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Top US health officials say they're encouraged by the accelerating Covid-19 vaccinations.

not enough Americans are fully vaccinated yet to suppress the spread of the virus

eased restrictions across the country coupled with spring break crowds could spell trouble,

The Games will be held this summer, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said on Sunday, “as a proof of humanity’s victory over the novel coronavirus” — even though there is no sign that Japan, let alone humanity, will defeat the coronavirus any time soon.

As of March 21, Japan ranked last for inoculations per capita among the 37 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; just 0.3 percent of the population has received a shot, according to Bloomberg. There is virtually no chance that Japanese people will be vaccinated in large enough numbers by the time the Olympics are supposed to start in late July.

Last week, Japan announced that spectators from overseas would be barred from attending the Games. The decision appears to have been partly a concession to public opinion: In one survey early this month, 77 percent of respondents opposed allowing foreign fans.

Republicans in Georgia sped a sweeping elections bill into law Thursday, making it the first presidential battleground to impose new voting restrictions following President Joe Biden's victory in the state.

The bill passed both chambers of the legislature in the span of a few hours

Kemp, who is up for reelection next year, had refused to give in to former President Donald Trump's demands last year that he overturn Biden's victory -- earning Trump's public condemnation.

The fledgling recovery was driven by services, agriculture, construction and some sectors of manufacturing, economists said. The service sector — especially financial and professional services — has done much better than expected, said Priyanka Kishore, head of South Asia at Oxford Economics.

In recent weeks, in many Indian cities, life has returned to near normal. Restaurants and bars are crowded over weekends. Movie theaters, swimming pools and gyms have reopened. Street markets are thronged with people shopping for weddings and festivals. And some schools are finally back in session.

But the data shows an uneven recovery, with small businesses facing the brunt of the downturn.“Large companies have seen a major increase in their profit. This shows up in the G.D.P. numbers. In the two consecutive quarters, the listed companies have made unprecedented record profits, ” said Mahesh Vyas, chief executive of the Center for Monitoring of the Indian Economy. “They are grabbing markets at the expense of small-scale industries. So small- and medium-size companies are not able to survive.”

More than 120,000 cases have been linked to American colleges and universities since Jan. 1, and more than 530,000 cases have been reported since the beginning of the pandemic. The Times has also identified more than 100 deaths involving college students and employees. The vast majority occurred in 2020 and involved employees.

Since students returned for the spring term, increased testing, social distancing rules and an improving national outlook have helped curb the spread on some campuses. At Ohio State, where the test positivity rate once peaked at about 5 percent, university officials reported a positivity rate of just 0.5 percent across 30,000 tests on campus in one recent week.

Despite surges at some colleges, there are positive signs. In counties with large populations of college students, coronavirus cases have been falling, mirroring a national trend in declining cases.

The immovable challenges of living in Alaska would, in theory, make it a nightmare to vaccinate all of its 731,000-plus residents: It's the largest state in the US in terms of land size, has some of the most extreme weather of any state and many resident Alaska Natives, who are disproportionately dying from Covid-19, live in the remote throes of the state.

And yet, at 40 doses administered per 100 people, Alaska is one of the leading states in the US when it comes to Covid-19 vaccinations.

What works in Alaska won't work everywhere -- it's over 660,000 square miles, after all, and not every state requires health care workers to travel by dog sled to administer vaccines. But the rest of the US can take cues from the state's unique approach to its unique problems.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he is directing the US Department of Health and Human Services to purchase an additional 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.

The administration and the pharmaceutical giant still need to negotiate when these 100 million doses will be available but it will likely happen later this year as Johnson & Johnson works to ramp up production.

"There is light at the end of this dark tunnel of this past year, but we cannot let our guard down now or assume victory is inevitable. Together we're going to get through this pandemic and usher in a healthier and more hopeful future," Biden said

“Unfortunately we have found that the new variants of Covid-19 are continuing to spread. And when you combine the variant of concern, B.1.1.7., the one first reported in the U.K., and the new variant of interest, B.1.5.2.6., that was first reported here in New York, together these new variants account for 51 percent of all cases that we have in the city right now. So for the variant of interest, B.1.5.2.6., that was reported here first in New York, our preliminary analysis indicates that it is probably more infectious than older strains of the virus. You know, what I referred last week to ‘Covid Classic.’ It may be similar in infectiousness to the B.1.1.7., the U.K. strain, but we’re not certain about this yet.

Genetic analysis suggests that roughly half of coronavirus cases in New York City now are caused by two new forms of the pathogen, city officials reported on Wednesday.

Another more contagious variant, B.1.1.7, first discovered in Britain, also is spreading steadily in the city, accounting for 12 percent of cases analyzed in the last week of February, up from 8 percent the prior week. B.1.1.7 may be more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.

More than 29 million cases have been reported in the US since the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic one year ago.

The virus plunged America into grief and crisis.

Spikes in deaths drove some communities to call in mobile units to support their morgues.

Joe Biden will sign an executive order expanding voting rights on Sunday, the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when police brutally attacked a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama.

Republicans have advanced more than 250 measures in state legislatures which aim to restrict voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The most significant will instruct federal agencies to offer voter registration opportunities if a state requests so

The global scientific consensus is clear: Emissions of planet-warming gases must be cut by nearly half by 2030 if the world is to have a good shot at averting the worst climate catastrophes.The global political response has been underwhelming so far.

The head of the United Nations climate agency, Patricia Espinosa, said the figures compiled by her office showed that “current levels of climate ambition are very far from putting us on a pathway that will meet our Paris Agreement goals.”

Still missing from the ledger is the United States, which has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country in history.

Across Maryland on Wednesday, mayors, county executives, business owners and public health officials were parsing Gov. Larry Hogan’s surprise Tuesday announcement that he was loosening statewide Covid restrictions.

“With the pace of vaccinations rapidly rising and our health metrics steadily improving, the lifting of these restrictions is a prudent, positive step in the right direction and an important part of our economic recovery,” Mr. Hogan said. He was joined at his announcement by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, a former director the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is now a senior adviser to the governor.

“I was shocked, I thought it was a joke,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and former Baltimore health commissioner.

It is hard to imagine a more fitting job for Congress than for members to join together to pass a broadly popular law that makes democracy safer, stronger and more accessible to all Americans.

The legislation has the support of at least 50 senators, plus the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. President Biden is on board and ready to sign it. So what’s the problem? Majority support in the Senate isn’t enough. In the upper chamber, a supermajority of 60 votes is required to pass even the most middling piece of legislation. That requirement is not found in the Constitution; it’s because of the filibuster, a centuries-old parliamentary tool that has been transformed into a weapon for strangling functional government.

The most compelling reason to keep the filibuster is its proponents’ argument that the rule prevents a tyranny of the majority in the Senate. That’s the rationale of the two Democrats currently standing in the way of ending it, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They have been steadfast in defending the modern filibuster as part of what they assert is a longstanding Senate custom.

Georgia's state Senate on Monday passed an election bill that would repeal no-excuse absentee voting, among other sweeping changes in the critical swing state.

The legislation, which has been championed by state Republican lawmakers, passed in 29-20. It now heads to the Georgia House of Representatives

Under SB 241, voters would need to be 65 years old or older, absent from their precinct, observing a religious holiday, be required to provide constant care for someone with a physical disability, or required to work "for the protection of the health, life, or safety of the public during the entire time the polls are open," or be an overseas or military voter to qualify for an absentee ballot.

n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way

Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one

but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Biden administration said, half of the country's adults are now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

"This is a major milestone in our country's vaccination efforts," Andy Slavitt, a White House senior adviser on the COVID-19 response, said during a midday briefing. "The number was 1% when we entered office Jan. 20."

Another 70 million vaccine doses are currently in the distribution pipeline, according to the agency.

The United States reached a significant milestone this week: More than 50% of adults have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

But in Mississippi, only 35% of adults are fully vaccinated. In Alabama, it's 37%. In Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming, they're all at or under 43%.

Estimates for achieving this nebulous goal vary widely, but states are clearly on different trajectories, and disparities in vaccination rates are sometimes even more stark at the local level.

Government officials in Peru announced on Monday the country's official COVID-19 death toll had been far lower than the real number. Instead of 69,342 Peruvians perishing from COVID-19 as of May 22, as the Peruvian government previously reported, more than 180,000 actually have died from the virus.

Officials blamed the undercounting on "a lack of testing that made it difficult to confirm whether a person had died due to the virus or some other cause,"

CONMEBOL, the governing body of the tournament, announced on Sunday that they dropped Argentina as the host country with less than two weeks to go until the start of the event.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In Colombia, nearly five hundred people a day have died of the coronavirus over the last three weeks, the nation’s most dramatic daily death rates yet. Argentina is going through the “worst moment since the pandemic began,” according to its president. Scores are dying daily in Paraguay and Uruguay, which now have the highest reported fatality rates per person in the world.

“It sounds absolutely contradictory, from an epidemiological point of view, to have 97 percent ICU occupancy and to announce a reopening,” she said, “but from the point of view of the social, economic and political context, with deep institutional mistrust, unacceptable poverty, and unemployment that is especially affecting women and young people, it is necessary to do so.”

In Colombia, rising virus cases and deaths have coincided with the largest explosion of social anger in the country’s recent history, bringing thousands of people to the streets to protest poverty exacerbated by the pandemic, among other issues, and prompting concern that the protest movement will spread throughout the region.

As the US may miss a vaccination goal set by President Joe Biden for July 4, officials are warning against complacency and states are ramping up measures to encourage reluctant residents to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

A multitude of states and companies in the last month have hoped to create demand for vaccines by awarding prizes to those inoculated.

It had fallen to under a million a day on average earlier in the week.