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Friday’s protests were triggered by the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after he was pinned at the neck by a white Minneapolis police officer. The demonstrations in Washington turned violent and appeared to catch officers by surprise.

ump continued his effort to project strength, using a series of inflammatory tweets and delivering partisan attacks during a time of national crisis.

The president and his family have been shaken by the size and venom of the crowds, according to the Republican. It was not immediately clear if first lady Melania Trump and the couple’s 14-year-old son, Barron, joined the president in the bunker. Secret Service protocol would have called for all those under the agency’s protection to be in the underground shelter.

Demonstrators returned Sunday afternoon, facing off against police at Lafayette Park into the evening.

They sparked one of the highest alerts on the White House complex since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 .

Former President Barack Obama is taking on an increasingly public role as the nation confronts a confluence of historic crises that has exposed deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities in America and reshaped the November election.

Obama rejected a debate he said he’d seen come up in “a little bit of chatter on the internet” about “voting versus protests, politics and participation versus civil disobedience and direct action.”

Obama called for turning the protests over Floyd’s death into policy change to ensure safer policing and increased trust between communities and law enforcement

We’re in a political season, but our country is also at an inflection point,” said Valerie Jarrett, a longtime friend and adviser to Obama.

“President Obama is not going to shy away from that dialogue simply because he’s not in office anymore.”

he warned, “at some point, attention moves away” and “protests dwindle in size” so “it’s important to take that moment that’s been created as a society, as a country, and say let’s use this to finally have an impact.”

Floyd’s death, however, has drawn a more visceral and personal reaction from the nation’s first black president. Floyd, a black man, died after a white police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for several minutes even after he stopped moving and pleading for air.

In a lengthy written statement last week, Obama said that while he understood that millions of Americans were eager to “just get back to normal” when the pandemic abates, it shouldn’t be forgotten that normal life for people of color in the U.S. involves being treated differently on account of their race.

Linda Burney, an opposition spokeswoman on Indigenous Australians, said more than 430 Indigenous people had died in Australian police custody since 1991. While Indigenous adults make up only 2 percent of the Australian population, they account for 27 percent of the prison population. "I think we should be using it as an opportunity," Burney told Australian Broadcasting Corp, referring to Floyd's death. "Whether we like it or not, it doesn't take much for racism to come out of the underbelly of this country."

Some have seen the US unrest as a chance to highlight what they see as American hypocrisy on protest movements at home versus abroad.  China's foreign ministry spokesperson called out US racism as "a chronic disease of American society". China's comments come at a time when relations with the US are particularly strained. Chinese state media is giving extensive coverage to the violent protests roiling American cities, while the unrest has also featured widely in Chinese social media.

In Europe, thousands spilled across streets in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to denounce police brutality, and those demonstrating in Paris urged the French government to take police violence more seriously and held up signs including "Racism is suffocating us". The EU's diplomatic chief Josep Borrell condemned the "abuse of power", saying Europe is "shocked and appalled" by the police killing of Floyd. He urged US authorities to rein in the "excessive use of force" as Trump ordered the military to intervene. Germany announced its support for the demonstrations. "The peaceful protests that we see in the US ... are understandable and more than legitimate. I hope that these peaceful protests won't slide further into violence, but even more than that I hope that they will make a difference in the United States," Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told reporters.

Iran's foreign ministry called on the US to "stop violence" against its own people. "To the American people: the world has heard your outcry over the state of oppression. The world is standing with you," foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said at a news conference in Tehran. "And to the American officials and police: Stop violence against your people and let them breathe," he told reporters in English. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, meanwhile, questioned foreign criticism of China, including from the US, over an imminent national security law being imposed in the Chinese territory. "They take their own country's national security very seriously, but for the security of our country, especially the situation in Hong Kong, they are looking at it through tinted glasses," she said.

Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo said Black people across the world are "shocked and distraught" by Floyd's killing. "Black people, the world over, are shocked and distraught by the killing of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in the United States of America," Akufo-Addo said in a statement. "We stand with our kith and kin in America in these difficult and trying times." Kenyan opposition leader and former prime minister Raila Odinga offered a prayer for the US "that there be justice and freedom for all human beings who call America their country". Like some in Africa who have spoken out, Odinga also noted troubles at home, saying the judging of people by character instead of skin colour "is a dream we in Africa, too, owe our citizens". And South Africa's finance minister, Tito Mboweni, recalled leading a small protest outside the US Embassy several years ago over the apparent systemic killings of Blacks. Mboweni said the US ambassador at the time, Patrick Gaspard, "invited me to his office and said: 'What you see is nothing, it is much worse'." Zimbabwe summoned the ambassador of the United States to the country over remarks by a senior US official accusing it of stirring anti-racism protests following Floyd's death.  In an interview with ABC News, US national security adviser Robert O'Brien referred to Zimbabwe and China as "foreign adversaries" using social media to stoke unrest and "sow discord" after the killing. Zimbabwe's foreign ministry spokesman James Manzou said US Ambassador Brian Nichols was called in to explain O'Brien's remarks. Government spokesman Nick Mangwana said Zimbabwe did not consider itself "America's adversary".   "We prefer having friends and allies to having unhelpful adversity with any other nation including the USA," Mangwana said.

China's foreign ministry accused the UK of having a colonial mentality with its historical link to Hong Hong stemming from "aggressive and unequal treaties".

'Time is running out'

Hong Kong has been rocked by months of enormous and often violent pro-democracy protests over the past year.

Beijing announced plans to introduce a sweeping national security law covering secession, subversion of state power, terrorism and foreign interference.

But opponents, including many Western nations, fear it will bring mainland-style political oppression to a business hub that was supposedly guaranteed freedoms and autonomy for 50 years after its 1997 handover to China from the British Empire.

In Parliament on Tuesday, UK Foreign Minister Dominic Raab said he had reached out to Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada about contingency plans if the law creates a deluge of Hong Kongers looking to leave.

We encourage more Hong Kongers to join this global petition and wish more European leaders could stand with Hong Kong," Wong said. "Hong Kong is already under threat, and time is running out in this global city."

Twice as many independent voters said they disapproved of Trump’s response to the unrest. Even among Republicans, only 67% said they approved of the way he had responded, significantly lower than the 82% who liked his overall job performance.

The officer has been charged with murder.

The survey conducted on Monday and Tuesday found 64% of American adults were “sympathetic to people who are out protesting right now,” while 27% said they were not and 9% were unsure.

Forty-seven percent of registered voters said they planned to support Biden in the Nov. 3 election, compared with 37% favoring Trump. Biden vowed not to “fan the flames of hate” in a speech on Tuesday about the unrest.

Public opinion could be particularly volatile as the protests continue to roil major cities every night. Several police officers were shot on Monday night, and Trump has derided governors who have not asked for military assistance.

The other poll conducted over the same period regarding Trump’s overall job performance and the 2020 election gathered responses from 1,113 American adults and had a credibility interval of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Three other officers (here) who were with Chauvin at the time of Floyd's death - Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao - all face two counts:

aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. Two of those officers helped keep Floyd pinned to the ground.

Under Minnesota law, second-degree murder can be charged as an intentional or unintentional act.

“It makes their job a lot easier. They don’t have to prove intent to kill,” Groshek said. “This allows for a jury to return a conviction without having to believe the cop was bad. Juries don’t like to convict cops.”

Floyd, 46, died on May 25 after Chauvin used a knee to pin his neck for nearly nine minutes. A video of the incident led to a week of sometimes violent protests and civil unrest (here) in dozens of U.S. cities.

The new charges also modify the probable cause statement that was included with Chauvin’s original charging document.

“Not only is it a terrible tactic and unsafe ... it also is sending a tone as if this is the president that has ordered this,” said Ronald Davis, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.

Davis oversaw a task force that in 2015 released new federal guidelines for improving police practices after demonstrations that turned violent over the 2014 police killing of a young black man named Michael Brown

That approach appears to have been seldom used in protests that have engulfed many U.S. cities since Floyd’s death after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes during his arrest.

For example, police in New York City have used pepper spray on protesters, hit people with batons and in one case drove two cruisers into a crowd. In New York and some other cities police themselves have been the target of violence.

“If we were dealing with traditional, peaceful protest, everything would have been different,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Monday.

Candace McCoy, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, noted police face a complicated task.

The exact origins of the group are unknown, but Antifa can be traced to Nazi Germany and Anti-Fascist Action, a militant group founded in the 1980s in the United Kingdom.

"What they're trying to do now is not only become prominent through violence at these high-profile rallies, but also to reach out through small meetings and through social networking to cultivate disenfranchised progressives who heretofore were peaceful," Levin said.

Earlier that year, Antifa protested the appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right provocateur, at the University of California, Berkeley. They also protested President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.

Peter Cvjetanovic, a white nationalist who attended the Virginia protests, said he believes the far left, including Antifa, are "just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be."

But Crow said the philosophy of Antifa is based on the idea of direct action. "The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.

Unfortunately, the February Revolution also mimicked the French Revolution by giving way to anarchy, violence and repression. As Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government floundered, Petrograd’s expatriates watched in horror as the air of optimism quickly grew toxic. Their diaries and letters detail the descent into violence as looting and killing became a common occurrence.

The February Revolution had surprised the Bolsheviks as much as anyone, and they were not powerful enough to take control early in 1917, Rappaport says. The return of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin from exile, however, galvanized the radical socialists. By the fall of 1917, the residents of Petrograd were so desperate for relief from the seemingly endless chaos that they cared little about who could bring it.

Rappaport says the first-hand accounts of Americans and other foreigners in Petrograd are valuable because they provide an unvarnished window into the events of 1917. “These were private citizens writing personal diary entries or letters. They didn’t have a particular political agenda. I looked at Russian accounts and had to wade through so much tedious politics. Their response, though, was natural and instinctive.”

There was always going to be an intervening event, be it police violence or economic strife, that would reawaken our country’s underlying racial tensions and inequity. In a country with our history – with our present – this might be the most predictable catastrophe in history.

The argument made in 2016 by conservatives who thought that Trump was manifestly unfit for the job went something like this:

Sure, we might get judges and tax cuts. But the potential downside of having a senescent, wannabe gangster as president of the United States is that (1) he might push us into a constitutional crisis and that (2) if he’s confronted with a real-world crisis, there’s a non-zero chance he could cause radical, real-world harm.

Did they really think that putting a man bereft of character, decency, and empathy in charge of the country wouldn’t make a difference?

Did they really think that dismissing each instance of his racism, bullying, fecklessness, megalomania, corruption, lies, and stupidity it wouldn’t have a cumulative effect?

to admit that Trump played any part in bringing us to this moment is to admit culpability for the role they played all the times they covered for him because, you know, Gorsuch. So instead they tweet outrage at the cities on fire and the protestors in the street with a studied blindness to the fact that this is the logical conclusion—to paraphrase John Heilemann—of putting a pyromaniac in charge of a tinder box.

The president’s behavior sets the tone for the country. When the president lacks restraint, he creates permission structures for less restraint from everyone down the chain—politicians, cops, citizens. When the president lacks character, there is a vacuum of leadership. And chaos always fills that void. When the president relishes violence and promises to unleash “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on protesters, we should not be shocked when things escalate.

The people committing that violence should be held accountable for their crimes. But this isn’t an either/or situation. You can hold those people responsible and also hold the president accountable for the toxic atmosphere he has recklessly nurtured.

And you can hold to account the people who, for reasons of either convenience, or ideology, or profit, made themselves willfully blind to what Trump has been doing.

it wears off faster among the young and energetic than among the older, more world-weary but also more patient

Middle-class Singaporean families often refer to themselves nowadays as the “sandwich generation,” by which they mean that between needing to care for elderly parents and spending heavily on tuition or tutoring and uniforms for school-age children, they have little left to spend on themselves

There are more than 10,000 cases, and numbers are rising fast. More than 800 cases were registered in just five and a half days this past week, more than the previous all-time record for a full week.

The Singaporean system lacks an open-ended entitlement akin to the U.S. Social Security system. It uses a market-based system with much to commend it, but it isn’t perfect. The system is designed to rely in part on multigenerational families taking care of the elderly, so as is the case everywhere, when a family doesn’t cohere well for one reason or another, its elderly members often suffer most.

with the coming of Singapore’s second monsoon season, the island is suffering the worst bout of dengue fever infections in more than a decade.

No country in the world has benefited more than Singapore from U.S. postwar grand strategy, except perhaps China. Which is an interesting observation, often made here, in its own right.

He proceeded to explain that the U.S. effort in Vietnam had already bought the new nations of Southeast Asia shelter from communist onslaught for three to four precious years.

LKY’s son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, repeated the same conclusion in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He added that ever since the Vietnam War era, regardless of the end of the Cold War and dramatic changes in China, the U.S. role in East Asia has been both benign—he did not say error-free—and stabilizing.

More than that, U.S. support for an expanding free-trade accented global economic order has enabled Singapore to surf the crest of burgeoning economic growth in Asia, becoming the most successful transshipment platform in history. It has enabled Singapore to benefit from several major technological developments—containerization is a good example—that have revolutionized international trade in manufactures

Few realize that military power can do more than either compel or deter. Most of the time most military power in the hands of a status quo actor like the United States neither compels nor deters; it “merely” reassures, except that over time there is nothing mere about it

The most important of these reasons—and, I’ve learned, the hardest one for foreigners to understand—is that the Protestant/Enlightenment DNA baked indelibly into the American personality requires a belief in the nation’s exceptionalist virtue to justify an activist role abroad

Singapore has ridden the great whale of Asian advancement in a sea of American-guaranteed tranquility.

Singapore’s approach to dealing with China has been one of strategic hedging. There is no getting around the need to cooperate economically and functionally with China, for Chinese influence permeates the entire region. Do a simple thought experiment: Even if Singaporeans determined to avoid China, how could they avoid the emanations of Chinese relations with and influence on Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Korea? Impossible.

Singapore’s close relationship with the United States needs to be seen as similarly enmeshed with the greater web of U.S. relationships in littoral Asia, as well as with India and the Middle East. It is misleading, therefore, to define the issue as one of Singapore’s confidence, or lack thereof, that the United States will come to Singapore’s aid and defense en extremis.

The utility of the U.S. role vis-à-vis China is mainly one of regional balancing that indirectly benefits Singaporean security.

Singapore’s hedging strategy, which reflects a similar disposition throughout Southeast Asia with variations here and there, only works within certain ranges of enabling reality. It doesn’t work if American power or will wanes too much, and it doesn’t work if the broader Sino-American regional balance collapses into glaring enmity and major-power conflict.

Over the past dozen years the worry has been too much American waning, less of capability than of strategic attention, competence, and will. Now, over the past year or two, the worry has shifted to anxiety over potential system collapse into conflict and even outright war.

It’s no fun being a sentient ping pong ball between two behemoths with stinging paddles, so they join together in ASEAN hoping that this will deflect such incentives. It won’t, but people do what they can when they cannot do what they like.

the flat-out truth: The United States is in the process of doing something no other great power in modern history has ever done. It is knowingly and voluntarily abdicating its global role and responsibilities

It is troubled within, so is internally directed for reasons good and otherwise. Thus distracted from the rest of the world in a Hamlet-like act sure to last at least a decade, it is unlikely ever to return in full to the disinterested, active, and constructive role it pioneered for itself after World War II.

The recessional began already at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, set roots during the eight years of the Obama presidency, and became a bitter, relentless, tactless, and barely shy of mad obsession during the Trump presidency.

the strategy itself is unlikely to be revivified for several reasons.

One Lee Kuan Yew vignette sums up the matter. In the autumn of 1968, at a dinner in his honor at Harvard, the Prime Minister had to sit through a litany of complaints from leading scholars about President Johnson’s disastrously escalatory war policies in Vietnam. When they were through, no doubt expecting sympathy from an Asian leader, LKY, never one to bite his tongue, turned on his hosts and announced: “You make me sick.”

When, for justifiable reasons or not, the nation loses its moral self-respect, it cannot lift its chin to look confidently upon the world, or bring itself to ask the world to look upon America as a worthy model, let alone a leader.

That fact that most Americans today also increasingly see expansive international engagement as too expensive, too dangerous, too complex to understand, and unhelpful either to the “main street” American economy or to rock-bottom American security, is relevant too

the disappearance of a single “evil” adversary in Soviet communism, the advent of near-permanent economic anxiety punctuated by the 2008-9 Great Recession—whatever numbers the stock market puts up—and the sclerotic polarization of American politics have left most Americans with little bandwidth for foreign policy narratives.

Few listen to any member of our tenured political class with the gumption to argue that U.S. internationalism remains in the national interest. In any event, few try, and even fewer manage to make any sense when they do.

In that context, pleas from thoughtful observers that we must find a mean between trying to do too much and doing too little are likely to be wasted. No thoughtful, moderate approach to any public policy question can get an actionable hearing these days.

what has happened to “the America I knew and so admired” that its people could elect a man like Donald Trump President? How could a great country deteriorate so quickly from apparent competence, lucidity of mind, and cautious self-confidence into utterly debilitating spasms of apparent self-destruction?

The political culture as a whole has become a centrism incinerator, an immoderation generator, a shuddering dynamo of shallow intellectual impetuosity of every description.

in the wake of the George Floyd unrest one side thinks a slogan—“law and order”—that is mighty close to a dogwhistle for “shoot people of color” can make it all better, while the other side advocates defunding or abolishing the police, for all the good that would do struggling inner-city underclass neighborhoods.

To any normal person these are brazenly unserious propositions, yet they suck up nearly all the oxygen the U.S. media has the inclination to report about. The optic once it reaches Singapore, 9,650 miles away, is one of raving derangement.

Drop any policy proposal into any of the great lava flows of contemporary American irrationality and any sane center it may possess will boil away into nothingness in a matter of seconds

It’s hard for many to let go of hoary assurances about American benignity, constancy, and sound judgment

It is a little like trying to peel a beloved but thoroughly battered toy out of the hands of a four-year old. They want to hold onto it, even though at some level they know it’s time to loosen their grip.

Since then the mendacious narcissism of Donald Trump, the eager acquiescence to it of nearly the entire Republican Party, and its deadly metathesis in the COVID-19 and George Floyd contexts, have changed their questions. They no longer ask how this man could have become President. Now they ask where is the bottom of this sputtering cacophonous mess? They ask what will happen before and then on and after November 3

Singapore’s good fortune in recent decades is by no means entirely an accident of its ambient geostrategic surroundings, but it owes much to those surroundings. While Singaporeans were honing the arts of good government, saving and investing in the country, educating and inventing value-added jobs for themselves, all the while keeping intercommunal relations inclined toward greater tolerance and harmony, the world was cooperating mightily with their ambitions. At the business end of that world was the United States

The U.S. grand strategy of providing security goods to the global commons sheltered Singapore’s efforts in more ways than one over the years

In 1965, when Singapore was thrust into independence from the Malaysian union, a more fraught environment could barely have been imagined. Indonesia was going crazy in the year of living dangerously, and the konfrontasi spilled over violently onto Singapore’s streets, layering on the raw feelings of race riots here in 1964. Communist Chinese infiltration of every trade union movement in the region was a fact of life, not to exclude shards of Singapore’s, and the Cultural Revolution was at full froth in China. So when U.S. Marines hit the beach at Da Nang in February 1965 the independence-generation leadership here counted it as a blessing.

this is exactly the problem now: Those massively benign trends are at risk of inanition, if not reversal.

While China is no longer either Marxist or crazy, as it was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is still Leninist, as its recent summary arrogation of Hong Kong’s negotiated special status shows. It has meanwhile grown mighty economically, advanced technologically at surprising speed, and has taken to investing grandly in its military capabilities. Its diplomacy has become more assertive, some would even say arrogant, as its Wolf Warrior nationalism has grown

The downward economic inflection of the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic strains

Across the US, a familiar chant echoed during a fifth day of protests: "No justice, no peace."

Outside groups are behind some of the violence, officials say

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced the US will designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Antifa positions can be hard to define, but many members support oppressed populations and protest the amassing of wealth by corporations and elites. Some employ radical or militant tactics to get their message across.

Hundreds arrested across the US

About four dozen police vehicles were damaged or destroyed, and more than 340 people were arrested, the official said.

"Nothing we do to provide justice for George Floyd ... matter(s) to any of these people who are out here firing upon National Guard, burning businesses of our communities," Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told reporters on Saturday.

Garner's daughter said it's "heartbreaking" that the Floyd family must endure what her family has suffered.

Cities set curfews and deploy National Guard

In Nashville, where a 10 p.m. curfew was set and Mayor John Cooper declared a state of civil emergency, officers used tear gas to disperse a crowd that turned violent.

At least 13 states and the District of Columbia have activated the National Guard to respond to the unrest, a defense official told CNN.

In Atlanta, which saw widespread destruction, looting and large blazes Friday night, Kemp authorized at least 3,000 National Guard troops ahead of protests expected Sunday.

"I am a mother to four black children in America, one of whom is 18 years old. And when I saw the murder of George Floyd, I hurt like a mother would hurt," Bottoms said. "And yesterday when I heard there were rumors about violent protests in Atlanta, I did what a mother would do, I called my son and I said, 'Where are you?' I said, 'I cannot protect you and black boys shouldn't be out today.'"

In July of 2019, Bottoms spoke out forcefully against planned Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Atlanta, and other cities, telling CNN at the time that her city was "not complicit in what's happening."

"Our officers don't enforce immigration borders," Bottoms said. "We've closed our city detention centers to ICE because we don't want to be complicit in family separation."

since 9/11 right-wing terrorists in the United States have killed 110 people for political reasons, while Antifa supporters have killed exactly no one for political reasons.

Yet there is no indication that the Trump administration will effectively criminalize being a member of an American right-wing extremist group. And for good reason: The First Amendment is the first for a reason, and it allows Americans to hold extremist beliefs of all flavors without fear of prosecution — including Antifa supporters.

It also was used by Nazi doctors in human malaria experiments in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.German scientist Claus Schilling, an expert in tropical diseases, infected hundreds of patients with malaria by exposing them to parasite-carrying mosquitoes.He then treated them with quinine and other drugs to see how they reacted.“Thirty or forty died from the malaria itself,” Franz Blaha, a physician and Czech inmate at Dachau, testified after the war. “Three hundred to four hundred died later … because of the physical condition resulting from the malaria attacks. In addition there were deaths resulting from poisoning due to overdoses.”

At that time, malaria was mostly treated with the quinine-like synthetic Atabrine, a medicine designed by German chemists in the early 1930s.

Other bizarre remedies hadn’t worked, Duran-Reynals, the quinine historian, reported.One ancient cure went: “Take the urine of the patient and mix it with some flour to make … seventy-seven small cakes … Proceed before sunrise to an anthill and throw the cakes therein. As soon as the insects have devoured the cakes the fever vanishes.”

But Atabrine, like quinine, had side effects, including gastritis, hallucinations and psychosis, Masterson wrote. Plus, it turned the skin of GIs and Marines yellow.“The most hair-raising [side effects] were rashes that … progressed grotesquely, with skin falling off in sheets, creating open sores that attracted flies,” Masterson wrote. Other side effects included “erratic mood swings, violent anger, and deep depression …[along with] the standard diarrhea, vomiting, and cramps.”Then came the rumor the drug caused impotence.During the fight for the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, Marines rejected Atabrine. Their officers had to watch them take the pills and make sure the pills were swallowed. But the Marines would later spit them out.Thousands got sick. “For every battle casualty, ten men lay sick with malaria,” Masterson wrote.

“A tree grows which they call ‘the fever tree’ … whose bark, of the color of cinnamon, made into powder … and given as a beverage, cures the fevers … it has produced miraculous results,” he reported.“Thus … did Father Calancha announce to the world that a cure had been found for the most widespread disease of the time,” Duran-Reynals wrote.

In the 1670s, despite the hidebound medical establishment, a young English pharmacist, Robert Talbor, became an expert in treating fevers. He had moved to the southeast coast of England, where fevers were “epidemical."By trial and error, he came up with a secret formula — “my particular … medicine,” he called it. He would reveal only that it was “a preparation of four vegetables,” and he warned people about using the “Jesuits’ Powder.”

The whole virtue of the pills consisted in the quinine alone.

The Tyranny of Merit is Sandel’s response to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump

By championing an “age of merit” as the solution to the challenges of globalisation, inequality and deindustrialisation, the Democratic party and its European equivalents, Sandel argues, hung the western working-class and its values out to dry – with disastrous consequences for the common good.

Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them

It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope

We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”

The recommended way to “rise” has been to get a higher education. Or, as the Blair mantra had it: “Education, education, education.

For those willing to make the requisite effort, there was the promise that: “This country will always be a place where you can make it if you try.”

First, and most obvious, the fabled “level playing field” remains a chimera. Although he says more and more of his own Harvard students are now convinced that their success is a result of their own effort, two-thirds of them come from the top fifth of the income scale.

social mobility has been stalled for decades. “Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults.”

Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.

A relentless success ethic permeated the culture: “Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively.

“On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.” Not only was this state of affairs seen as irreversible, it was also presented as laudable. “To object in any way to that was to be closed-minded, prejudiced and hostile to cosmopolitan identities.”

Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own.

As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified. “They became reliant on the professional classes as their constituency, and in the US as a source of campaign finance.

Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure

Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”

Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism?

my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites

A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race

the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”

The only way out of the crisis, Sandel believes, is to dismantle the meritocratic assumptions that have morally rubber-stamped a society of winners and losers

“This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem.

There must be a radical re-evaluation of how contributions to the common good are judged and rewarded.

The money to be earned in the City or on Wall Street, for example, is out of all proportion with the contribution of speculative finance to the real economy. A financial transactions tax would allow funds to be channelled more equably.

the word “honour” is as important as the question of pay. There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.

“We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice

Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”

Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump.

To those who, like many of his Harvard students, believe that they are simply the deserving recipients of their own success, Sandel offers the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift

“Humility is a civic virtue essential to this moment,” he says, “because it’s a necessary antidote to the meritocratic hubris that has driven us apart.”

The Tyranny of Merit is the latest salvo in Sandel’s lifelong intellectual struggle against a creeping individualism that, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, has become pervasive in western democracies

“To regard oneself as self-made and self-sufficient. This picture of the self exerts a powerful attraction because it seems on the face of it to be empowering – we can make it on our own, we can make it if we try.

It’s a certain picture of freedom but it’s flawed. It leads to a competitive market meritocracy that deepens divides and corrodes solidarity.”

Sandel draws on a vocabulary that challenges liberal notions of autonomy in a way that has been unfashionable for decades. Words such as “dependency”, “indebtedness”, “mystery”, “humility” and “luck” recur in his book.

vulnerability and mutual recognition can become the basis of a renewed sense of belonging and community. It is a vision of society that is the very opposite of what came to be known as Thatcherism, with its emphasis on self-reliance as a principal virtue.

There are, he believes, optimistic sign

“The Black Lives Matter movement has given moral energy to progressive politics. It has become a multiracial, multigenerational movement and is opening up space for a public reckoning with injustice. It shows that the remedy for inequality is not simply to remove barriers to meritocratic achievement.”

“The moral of Henry Aaron’s story is not that we should love meritocracy but that we should despise a system of racial injustice that can only be escaped by hitting home runs.”

“Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture.

Their concerns came to life Wednesday afternoon at a park in the upscale Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, where hundreds of Trump supporters gathered, waving American flags and Trump flags, to cheer two lawyers who have challenged the Georgia election results in federal court, Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood.

But in other ways, the momentum seemed to turn against Mr. Trump this week. On Tuesday, a top state election official, Gabriel Sterling, laced into the president, pleading with him to scale back the conspiratorial rhetoric that Mr. Sterling said was inspiring people to make violent threats against election workers.

Noting that the U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr, had just said that the Justice Department found no widespread fraud in the national race, Mr. Raffensperger said, “Our investigators have seen no widespread fraud either.”

The president may spout conspiracy theories and acrimony — he has publicly attacked Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp for not acceding to his wishes — but he is also the most popular figure in the Republican Party. Nationally, Mr. Trump’s sustained assault on voting integrity, while false, has persuaded many Republicans that there was something crooked about the election. And no one is sure whether, or for how long, he will continue to command the fealty of his party.

But the fact remains that Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp have refused to give Mr. Trump what he wants most: an opening that would allow the results to be overturned (Mr. Kemp has not only certified the state’s 16 electors; he has also refused to call a special session of the legislature, which people like Mr. Wood have demanded, and where the election results could ostensibly be overturned).

Aside from trying to assuage Mr. Trump, Republicans in Georgia also appear to be laying the groundwork for new limits on voting, and particularly on absentee voting. Mr. Trump has baselessly claimed that there was something fraudulent about the signature-matching system election officials used to verify the identities of absentee voters.

This week, Nse Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, said that Mr. Raffensperger was “resorting to desperate attempts to smear law-abiding organizations and scare eligible Georgians from registering to vote in critical upcoming elections.” Mr. Raffensperger’s office said on Wednesday that Ms. Ufot’s group had sent an absentee ballot registration form to his dead son.

“I would be highly surprised and very disappointed,” Mr. Chambliss, the former senator, said in an interview, “if Donald Trump came to Georgia this weekend and had any comments that weren’t positive about any Republican politician.”

The Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity.

Understanding how and why not only reveals why America is so fractured today, but illuminates the path forward, toward a more perfect union.

In measure after measure, positive change for Black Americans was actually faster in the decades before the civil rights revolution than in the decades after

The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between about 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest

The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated, then reversed

Racial integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is often believed

It accelerated sharply in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But this trend leveled off in the early 1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.

Income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970.

However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968

Black Americans on the whole have experienced flat or downward mobility in recent decades.

What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped and even reversed.

Long-run data on national trends in voting by race is patchy, but the South saw a dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed by decline and stagnation

nearly all of the gains toward equality with white voter turnout occurred between 1952 and 1964, before the Voting Rights Act passed, then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.

These data reveal a too-slow but unmistakable climb toward racial parity throughout most of the century that begins to flatline around 1970 — a picture quite unlike the hockey stick of historical shorthand.

It was Black Americans’ undaunted faith in the promise of the American “we,” and their willingness to claim their place in it, against all odds, that won them progress between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the end of the civil rights movement in the 1970s. Collectively, these migrants and their children and grandchildren steadily narrowed the Black-white gap over those years.

Some six decades later all of those upward trends reversed, setting the United States on a downward course that has brought us to the multifaceted national crisis in which we find ourselves today, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the Gilded Age

Why was the last third of the 20th century characterized by a marked deceleration of progress, and in some cases even a reversal?

We have two answers to these questions.

Substantial progress toward white support for Black equality was made in the first half of the 20th century

The first is simple and familiar: White backlash

when push came to shove, many white Americans were reluctant to live up to those principles. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68 percent of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement. In fact, many felt that the Johnson administration was moving too fast in implementing integration.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s rejection, in 1968, of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations of sweeping reforms to address racial inequality suggested that his fine-tuned political sensitivity had detected a sea change in white attitudes in the year since he — more than any previous president — had led the project of racial redress

as the century turned and the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, America experienced a remarkable moment of inflection that set the nation on an entirely new trajectory. A diverse group of reformers grabbed the reins of history and set a course toward greater economic equality, political bipartisanship, social cohesion and cultural communitarianism.

But if Black Americans’ advance toward parity with whites in many dimensions had been underway for decades before the Civil Rights revolution, why then, when the dam of legal exclusion finally broke, didn’t those trends accelerate toward full equality?

These interconnected phenomena can be summarized in a single meta-trend that we have come to call the “I-we-I” curve: An inverted U charting America’s gradual climb from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent back into egoism over the next half century

The moment America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequalities largely coincides with the moment America’s “we” decades gave way to the era of “I.”

hopes went unrealized as the whole nation shifted toward a less egalitarian ideal.

A central feature of America’s “I” decades has been a shift away from shared responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism.

Contemporary identity politics characterizes an era that could well be described as a “War of the ‘We’s’.” This is a reality that predated the election of Donald Trump, though his presidency threw it into sharp relief.

It is difficult to say which came first — white backlash against racial realignment or the broader shift from “we” to “I.”

the fact that landmark civil rights legislation passed at the very peak of the I-we-I curve suggests that an expanding sense of “we” was a prerequisite for the dismantling of the color line. Without what the historian Bruce Schulman calls the “expansive, universalist vision” that America had been building toward in the preceding decades, it is hard to imagine that such watershed change — so long and so violently resisted — would have been possible.

By the late 1960s, though the work of widening was not nearly complete, America had come closer to an inclusive “we” than ever before. But just as that inclusion began to bear tangible fruit for Black Americans, much of that fruit began to die on the vine.

The lessons of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception

we” can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized, and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive, fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.

According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites

During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according a British think tank.

The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that "fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity." Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month.

"I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart," said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon's influence is distressingly pervasive.

Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories.

Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account.

"If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you," reads the ministry's website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism," said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.

Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter -- no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.

QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.

Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).

In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.

If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.

"It's kinda like checking Fox News or CNN," -- that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a masters in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. "It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought."

"What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government," she said, "and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times."

It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It's obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion -- and hero -- in President Trump.

That's no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.

"That's a recruiting tactic," said Travis View, a host of "QAnon Anonymous," a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. "It's their red pill." (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )

View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them."The 'Save the Children' messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children."

"People who start with 'saving the children' don't stay there -- and that's the problem," he said. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality."

"This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it," he said. It's an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.

When Jesus didn't arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.

"Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side," Neff said, "as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work."

The way people have publicly questioned and debated whether I played a role in my own violent assault proves that my fears about discussing what happened were, unfortunately, warranted.

Instead, it happens because too many men treat all women as objects, which helps them to justify inflicting abuse against us when we choose to exercise our own free will.

Black women, who struggle against stereotypes and are seen as angry or threatening when we try to stand up for ourselves and our sisters.

Daniel Cameron, for his appalling conduct in denying Breonna Taylor and her family justice.

the simple phrase “Protect Black women” is controversial. We deserve to be protected as human beings. And we are entitled to our anger about a laundry list of mistreatment and neglect that we suffer.

racial bias in health care.

If we dress in fitted clothing, our curves become a topic of conversation not only on social media, but also in the workplace. The fact that Serena Williams, the greatest athlete in any sport ever, had to defend herself for wearing a bodysuit at the 2018 French Open is proof positive of how misguided the obsession with Black women’s bodies is.

Countless times, people have tried to pit me against Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, two incredible entertainers and strong women.

Or that Black women, too often in the shadows of such accomplishments, actually powered the civil rights movement

Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris lamented Mr. Wallace’s death and condemned the looting that followed, but added that none of this would be solved with a president who fanned “the flames of division in our society.”

Gov. Tom Wolf called in the National Guard. On Wednesday, the city declared a 9 p.m. curfew.

The shooting and its aftermath were guaranteed to ratchet up tensions in a country already on edge.

The White House blamed the “liberal Democrats’ war against the police” for the destruction that followed the protests

two officers confronted Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year-old with a history of mental health problems. A lawyer for the family said that he was experiencing a crisis that day and that the family told officers about it when they arrived at the scene

To vote is to believe that problems can be solved, and the election has presented a stark division as to how best solve a litany of national problems, including racial divisions and the coronavirus pandemic.

The Philadelphia police have for many years been criticized by community activists for excessive use of force against people of color.

“The department has a long history of abusive behavior, violent behavior and brutality when it comes to residents in this city, and more specifically, when it comes to Black and brown Philadelphians,”

the A.C.L.U. found that Black people in the city are more than 50 percent more likely to be stopped by the police without reasonable suspicion than white people are, and 40 percent more likely to be frisked without reasonable suspicion.

Efforts to strengthen accountability have gained some steam in Philadelphia since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May set off a national outcry over abusive policing practices

But the debates about how to improve police accountability are only made more complicated by what happened on Tuesday night nearly a dozen miles away from where crowds were protesting in Mr. Wallace’s name