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, when parents refuse vaccines it's usually due to concerns about children receiving too many shots or developing side effects, including autism

concluded childhood vaccines are safe, and a complete retraction of the study that spawned the fear that vaccines cause autism

One reason may be that some parents are trying to protect their children's immunity from diseases by insisting on specialized diets and natural living practices instead of vaccines, according to a different study.

"Vaccines are becoming the victims of their own success. Most people have never witnessed the infections that vaccines prevent."

If enough people get vaccinated you achieve "herd immunity" -- the bodies of so many people have been tricked that there's little chance of a widespread outbreak

"It's a life-threatening problem. Some people could die because you're not vaccinating," Yang said.

"It's an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I'm not going to put my child at risk to save another child," Wolfson said

The red alert -- the highest level in the system -- is due to be in force until noon Thursday local time. The city is currently under an orange alert, the second-highest level.

aims to have its emissions peak by 2030.

The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began,

Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through.

The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt.

He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope

presenting Princip his victims at close range.

on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia,

As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines.

So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992

in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs,

which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.

Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.

Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense

Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe.

After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union

To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are

ommunities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines,

Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now.

Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions.

“Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village.

Once the war came, hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants enlisted in the U.S. Army. For a time this flood of foreign-born soldiers swept nativism away. In the years after the Civil War, 12 states explicitly enfranchised immigrant aliens who had declared their intention to become naturalized but had not yet been made citizens. Voting by non-citizens who planned to become naturalized was “widely practiced and not extraordinarily controversial” in this period, political scientist Ron Hayduk argues.

In the early 1800s, as organized political parties began to fight over issues like banking and infrastructure, that changed; turnout rose to 70 percent in local and state elections. Still, presidential polls remained dull and ill-attended. That changed in Jackson’s second run for the presidency in 1828. Heated debates and even-hotter tempers attracted men to the polls

Democracy for white men did not, however, spill over to democracy for everyone; in this same period several states rolled back laws that permitted free black men to vote.

For white men, the United States became a democracy by degrees, not by design, and it showed in the chaotic voting systems

While colonial Americans cast beans, peas, and corn into containers or called their vote aloud, in the 1800s most men either wrote the candidate’s name on a blank sheet of paper or turned in a ballot helpfully printed for them by the local political party or newspaper. Outside of Massachusetts, almost no one registered to vote

Today, the ubiquity of voter registration blinds us to its impact. It is a price we all pay for voting and so no longer think of as a price at all. But nineteenth-century Americans understood the costs. Registering in person months before the election minimized the chance of fraud but doubled the difficulty of voting and the possibility of interference

Alexander Keyssar’s excellent history of voting called the 1850s a period of “narrowing of voting rights and a mushrooming upper- and middle-class antagonism to universal suffrage.”

the flood of 200,000 black men into the U.S. Army and Navy inspired them — and others — to claim the vote as their due. “If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot-box?

Another way to bar African-American men was to expand the number of disfranchising crimes. Cuffie Washington, an African American man in Ocala, Florida, learned this when election officials turned him away in 1880 because he had been convicted of stealing three oranges. Other black men were barred for theft of a gold button, a hog, or six fish. “It was a pretty general thing to convict colored men in the precinct just before an election,” one of the alleged hog thieves said.

By the fall of 1867, more than 80 percent of eligible African-American men had registered. During the subsequent elections, at least 75 percent of black men turned out to vote in five Southern states. Democracy has a long history, but almost nothing to match this story.

Smalls and his compatriots tore down racial barriers; established public school systems, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums; revised tenancy laws; and tried (sometimes disastrously) to promote railroad construction to modernize the economy. Reconstruction governments also provided crucial votes to ratify the 14th Amendment, which is still the foundation of birthright citizenship, school desegregation, protection against state limits on speech or assembly, and the right to gay marriage.

, South Carolina, the counter-revolution was brewing in the upcountry by summer 1868. Ku Klux Klans and other vigilantes there assassinated Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a wartime chaplain, constitutional convention member, and newly elected state senator, as well as three other African-American Republican leaders. Nevertheless black South Carolinians turned out in force, carried the 1868 election, and helped elect Ulysses S. Grant president.

In his March 4, 1869 inaugural, Grant called on states to settle the question of suffrage in a new 15th Amendment. Anti-slavery icon Frederick Douglass said the amendment’s meaning was plain. “We are placed upon an equal footing with all other men.” But the 15th Amendment did not actually resolve the question of who could vote or establish any actual right to vote. It merely prohibited states from excluding voters based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its own language acknowledged that states could legitimately strip the vote away for other reasons

proposed prohibitions on literacy, education, property, or religious tests died at the hands of northeastern and western Republicans who feared expanding the power of Irish and Chinese immigrants.

Nor did the 15th Amendment protect voters against terrorism. As Smalls and other African-American Republicans gained seats in Congress, they and their white allies tried to defend black voting through a series of enforcement acts that permitted the federal government to regulate registration and punish local officials for discrimination. But the Supreme Court soon undercut those laws

Without hope of victory, federal prosecutions for voting crimes fell by 90 percent after 1873.

Keeping African-American people away on election day was difficult, and potentially bad publicity, so white Democrats over the 1870s and 1880s passed registration laws and poll taxes, and shifted precinct locations to prevent black people from coming to the polls at all. In 1882, the South Carolina legislature required all voters to register again, making the registrar, as one African-American political leader said, “the emperor of suffrage.

To disfranchise rural laborers, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and other Southern states doubled residency requirements.

Using data painstakingly compiled by Philip Lampi, historians have discovered that somewhere between half and three-quarters of adult white males were eligible to vote before the Revolution; by 1812, almost the entire adult white male population could cast a ballot.

By the 1880s, this so-called “kangaroo voting” seemed the solution to every political problem. Reformer Henry George and Knights of Labor leaders hoped the Australian ballot would free workingmen from intimidation, while reformers in Boston and New York hoped it might eliminate fraud and make it difficult for illiterate men to fill out ballots.

Massachusetts leapt first in 1889, and by the 1892 election a majority of states had passed the bill. In Massachusetts, turnout dropped from 54.57 to 40.69 percent; in Vermont from 69.11 to 53.02. One statistical survey estimated that voter turnout dropped by an average of 8.2 percent. The Australian ballot’s “tendency is to gradual disfranchisement,” the New York Sun complained.

by stripping political parties’ names from the ballot, the reform made it difficult for illiterate voters, still a sizable portion of the electorate in the late 19th century. But even more profoundly, the effort to eliminate “fraud” turned election day from a riotous festival to a snooze. Over time many people stayed home

In New York, voter participation fell from nearly 90 percent in the 1880s to 57 percent by 1920

The 1888 election was almost a very different turning point for voting rights. As Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in a decade, they tried to bolster their party by establishing federal control of congressional elections so they could protect African-American voting rights in the south (and, Democrats charged, block immigrant voting in northern cities). The bill’s dual purposes were embodied in its manager, anti-immigrant, pro-black suffrage Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge. Although the bill passed the House, it died in a Senate filibuster. Democrats swept the House in the fall 1890 elections and soon repealed many of the remaining voting rights provisions.

African-American registration in Mississippi soon fell from 190,000 to 9,000; overall voter participation dropped from 70 percent in the 1870s to 50 percent in the 1880s to 15 percent by the early 1900

“We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,” Alabama’s convention chairman said in 1901, “but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”

These laws and constitutional provisions devastated voting in the South. When Tennessee passed a secret ballot law in 1889, turnout fell immediately from 78 percent to 50 percent; Virginia’s overall turnout dropped by 50 percent. For African-American voters, of course, the impact was even more staggering. In Louisiana black registration fell from 130,000 to 1,342. By 1910 only four percent of black Georgia men were registered.

Poll taxes, intimidation, fraud, and grandfather clauses all played their part, but the enduring tools of registration and the Australian ballot worked their grim magic, too, and made voters disappear.

In the landmark case Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts turned the disfranchisement of the 1890s into a racial and regional exception, one that had since been overwhelmed by the national tide of democracy. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

This is part of what political scientist Alexander Keyssar critically called the “progressive presumption” that there is an “inexorable march toward universal suffrage” interrupted only by anomalous, even un-American, regional and racial detours.

But the tools that disfranchised Jackson Giles were not all Southern and not only directed at African-American men. When the United States conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it imposed the Australian ballot there, too.

in 1903, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Massachusetts native, denied Giles’ appeal on the grounds that the court could not intervene in political questions. If citizens like Giles suffered a “great political wrong,” Holmes intoned, they could only look for help from the same political system that had just disfranchised them

The great writer Charles Chesnutt wrote that “In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.” It was a “second Dred Scott decision,” white and black activists lamented.

If the U.S. cites national security as its reason for imposing the tariffs in the face of a WTO challenge, it’s unclear how the trade body would respond. “The WTO doesn’t have a lot of experience in adjudicating this sort of dispute,” Oxenford said, noting that the U.S.’s decision to effectively target its allies and geopolitical rivals alike could make the justification seem tenuous. Even if the WTO were to rule against the U.S., it’s unlikely it would change the president’s stance. Trump threatened to pull the U.S. out of the WTO, which he has also accused of being biased against the U.S. “We lose almost all of the lawsuits within the WTO because we have fewer judges than other countries,” Trump said in October. “It’s set up. You can’t win.”

To oppose this, the League of Augsburg was formed on July 9, 1686, by Emperor Leopold, the electors of Bavaria, Saxony, and the Palatinate, and the kings of Sweden and Spain

he planned a short French invasion of the Rhineland

Louis sent his forces into the Palatinate

Louis’s inveterate opponent, William of Orange, stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, would be preoccupied with his coming attempt to overthrow James

Many German princes were aroused by Louis’s actions and feared French annexations

William had been quickly and completely successful in expelling James II from the English throne (January 1689), and the Jacobite counterrevolution that Louis supported in Ireland was crushed by William (now William III of England) at the Battle of the Boyne (July 1690)

Instead of a short venture in Germany

France was now forced to fight a nine-year-long, worldwide war

the members of the Grand Alliance responded with alacrity when Louis XIV in 1695 opened secret, separate negotiations

A movement for a general peace culminated in the Treaty of Rijswijk in September-October 1697

The rise of England and Austria as effective counterforces to France and the development by William III of the strategy of building and maintaining the Grand Alliance stand out as the significant features of this war

In 2002, they disrupted a speech by the head of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist group in Pennsylvania; 25 people were arrested in the resulting brawl.

Rivalries within the royal family lay at the heart of English politics between the reigns of Edward III (1327-77) and Henry VII (1485-1509), not least the Wars of the Roses. This was also the case in France and Scotland in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Habsburgs provide the exception: with only a few lapses, they were almost the model of family loyalty

As an heir of Henry VII, Mary could not challenge the legitimacy of the Tudor line as a whole

If Anne Boleyn was as promiscuous as was charged, then Henry VIII’s paternity was in doubt

Illegitimacy was used to justify the removal of Elizabeth and Mary from the succession in Edward VI’s settlement of the crown on Lady Jane Grey in 1553. This was of major significance. If the events of 1553 united Mary and Elizabeth in common defence of their rights as heirs to Henry VIII, they also brought the Queen of Scots to the fore as a rival to both. The basis of Mary Stuart’s claim from this point on was that she was the one descendent of Henry VII untainted by either illegitimacy or heresy

The Wars of the Roses effectively destroyed the male members of the House of Lancaster (the descendants of John of Gaunt) and Henry VII and Henry VIII completed the process. By Edward VI’s death in 1553 all the main claimants to the English crown were women, and such men as had a claim owed it to a female descent. This was the case with Henry VII himself, and moreover his mother (Lady Margaret Beaufort) was descended from John of Gaunt’s illegitimate family

Elizabeth’s alienation from Philip also inspired a reconciliation with France that effectively lasted for the rest of her reign

The events of 1553 made Elizabeth’s place in the succession an international issue.

Elizabeth’s ability to turn to France on her accession was hampered by Mary Stuart’s position as Dauphine and, after July 1559, Queen of France. Until her death in 1587, Mary was the pole around which Elizabeth’s foreign policy revolved

The furthest concession Elizabeth appears to have made to Mary was to offer a new settlement that would have circumvented the treaty of Edinburgh in the months following James VI’s birth in June 1566.

The revelation of Mary’s understanding with Philip II and their plans for Elizabeth’s deposition marked the next stage in Elizabeth’s foreign relations

Philip of Spain had a strong claim as descendant of the legitimate daughters of Gaunt’s second marriage

Elizabeth’s hesitation over the Netherlands was overcome by the arrival of Don Juan of Austria as the new Governor General in late 1576

Throughout the ensuing negotiations she made no secret of the fact that what she really wanted was an alliance with Henry III. What she could not control was the decision of William of Orange in the winter of 1579-80 (partly on the strength of the marriage negotiations) to break with Spain and offer the lordship of the Netherlands to Anjou

Enterprise of England she could not allow Philip II to regain the Netherlands, whatever Henry III did

She now had the opportunity to form a new relationship in defence of his claim to the succession

Navarre was heir to the childless Henry III under the Salic Law, but bitterly opposed on account of his religion. This – it was now appreciated in England – was something that Henry III was trying to circumvent. In 1589 the two kings allied and following Henry III’s assassination in July, Navarre succeeded him as Henry IV

Throughout the 1590s, even if the war with Spain was not as successful as was occasionally hoped, defeat was not an issue

Henry IV may have converted and then made a separate peace with Philip II in 1598, but he remained an ally

If there was an ironic aspect to Elizabeth taking Mary’s place as James’s mother, this was also the case with Essex

However, Elizabeth, James and Henry formed a triumvirate of monarchs

She is a haughty woman, falling easily into rebuke, and above all when any speak of the king [Henry IV] whom she considers for a long time to have been greatly beholding to her

Philip II’s last years were embittered by disparaging comparisons

These last twenty-one years that the queen of England has spent in the service of the world will be the most outstanding known of in history

At a series of council meetings in February 1610 the king and his ministers planned to invade Flanders in the spring

Henry IV was visiting his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, at the Hôtel Schomberg in Paris when Chastel drew his knife, wounding him in the lip.Chastel did not try to escape, confessed and was duly executed

There was also much pointing of fingers after Henry IV’s assassination

Had they not been responsible for the assassination of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, in 1584 and for the Gunpowder Plot in England in 1605? They were also seen as the hidden force that had inspired Jacques Clément, the Jacobin friar who had fatally stabbed Henry III in 1589

Henry IV is remembered as one of the most popular kings of France

The Edict of Nantes of April 1598 is commonly seen, albeit inaccurately, as an act of toleration that enabled Catholics and Protestants to live side by side in peace.

It was in 1584 on the death of François Duke of Anjou, the younger brother of Henry III, that Henry, king of Navarre became heir presumptive to the French throne. Under Salic Law, women were debarred from the line of succession, but the situation was not clear-cut, for the king of France had always been a Catholic and Henry of Navarre was a Huguenot

chose a rival candidate in the person of the old and ineffectual Cardinal Charles de Bourbon

When Henry III, who was childless, was himself assassinated in 1589 the succession problem became acute. Though Henry of Navarre was rightfully heir under the Salic Law, as a Protestant he had literally to fight his way to the throne

Following the death of the Cardinal of Bourbon in 1590, whom the Leaguers had acclaimed as King Charles X, they toyed with the idea of setting aside the Salic Law and having a Spanish Infanta, Isabella Clara Eugenia, as queen

Even after he had made peace with Spain (in 1598) and Savoy (in 1601), their rulers continued to stir up trouble among the great nobles in France

Coming to terms with Spain, she married off her son, the boyking Louis XIII, to a Spanish princess, Anne, the daughter of Philip II of Spain

to check the drift to war, but her success was uncertain

The peace of Saint-Germain in August 1570 held some prospect of permanence, since the house of Orange, leading resistance to Spain in the Netherlands

Although the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, had conferred in 1565 with Philip II’s lieutenant, the Duke of Alba, the close association of the French Crown with Spain had been broken by the death of her daughter, Philip’s Queen, in 1568

crossed the frontier to assist the rebels, and by mid-summer the French government was on the brink of open war with Spain

a majority opposed Coligny’s policy of foreign war to ensure domestic peace, but the decision lay with the King, and the ascendancy Coligny had established over Charles IX suggested he would opt for war

Catherine initiated the train of events that led to the massacre. Elizabeth of England, who had no wish to see France in control of the Netherlands, informed Alba that she did not regard the Anglo-French treaty as committing her to war, and Alba passed this information to Catherine. The Huguenot armies sustained severe setbacks, and the Queen Mother persuaded herself that war at this time would end in disaster

Associated with these conscious motives was her bitter resentment at being replaced in her son’s confidence by Admiral Coligny

This plan seems to have remained in Catherine de Medicis’ mind as an alternative for use in an emergency. In all the frantic discussions of August 23rd it involved no more than the killing of the inner circle of Protestant nobles, the young Bourbon princes, Navarre and Condé, excepted

Saint Bartholomew’s day had been prepared two whole years in advance. It was a day when one section of the nation slaughtered another; when the assassins pursued their victims under the very beds and even into the arms of princesses who vainly tried to intercede [a reference to the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois]; when Charles IX himself fired from a window of the Louvre upon those of his subjects who had escaped the butchers

The massacre became a general slaughter because the Crown needed a military force strong enough to ensure success.

When Henry of Guise, who had pursued a group of escaping Huguenots, returned to the city, the King was obliged to accept public responsibility for the counter-blow to the alleged Protestant plot

Belief in a diabolical and long-standing deception on the part of Charles IX and his mother became widespread soon after the massacre

The joy with which Philip II and Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the news confirmed Protestant suspicion of the complicity of Madrid and Rome

The age of Louis XIV, into which Voltaire was born, witnessed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of Catholic Jansenists and Quietists as well as of Huguenots

During the Regency that followed the death of Louis XIV in 1715 there was a need for another kind of hero to replace the Sun King’s tarnished military glory and record of religious persecution. Voltaire chose Louis’ grandfather, Henry of Navarre, who had accepted Catholicism after the massacre, reverted to Protestantism on his escape from court in 1576, and found Paris worth the price of a mass seventeen years later. The King who had healed French divisions after the religious wars, and granted the edict of toleration that Louis XIV had revoked, seemed the perfect candidate

asserted that the Queen Mother planned the massacre at the time of the peace of Saint-Germain in 1570

the cynical bad faith of Catherine de Medici, the turbulence of the aristocracy, and the cruelty of popular fanaticism. The lesson was reiterated with little variation

Catherine de Medici ordered the massacres in the midst of the wedding celebrations, in circumstances of profound peace, and after the most solemn oaths. Frightful as they were - and wholly destructive to the good name of France-their memory must be perpetuated, so that those who are always ready to begin unhappy religious disputes may see to what excess a partisan spirit ultimately leads

The slaughter of the Huguenots was not the outcome of a skilfully contrived and long premeditated plan, but the passions of the time, the enormity of the act, and the assertions of those who claimed, or seemed to claim, foreknowledge of the event

Saint Bartholomew had accounted for about 90,000 martyrs

But the problem with almost everything President Trump is doing today is not that he’s violating norms. The problem is that he is abusing his presidential powers to cover up his crimes and his associates’ crimes. Full stop.

The norms are just the orange rubber cones he knocked over when he drove out of his lane and headed for the crowded sidewalk.

These are not ‘conflicts of interest’. A ‘conflict of interest’ is a case in which the nature of a situation makes it impossible for a person to separate their personal interests from their public responsibilities (or to appear to do so)

What we’re seeing now are not conflicts of interest. They’re straight-up corruption.

We have an increasingly open effort to make vast sums of money with the presidency. It’s happening in front of our eyes, albeit not quite as visibly as the coverup.

for more than a year, President Trump has continued a nonstop effort to cover up his and his associates’ crimes

obstruction of justice statutes universally do not require proof of an underlying crime. You’re not allowed to stymie or obstruct a lawful criminal investigation. Full stop. The effort to do so generally speaks for itself in creating a presumption of guilt.

As is often the case with Presidents, this goes beyond mere statutes: the point is the substance of obstructing justice which the President is not only clearly doing now but has been doing more or less openly for more than a year.

The other problem with “norms” – perhaps the really critical one – is that they can easily sound like some precious bureaucratic niceties which simply aren’t that important

Again, we’re confusing the issue. It’s not norms. The President is trying to obstruct and stymie and hamstring a lawful investigation into his own crimes and those of his associates: by repeatedly lying, firing and threatening to fire people, intervening in law enforcement decisions in his own interest, fabricating fake stories to impede the investigation.

Hopes remain that the fallout could be contained. Analysts at the research firm Oxford Economics said the economic hit for Europe would be well below 0.1% of GDP, as steel and aluminium only make up a small part of the bloc’s overall exports around the world. However, they warned a tit-for-tat escalation leading to tariffs on other goods, such as cars, would have dire consequences for global trade.

Ross blamed insufficient progress in talks with Mexico and Canada over changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) for the US’s decision to slap tariffs on its two neighbours.

This is a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is factored in with the air temperature, providing a number on a coloured scale, starting with 80F (26C) which is yellow – caution, and rising through dark yellow beginning at 91F (33C) – extreme caution, orange at 103F (39.5C) – danger, and up to red beginning at 126F (52C) – extreme danger.

The average number of days per year nationwide with a heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit would more than quadruple to 24 by mid-century and increase eight-fold to 40 by late century

“Our analysis shows a hotter future that’s hard to imagine today,”

The work is the first study to examine the impacts of climate change on the heat index – instead of just temperature – when calculating the impacts of warming,

“These conditions occur at or above a heat index of 127 degrees, depending on temperature and humidity. Exposure to conditions in that range makes it difficult for human bodies to cool themselves and could be deadly,”

The FTSE, Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nikkei have all seen huge falls since the outbreak began on 31 December.

The Dow and the FTSE recently saw their biggest one day declines since 1987.

Investors fear the spread of the coronavirus will destroy economic growth and that government action may not be enough to stop the decline.

In response, central banks in many countries, including the United Kingdom, have slashed interest rates.

In the United States, the number of people filing for unemployment hit a record high, signalling an end to a decade of expansion for one of the world's largest economies.

The travel industry has been badly damaged, with airlines cutting flights and tourists cancelling business trips and holidays.

Governments around the world have introduced travel restrictions to try to contain the virus.

In the US, the Trump administration has banned travellers from European airports from entering the US.

Supermarkets and online delivery services have reported a huge growth in demand as customers stockpile goods such as toilet paper, rice and orange juice as the pandemic escalates.

In order to stop the spread of the Covid-19 outbreak, many countries across the world have started implementing very tough measures. Countries and world capital have been put under strict lockdown, bringing a total halt to major industrial production chains.

The new images clearly show how a strong reduction in emission is now in place over major cities across Europe - in particular Paris, Milan and Madrid.

In China, where the coronavirus first appeared, industrial production, sales and investment all fell in the first two months of the year, compared with the same period in 2019.

Chinese car sales, for example, dropped by 86% in February. More carmakers, like Tesla or Geely, are now selling cars online as customers stay away from showrooms.

But even the price of gold tumbled briefly in March, as investors were fearful about a global recession.

“On one side, the voices are saying what’s wrong with you guys are you not paying attention. What’s a human life worth? Saving life is more important than saving a business. You must be corrupt,” he said. “There are other people that argue . . . they have all these employees and have to make payrolls.”

The compromise area leaders settled on has been to strongly encourage people to stay home — but not to mandate it with the threat of fines and the force of law.

Opponents of a stay-at-home order point to signs that people are taking personal responsibility: Traffic counts are down 80 percent, public transit ridership has dropped 45 percent, people are, for the most part, obeying the glowing orange signs that say the beaches are closed

The US could now see 134,475 deaths by early August -- nearly double the prediction just last week of 74,000 deaths by a model from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

So far, the US has recorded more than 1,180,600 infections and at least 68,934 deaths. Over the weekend, parks in New York City and Atlanta drew crowds as residents began venturing out of their homes. In the city of Miami Beach, more than 7,300 warnings were issued to people who weren't wearing face covers, while more than 470 warnings were given to those who failed to practice social distancing.

California was one of the states where crowds gathered over the weekend as thousands of protesters descended on the state's Capitol and an Orange County beach to protest social distancing orders.

The country's R rate is now at 1.6 with coronavirus variants increasing the spread of the virus, according to the health ministry.The variant B.1.1.7, which was first identified in the United Kingdom, is also now prevalent in the country, according to the health ministry, who also said that they are worried about the presence of small clusters of the Brazilian variant.

Meanwhile, the variant first reported in Brazil, known as P.1, may be up to 2.2 times more transmissible and could evade immunity from previous Covid-19 infection by up to 61%, according to a modeling study, released earlier this month by researchers in Brazil and the UK.

Italy was under a national lockdown from March to May 2020, however there have been many localized lockdowns in regions across Italy since.

On Thursday alone Italy reported more than 25,000 new daily cases. That was its highest record since November -- and it jumped to over 26,000 cases on Friday.The last two weeks have also seen an additional 5,000 people in hospital with Covid-19, with the number in intensive care increasing by more than 650, he said.

On Saturday, Italy's new Covid-19 commissioner Paolo Figliuolo said, "By this summer, all Italian adults will be vaccinated," noting that the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which is expected to be the next coronavirus vaccine authorized by the EU, will be "decisive."Only 3.08% (1,861,852 people) of Italy's eligible population has been fully vaccinated so far, with 6,219,849 doses administered, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

Italy, once the epicenter of Covid-19 in Europe, has marked 3,149,017 Covid-19 cases in total. The country ranks sixth highest in the world for coronavirus fatalities, with 101,184 deaths recorded, according to JHU.

Hostility to science:

Racism:

Authoritarianism:

Polls show that 78 percent of Republicans don’t think Biden legitimately won and 51 percent say Congress “did not go far enough” to support “Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.”

Some have directly blamed the anti-China rhetoric of former President Donald Trump, who often made mention of the pandemic as the "China virus" or the "kung flu".

The coronavirus hit the state hard and early, grinding its bustling cities and businesses to a halt. The virus has already claimed over 50,000 Californian lives.From March to May 2020 alone, over 800 Covid-related hate incidents were reported from 34 counties in the state, according to a report released by the Asian Pacific Policy Planning Council.

Those numbers have since intensified in Orange County, where anti-Asian hate incidents are up by an estimated 1200%, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.In neighbouring Los Angeles County, hate crimes against Asian Americans are up 115%, CBS News reported.

The bill designates an official at the US Justice Department to expedite reviews of violence and hate crimes related to Covid-19. It also provides grants for state and local governments to improve their own reporting systems.

"We are in a moment of reckoning right now," Ms Nguyen adds. "We have been systematically erased on every single level and people can start to combat that by educating themselves about us.