republican Party. So if they were going to continue on that trajectory, it was only a matter of time before Democrats were going to pass Republicans in terms of the vote. Winning the presidential election is only one data point, so I can't, I can't create a trend just yet with respect to that. What I suspect we're entering into is an era of increased competition where I'm expecting that we're going to continue to see very narrow margins between Democratic and Republican candidates in statewide elections, where Democrats win some elections and Republicans some elections.

Southern whites were a firm part of the New Deal coalition and that starts to change after the Civil Rights Movement. It didn't happen overnight. It took a long period of time. It culminated in the 2000s, at the beginning of the decade, with Sonny Perdue's gubernatorial victory and a change in party of the control in the state House of Representatives. And then it culminated by the 2010s at the end of the decade, when all of the statewide offices were won by Republican candidates.

We also have to credit the effort of both the Democratic Party and outside groups in reaching out to likely Democratic voters, getting them registered to vote and then getting them educated and mobilized so that they actually turn out to vote.

What we've seen happen in the last 20 years in the state is, one: the size of the African American vote makes up 30% of registered voters in the state. Given the fact that they are 90% Democratic in their voting behaviors, that means they make up the majority of Democratic voters in the state.But you can't win with 90% of 30% of the population, so you need a nontrivial number of White voters. And unlike neighboring states, Georgia is in a position where Democrats can get 30% of White voters.Georgia, unlike South Carolina or Alabama or Mississippi, has a very fast-growing Asian American and Hispanic population.While the Black electorate grew in the 2000s, the growth has been the most Asian American and Hispanic voters in the 2010s. They were 3% of all of registered voters in 2012, they were 6% of registered voters in this election cycle, and they also break Democratic. And if you get everybody to turn out to vote, you can put a winning electoral coalition together of African American, Asian American, Hispanic and liberal White voters.

Atlanta being a financial hub, a tech hub, a hub for the arts.

Atlanta is attracting well educated professional types of voters who are more Democratic in their orientation

In particular, Georgia is more Democratic now because it's got growing populations of color who are predisposed to be Democratic in orientation.This is not to say that 20 or 40 or 50 years from now that these populations are still going to be Democratic in orientation. A lot can change.

We have more intensive care beds per capita, more equipment and more pricey specialists than almost anywhere else. We have a fantastically innovative biotech sector.

Two major American assets I didn’t list, and should have, were weather and time.

America’s weather was more favorable to fighting covid-19 because more of our landmass falls in southern latitudes where it’s comfortable, for most of the year, to spend time outside.

we had time to figure all that out, because Europe got hit hard first, giving us a valuable preview of horrors to come. That bought us priceless extra days

only we squandered them and every other advantage we started with.

Sure, America doesn’t have the absolute worst death rate in the industrialized world — not yet, anyway

Either way, we’ll still be doing much worse than we could have — and much worse than we should have. And I mean all of us, not just President Trump.

everyone, left or right, who turned this into a political battle with their fellow Americans, rather than a desperate fight our country needed to unite to win.

Yes, Trump was by far the worst bungler in this whole affair. But there is plenty of blame to go around:

I include myself in that number. I think of all the times I lost my temper with covid skeptics, even though I knew it was counterproductive, and I regret every one of them.

I look back at my columns and wonder if I should have advocated for less intrusive policies that might have garnered broader support, or if I would have convinced more people if I’d evinced a little more humility in my conviction that America needed to take radical action immediately.

I’ll always wonder: How many people could we have saved if everyone, from the president on down, had acted as if saving American lives from a deadly virus was the most important thing we had to do this year?

All of which is fuelling the fear that it will be Britain’s fate to get the worst of both worlds: a higher death rate than comparable countries and a more ravaged economy. That dread now radiates from Tories like a pungent musk

public approval of the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen to a new low of just 3 in 10.

the inevitable public inquiry is convened it will have to decide how much blame should be allocated to longstanding institutional weaknesses and how much can be attributed to the actions and inactions of particular individuals.

Many Tory MPs are flashing knives at Public Health England, which they blame for early mis-steps in establishing an adequate testing regime

The Tories have been in power for more than a decade and the NHS’s current configuration is a result of the “Lansley reforms” implemented during David Cameron’s premiership.

The scientific advisers on the Sage group flagged up the vulnerability of care homes as early as February. Yet the government devoted more zeal to protecting the prime minister’s rule-breaking adviser, Dominic Cummings, than it did to safeguarding the lives of the fragile elderly. A just-released report by the National Audit Office estimates that 25,000 elderly people were discharged from hospitals into homes without being tested at the height of the pandemic.

Time and again, I have heard accounts from inside government of warnings given and action exhorted only for the machinery never to properly click into gear for want of decisive leadership.

Boris Johnson was complacently late to grasp the gravity of the crisis and then animated by a panic-driven urge to try to impress the public by throwing out pledges he could not deliver. One critique, often to be heard now even from erstwhile admirers, is that his outfit at Number 10 is not so much a government as a campaign

, this Number 10 is obsessed with polling and focus grouping, which they conduct daily, and how things are projected in the media. “The problem with this government is that it is led by journalists,”

Where energy ought to have been directed to making important things happen, it was expended on concocting brags that might temporarily garner approving headlines or neutralise hostile ones. The result has been a persistent pattern of over-promising and underperforming.

His weaknesses have been magnified because he deliberately appointed a cabinet conspicuously light on talent – “the nodding dogs”, as one senior Tory labels them. The cabinet were chosen not for their ability, dynamism or independence of thought, but for their devotion to a hard Brexit and obedience to Number 10.

No other European country has made such an abysmal mess of reopening schools.

The one-year credit appears likely to garner enough support to be included in the stimulus package, but it will also have to clear a series of tough parliamentary hurdles because of the procedural maneuvers Democrats are using to muscle the stimulus package through, potentially without Republican support.

Ms. Yellen said that passing the stimulus package could allow the economy to reach full employment by next year. Failing to do so, she said, could leave the jobless rate elevated for years to come.

But the child tax credit could provide an opportunity for some bipartisan support, since Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, introduced a similar measure that would send payments of up to $1,250 per month to families with children.

Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, warned on Sunday that the United States labor market was stalling and in a “deep hole” that could take years to emerge from if lawmakers did not quickly pass the stimulus package.

With House Democratic leadership aiming to have the stimulus legislation approved on the chamber floor by the end of the month, Congress moved last week to fast-track Mr. Biden’s stimulus plan even as details of the legislation are still being worked out.

Researchers at Columbia University found that Mr. Biden’s overall stimulus proposal could cut child poverty in half in 2021 because of the expansion of the child credit, as well as other changes to tax credits and expansions of unemployment and food assistance benefits.

“These are interrelated crises — the crisis of racism and inequality that is now converging with the crisis of Covid-19,”

an analysis of data from 40 states and the District of Columbia, released last month by the nonpartisan APM Research Lab, found black Americans are more than twice as likely as whites, Latinos or Asian-Americans to die from the coronavirus. In some states, the disparity is much greater.

Devastating job losses are also “hitting black workers and their families especially hard,” according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 16.8 percent, compared with 12.4 percent for white Americans

The mass incarceration of black people has only worsened the pandemic’s heavy toll on minorities. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at five times the rate of whites,

“When people are released, what job opportunities do they have? What is their housing situation? All of these other factors relate back to the current pandemic.”

“While everyone is facing the battle against coronavirus, black people in America are still facing the battle against racism and coronavirus,” he said in a recent 18-minute monologue, adding, “Coronavirus exposed all of it.”

Mr. Shabazz wrote about it in a column for The Root, a black news and opinion site, under the headline “We Can’t Breathe: Covid-19 and Police Injustice are Suffocating Black People.”

In New York, Rashid Shabazz, the chief marketing officer of the online organization Color of Change, displayed symptoms of the coronavirus for several weeks, he said, but was unable to get tested. He said the respiratory illness reminded him of the dying words — “I can’t breathe” — of Mr. Floyd and another victim of police violence, Eric Garner, who was put in an illegal chokehold.

One patient, seeing the protective gear that covered Dr. Blackstock’s skin, asked if she was black, she said, because he wanted to make sure his concerns would be taken seriously. She said she worried that Covid-19 would become a disease of marginalized communities, just as AIDS was in the late 1990s, when white Americans had access to new medicines and health care while many black Americans, with fewer economic resources, did not.

“I’m worried about black communities and other communities of color being stigmatized, as those are the people with coronavirus,” she said, adding, “We need to equitably allocate resources to black communities as quickly as possible.”

More people are thinking that way now. In North Carolina, where African-Americans account for 28 percent of coronavirus cases but only 22 percent of the population, the state health secretary decried “structural racism” last week. In Ohio, where black people account for 18 percent of Covid-19 deaths but 13 percent of the population, officials in Franklin County have declared racism a public health crisis.

“This is a transformative moment,” she said. “I’m sad, I’m angry, but I have hope.”

After the Baltimore unrest in 2015, Dr. Wen, now a public health professor at George Washington University, declared racism a public health issue, which she said “raised a lot of eyebrows at the time.”

On July 8, the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 41.22, down nearly 90 percent from its peak before the market crashed on Black Monday in October of 1929. Many of the homeless were living in shacks in “Hoovervilles.”

During his nearly four years in office, Hoover had focused on trying to balance the budget. But as the jobless rate rose to a record 23.6 percent in 1932, he proposed a $1.8 billion relief package

The foundation of both plans was $1 billion to expand loans by the government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But the Garner-Wagner bill also called for up to $1.2 billion for public works to create jobs.

To Hoover this was spending money for “pork” and “unproductive” jobs. Republican Rep. Fiorello La Guardia, the future mayor of New York, shot back that the legislation was a “breadbasket bill” and represented “the first ray of hope that has been cast in a critical situation.”

By early July, it was clear that the House-Senate conference bill was doomed. “Weary leaders looked to the veto message already penned and waiting at the White House as marking the end of the long and bitter controversy over federal aid to the jobless,” the AP reported.On July 11, Congress sent its bill to Hoover. Sure enough, the next day Hoover vetoed the bill, saying it would “bring far more distress than it will cure.” It was a phrase similar to Trump’s declaration last month that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself" as he considered urging Americans to end their coronavirus quarantines.

“In a night session which was astonishing for the swift and decisive action of its nonpartisan coalition,” the Senate passed a revised bill and sent it to the House, the AP reported. There, what was now called “the Hoover bill” passed by a vote of 296 to 46. When the final conference bill came back to the House, members passed it by unanimous consent. Only one lawmaker gave a speech, and he was nearly drowned out by cries of “Vote, vote!”

“Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. … But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows’ hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”

Bridget Floyd struggled to hold back tears as she spoke to NBC Today about the family’s shock and grief.

In the footage that emerged of Floyd’s violent detention, he can be heard to shout “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me!” He then becomes motionless, eyes closed, face-first on the road.

She said: “It’s painful but true that black lives continue to be destroyed by police officers in many communities across our country. They keep killing us. and it’s the same story again and again.”

I offer my deepest condolences to the Floyd family, and I stand with them in their fight to get justice for George.”

Crump said that in some ways, the use of “violent, lethal and excessive force” on Floyd was more disturbing than the treatment of Garner, even, because the officer is seen kneeling on Floyd’s neck for up to nine minutes.

He said he hoped the killing would be a turning point for the justice system. “There cannot be two justice systems, one for black America and one for white America.”

She said: “I would like for these officers to be charged with murder, because that’s exactly what they did. They murdered my brother. He was crying for help.”

e could prevail next week

A Biden win would doom Mr. Trump’s chances for re-election. More significantly, it would herald the arrival of a formidable multiracial Democratic coalition in the country’s largest red state. That would hand the Democrats an electoral upper hand nationwide and all but block Republicans from the White House until they improve their fortunes with college-educated white voters, younger people and minorities.

Yet even as leading figures in both parties urge their respective presidential nominees to take Texas seriously, the campaigns are still reluctant to spend precious remaining time and money there.

Though the state isn’t essential to a Biden victory, Democrats have been more aggressive here. Mr. Biden is dispatching his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to Texas on Friday, and Democrats have also planned a multicity bus tour across the state.

Texas Republicans and Democrats alike believe the long-awaited m

The pandemic has slowed the Texas economy, the top selling point for its politicians

With two days left of early voting, turnout in Texas has nearly exceeded the total number of votes cast in the state in the 2016 election. Voters under 30 have showed up in historic numbers, with over 904,000 of them already casting ballots (only 1.1 million such young Texans voted in all of 2016).

“It is a competitive state, meaning a Democrat can now win statewide,” acknowledged Steve Munisteri, a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party, noting that about 10 million people had moved to the state in the last 20 years. “We’ve had the equivalent of two medium-sized states move in.”

In border communities like Brownsville and McAllen, the question for Mr. Biden is not whether voters will support a Democrat — they do so reliably — but whether voters in this working-class region hit hard by the coronavirus will turn out at the same levels as the more affluent parts of the state.

Visits to a pair of precincts last week in the Rio Grande Valley revealed a noticeable number of first- or second-time voters, including many students. Many of them were Hispanic and they cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden — or, as they put it, against Mr. Trump.

If Mr. Biden can significantly expand beyond the 54 percent of the vote Hillary Clinton garnered there in 2016, the gain in raw votes in such a highly populated community could draw him close to Mr. Trump statewide.

“I think most of the young generation is for Biden,” explained Brian Nguyen, a 20-year-old college student, after he voted.

“Texas is changing,” said Mr. Cruz. “We’re not home to just oil and gas wildcatters.”

While testing has been comparatively limited, the continent appears to have bucked the doomsday predictions of global health experts. The telltale signs of severe outbreaks seen elsewhere — crowded hospitals and a spike in deaths — have emerged in only a handful of African countries. Surveys done by the World Health Organization have found negligible excess mortality rates in most African countries, reducing suspicion that many covid-19 deaths are going uncounted.

even as more research emerges, public health experts caution that the explanation for why Africa’s caseload has remained low will be complicated.

“It is highly unlikely that there is a single, definitive answer as to why this is the case,” said Ngoy Nsenga, a Congolese epidemiologist and the WHO’s program manager for emergency response in Africa. “Youthful populations, warmer climates, less time indoors, less traveling, less obesity and diabetes, immunities derived from other diseases — even other coronaviruses — are all playing a part, we think. But what distinguishes Africa from other places like Brazil that might share those factors, but were still hard-hit, are our human interventions.”

Those interventions have exacted immense economic damage, however, and with many African governments not seeing uncontrolled growth in cases, they have been rolled back in many places.

Health officials, however, caution that the threat is far from over — even if hospitals aren’t filling up.

“During the holiday season, there will be a tendency for large movement from capital cities to villages, remote areas, for people to connect with families. That might drive the pandemic,”

Ndongo Dia, head of the respiratory virus diagnostic laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, isn’t sure why Senegal dodged the worst of the pandemic.

The nation has garnered widespread praise for its quick response, which included sealing its border, rolling out four-hour tests while Americans waited days for results, and imposing a curfew until infections slowed.

Beyond that, Dia said, “our luck is the composition of our population. The number of severe cases is going to be much lower compared to the northern countries, where there are more elderly people.”

Death rates have been higher in South Africa, Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, where a larger percentage of the population is over the age of 65. Those four countries make up two-thirds of all coronavirus deaths in Africa.

Preliminary analyses done by the WHO indicate that Africans may be twice as likely to experience covid-19 without any illness, and that more than 80 percent of cases on the continent have been asymptomatic — a far higher percentage than elsewhere in the world.

“It is not different strains — that I can refute. We have a network of laboratories all over the continent and the world,” he said. “We have sequenced from many places, we haven’t seen dramatically different strains here.”

The district court agreed with the challengers that the law is unconstitutional, and it permanently blocked Kentucky from enforcing the law.

A divided 6th Circuit panel turned down Cameron’s request to join the case. It explained that Cameron’s plea had come “years into” the case, after both the district court’s ruling and the 6th Circuit’s opinion upholding that ruling. Granting a motion to intervene after the court of appeals has already issued its opinion, the court reasoned, would “provide potential intervenors every incentive to sit out litigation untill we issue a decision contrary to their preferences, whereupon they can spring into action.”

Cameron went to the Supreme Court in October 2020, asking the justices to weigh in on whether he should have been allowed to intervene and, if so, to send the case back to the lower courts for another look in light of their June 2020 decision in June Medical. In March 2021, the court agreed to take up only the procedural question.

In the Supreme Court, Cameron framed the case as a “dispute about a State’s sovereign ability to defend its laws.”

The attorney general’s office can’t enter the case now, the clinic wrote, because the office didn’t file a notice of appeal from the district court’s 2019 ruling. Allowing Cameron to intervene in the 6th Circuit in 2020, the clinic told the justices, “would create an impermissible end-run around Congress’s express statutory limits on appellate jurisdiction.”

there is no reason to disturb the denial of that motion by the court of appeals.

Arizona and 22 other states filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting Cameron in which they described the question presented by the case as one “of profound substantive importance to our democratic system of governance.” “States,” they wrote, “have a compelling and indisputable sovereign interest in defending the constitutionality of their laws when challenged in federal court.”

The experience of nearly 250 years is that the first type of movement generally succeeds: emancipation, suffrage, civil rights, marriage equality. They have aimed to build the country up, and bring Americans more closely together, on foundations already in place.

The second type — from the Confederacy to the white supremacy of the Jim Crow era to militant Black nationalism in the 1960s — always fails. These movements want to tear things down, divide Americans, reject and replace our national foundations.

What’s wrong with a movement that, on its narrowest terms, aims to make Americans more aware of racial injustices, past and present? Nothing. In cases like those of Eric Garner, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, non-Black America has had a long-overdue education about the fact that Black lives can still be subject to the same casual cruelties of a century ago.

like many movements that overspill their initial causes of action, Wokeness now connotes much more than an effort to reform the police or denounce racial injustice when it occurs. It is, instead, an allegation that racism is a defining feature, not a flaw, of nearly every aspect of American life, from its inception to its present, in the books we read, the language we speak, the heroes we venerate, the roads we drive, the way we do business, the way we select for merit and so on.

The insult turns to injury when it comes to the solutions Wokeness prescribes, and in the way that it prescribes them.

The problem with the allegation isn’t that it’s flatly wrong: America’s past is shot through with racism and, as Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But the allegation is also incomplete, distorted, ungenerous to former generations that advanced America’s promise, and untrue to the country most Americans know today.

it is a prescription, not for genuine dialogue and reform, but for indoctrination and extirpation, based on a relentless form of race consciousness

It operates as if, in city after city, American police forces aren’t led by Black police chiefs and staffed by officers of diverse backgrounds. It operates as if white supremacy is still being systemically enforced, while ignoring the fact that a previously marginalized ethnic minority, namely Asian Americans, enjoys higher income levels than white Americans.

Above all, Wokeness pretends that incidents such as George Floyd’s murder, which are national scandals, are actually national norms

Most Americans, I suspect, not only sense the falseness of the allegation. They are, increasingly, insulted by it.

Wokeness operates as if there had been no civil rights movement, and that white Americans hadn’t been an integral part of it. It operates as if 60 years of affirmative action never happened, and that an ever-growing percentage of Black Americans don’t belong to the middle and upper class (and that they are, incidentally, concentrated in the American South). It operates as if we didn’t twice elect a Black president and recently bury a Black general as an American icon.

A typical example: The American Medical Association recently published its “Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” which includes such recommendations as replacing the term “disadvantaged” with “historically and intentionally excluded,” “social problem” with “social injustice,” “vulnerable” with “oppressed,” and “blacklist” and “blackmail” with words that don’t suggest an association between the word “black” and “suspicion or disapproval.”

This isn’t silly. It’s Orwellian. It’s a blunt attempt to turn everyday speech into a perpetual, politicized and nearly unconscious indictment of “the system.” Anyone who has spent time analyzing how the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century operated will note the similarities.

Ultimately, though, Americans are still free to reject the Woke ethos, even if they sometimes have to leave their institutions as a result.

This is why Wokeness will fail. For every attempt to cancel certain writers, others will publish them. For every diktat to fix language by replacing some words with others, people will merely find more subversive ways to say the same thing.

In the long run, Americans have always gotten behind protest movements that make the country more open, more decent, less divided. What today is called Woke does none of those things. It has no future in the home of the free.

Meanwhile, donors such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn and ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin — as well as institutions like Open Philanthropy, a charitable organization started by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz — have worked to push doomsayers from the tech industry’s margins into the mainstream.

More recently, wealthy tech philanthropists have begun recruiting an army of elite college students to prioritize the fight against rogue AI over other threats

Other skeptics, like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, are AI boosters who say that hyping such fears will impede the technology’s progress.

Critics call the AI safety movement unscientific. They say its claims about existential risk can sound closer to a religion than research

And while the sci-fi narrative resonates with public fears about runaway AI, critics say it obsesses over one kind of catastrophe to the exclusion of many others.

Open Philanthropy spokesperson Mike Levine said harms like algorithmic racism deserve a robust response. But he said those problems stem from the same root issue: AI systems not behaving as their programmers intended. The theoretical risks “were not garnering sufficient attention from others — in part because these issues were perceived as speculative,” Levine said in a statement. He compared the nonprofit’s AI focus to its work on pandemics, which also was regarded as theoretical until the coronavirus emerged.

Among the reputational hazards of the AI safety movement is its association with an array of controversial figures and ideas, like EA, which is also known for recruiting ambitious young people on elite college campuses.

The foundation began prioritizing existential risks around AI in 2016,

there was little status or money to be gained by focusing on risks. So the nonprofit set out to build a pipeline of young people who would filter into top companies and agitate for change from the insid

Colleges have been key to this growth strategy, serving as both a pathway to prestige and a recruiting ground for idealistic talent

The clubs train students in machine learning and help them find jobs in AI start-ups or one of the many nonprofit groups dedicated to AI safety.

Many of these newly minted student leaders view rogue AI as an urgent and neglected threat, potentially rivaling climate change in its ability to end human life. Many see advanced AI as the Manhattan Project of their generation

Despite the school’s ties to Silicon Valley, Mukobi said it lags behind nearby UC Berkeley, where younger faculty members research AI alignment, the term for embedding human ethics into AI systems.

Mukobi joined Stanford’s club for effective altruism, known as EA, a philosophical movement that advocates doing maximum good by calculating the expected value of charitable acts, like protecting the future from runaway AI. By 2022, AI capabilities were advancing all around him — wild developments that made those warnings seem prescient.

At Stanford, Open Philanthropy awarded Luby and Edwards more than $1.5 million in grants to launch the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, which supports student research in the growing field known as “AI safety” or “AI alignment.

from the start EA was intertwined with tech subcultures interested in futurism and rationalist thought. Over time, global poverty slid down the cause list, while rogue AI climbed toward the top.

In the past year, EA has been beset by scandal, including the fall of Bankman-Fried, one of its largest donors

Another key figure, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 bestseller “Superintelligence” is essential reading in EA circles, met public uproar when a decades-old diatribe about IQ surfaced in January.

Programming future AI systems to share human values could mean “an amazing world free from diseases, poverty, and suffering,” while failure could unleash “human extinction or our permanent disempowerment,” Mukobi wrote, offering free boba tea to anyone who attended the 30-minute intro.

Open Philanthropy’s new university fellowship offers a hefty direct deposit: undergraduate leaders receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insurance, and up to $100,000 a year to cover group expenses.

Student leaders have access to a glut of resources from donor-sponsored organizations, including an “AI Safety Fundamentals” curriculum developed by an OpenAI employee.

Interest in the topic is also growing among Stanford faculty members, Edwards said. He noted that a new postdoctoral fellow will lead a class on alignment next semester in Stanford’s storied computer science department.

Edwards discovered that shared online forums function like a form of peer review, with authors changing their original text in response to the comments

Mukobi feels energized about the growing consensus that these risks are worth exploring. He heard students talking about AI safety in the halls of Gates, the computer science building, in May after Geoffrey Hinton, another “godfather” of AI, quit Google to warn about AI. By the end of the year, Mukobi thinks the subject could be a dinner-table topic, just like climate change or the war in Ukraine.

Luby, Edwards’s teaching partner for the class on human extinction, also seems to find these arguments persuasive. He had already rearranged the order of his AI lesson plans to help students see the imminent risks from AI. No one needs to “drink the EA Kool-Aid” to have genuine concerns, he said.

Edwards, on the other hand, still sees things like climate change as a bigger threat than rogue AI. But ChatGPT and the rapid release of AI models has convinced him that there should be room to think about AI safety.

Interested students join reading groups where they get free copies of books like “The Precipice,” and may spend hours reading the latest alignment papers, posting career advice on the Effective Altruism forum, or adjusting their P(doom), a subjective estimate of the probability that advanced AI will end badly. The grants, travel, leadership roles for inexperienced graduates and sponsored co-working spaces build a close-knit community.

The course will not be taught by students or outside experts. Instead, he said, it “will be a regular Stanford class.”

The rescue efforts also couldn’t be more different: a frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea.

The Greek coastguard and government officials, in response to criticism of their handling of the disaster, have said that people on board refused any help. Activists, on the other hand, have said the people on board were pleading for help more than 15 hours before it sank. In any case, is it really the job of a coast guard to look at a ship full of desperate people, full of innocent children, and decide they don’t want help

Nobody looked at the Titan and thought: ahh well, they signed a waiver saying they accepted death was a possibility, there’s no point saving them.

If you find yourself more captivated by the story of five rich people in a submersible rather than the 750 people who sank on a fishing trawler, it’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because it’s human nature to be feel overwhelmed by suffering at scale; it’s called psychic numbing. As the saying goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

They deserve the same sort of resources and attention and empathy that five rich adventurers, who put themselves in harm’s way for the fun of it, rather than because they were desperate for a better life, have had.

I hope it makes it uncomfortably clear that, in the eyes of the media and policymakers, one missing billionaire is seemingly more important than hundreds of missing migrants.

I hope it makes more people interrogate the ways in which migrants are blamed for their deaths, blamed for seeking out better lives – and how completely different that is from the empathy afforded to millionaires seeking out underwater thrills.

What if a segment of the population actually supported, or at least tolerated, the CCP? And even if that segment involved both myth and fact, it behooves the CCP to keep the myth alive.

How does the CCP garner popular support in an information era? How does a dictatorship explain to its population that its unchallenged rule is wise, just, and socially beneficial?

All of this takes place against a backdrop of family and social developments in which we can explore household dynamics, dating habits, and professional aspirations—all within social norms for those honest party members and seemingly violated by those who are not so honest.

watch the television series Renmin de Mingyi (“In the Name of the People”), publicly available with English subtitles.

In the Name of the People is a primetime drama about a local prosecutor’s efforts to root out corruption in a modern-day, though fictional, Chinese city. Beyond the anti-corruption narrative, the series also goes into local CCP politics as some of the leaders are (you guessed it) corrupt and others are simply bureaucratic time-servers, guarding their own privileges and status without actually helping the people they purport to serve.

the series boasts one of Xi’s other main themes, “common prosperity,” a somewhat elastic term that usually means the benefits of prosperity should be shared throughout all segments of society.

The historical tools used to generate support such as mass rallies and large-scale hectoring no longer work with a more educated and communications-oriented citizenry.

the central themes are quite clear: The party has brought historical prosperity to the community and there are a few bad apples who are unfairly trying to benefit from this wealth. There are also various sluggards and mediocrities who have no capacity for improvement or sense of public responsibilities.

So we see government officials pondering if they can ever find a date (being the workaholics that they are), or discussing housework with their spouses, or sharing kitchen duties, or reviewing school work with their child.

The show makes clear that the vast majority of party members and government officials are dedicated souls who work to improve peoples’ lives. And in the end, virtue triumphs, the party triumphs, China triumphs, and most (not all) of the personal issues are resolved as well.

The show’s version of the CCP eagerly and uncynically supports Chinese culture: The same union leader from the wildcat strike also writes and publishes poetry. Calligraphy is as prized as specialty teas. And all of this is told in a lively style, similar to the Hollywood fare Americans might watch.

n the Name of the People was first broadcast in 2017 as a lead-up to the last Communist Party Congress, China’s most important decision-making gathering, held every five years. The show’s launch was a huge hit, achieving the highest broadcast ratings of any show in a decade.

Within a month, the first episode had been seen over 350 million times and just one of the streaming platforms, iQIYI, reported a total of 5.9 billion views for the show’s 55 episodes.

All of this must come as good news for the prosecutors featured so favorably in the series—for their real-life parent government body, the Supreme People’s Protectorate, commissioned and provided financing for the show.

At a minimum, these shows illustrate a stronger self-awareness in the CCP and considerable improvement in communication strategy.

Most important, it provides direction to current party members. Indeed, in some cities viewing was made obligatory and the basis for “study sessions” for party cadres

Second, the enormous public success of the series and acknowledging deficiencies of the party allows the party to control the criticism without ever addressing the fundamental question of whether a one-party system is intrinsically susceptible to corruption or poor performance.

As communication specialists like to say, There is already a conversation taking place about your brand—the only question is whether you will lead the conversation. The CCP is leading in its communications strategy and making it as easy as possible for Chinese citizens to support Xi.

it is not difficult to see that in this area, as in many others, China is breaking with tactics from the past and is playing its cards increasingly well. Whether the CCP can renew itself, reestablish that social contract, and live up to its television image is another question.