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Saudi Arabian legal scholar Abdullah Alaoudh has become adept at spotting state-backed harassment.

“take advantage of what they called the chaos in the U.S. and kill me on the streets,” Alhaoudh tells TIME

Although the message ended with a predictable sign-off, “your end is very close, traitor,” Alaoudh was more struck by what he took to be a reference to protests and unrest in the months leading up to the U.S. elections.

The United States has surpassed yet another devastating milestone in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: 250,000 Americans have now died from the disease. That's more than twice the number of U.S. service members killed in World War I.

"Unfortunately, we are entering what I think will be the worst stretch that we have experienced so far," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "We're seeing hot spots all across the country and new highs for the number of cases and hospitalizations."

With cases spiking, more deaths will follow — but advances in medicine in recent months have improved the odds of surviving COVID-19.

In the wake of Tuesday’s messy debate, we got a different kind of survey: a so-called instapoll. People tell a pollster they will watch a debate and agree to take a poll after it’s over. These surveys are quirky in some ways, but they do a decent job of gauging a debate’s effect. This time, the news was generally good for Joe Biden.

CNN found that Mr. Biden won the debate, 60 percent to 28 percent, while CBS News and an early cut from a Data for Progress poll found far closer seven- and 12-point leads for Mr. Biden.

But a closer look in this case raises the possibility of good news for Mr. Biden. His favorability rating improved by a net four percentage points, compared with how the same respondents answered before the debate. The president’s rating declined by a net four points.

President Donald Trump's physician, Navy Cmdr Dr. Sean Conley, held a second medical briefing that again raised more questions than answers about the President's condition.

Trump's doctors said that even though the President has had at least two concerning drops in oxygen levels, they are hoping he could be discharged as early as tomorrow from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Conley failed to answer basic questions about the President's condition and admitted that he had omitted those alarming drops in the President's oxygen levels during a news conference Saturday because he wanted to "reflect the upbeat attitude"

Biden ran a heavily policy-focused campaign, releasing dozens of lengthy and ambitious plans ranging from large-scale economic and environmental initiatives to broad actions on racial justice, education and health care.

Biden heads into office with strategies to address the COVID-19 crisis and the search for a vaccine as well.

The sheer volume of Biden's plans could make it a challenge to execute them all. On immigration alone, he has proposed more than a dozen initiatives to complete within 100 days of taking office, a feat that could prove difficult to execute.

No one understands the CCP better than Taipei. Simply put, Taiwan operates on the premise that its cross-strait counterparts are inherently untrustworthy. This was a key factor in the rapidity and comprehensiveness with which Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration responded to reports of a strange new virus in late December.

The system of integrated rapid-response agencies behind Taiwan’s successful handling of Covid-19 emerged — at least partly — in response to Bejing’s attempts to prevent Taiwan attaining observer status at the WHO’s annual World Health Assembly (WHA), beginning in the late 1990s.

“The Chen administration, in order to improve its prospects of re-election in 2004, deliberately utilized the threat posed by the SARS pandemic to appeal to Taiwanese identity,” writes Björn Alexander Lindemann in a 2014 case study of Taiwan’s WHO bid. “The mobilization of the Taiwanese population during the SARS crisis indeed benefitted the DPP government in the 2004 elections [as] public discourse shifted... to the consequences of SARS and the threat that China posed to Taiwan’s security in the run-up to the presidential elections. People were left with the impression that the island had been left on its own and were thus susceptible to the government’s efforts to appeal to Taiwanese identity and nationalist sentiments.”1

To prove this somewhat quantitatively, Putnam and Garrett simplify the complex trajectory of American society since 1900 to four curves: economic inequality, political partisanship, social capital, and cultural narcissism

it is possible to get all the disparate trends to superimpose neatly on one another. Their observation of “an unexpected and remarkable synchronicity in trends in four very different spheres over the last 125 years” is the essence of the book. All of the indicators begin in the doldrums at the start of the twentieth century, before the titular upswing takes place. This happy trend extends until the 1960s, after which these indicators pivot and slowly trace a bell curve as they collapse back to their original nadirs: rancorous partisanship, deep inequality, and anomie.

For the authors, the synchronicity cannot be accidental. To the lay reader, this logic is compelling. To the social scientist forever spouting about the distinction between correlation and causation, however, it is merely suggestive

The bill’s approval in Argentina’s lower house of Congress by 131 to 117 votes, after more than 20 hours of debate, was a legislative victory for Mr. Fernández, who has dedicated funding and political capital to improving conditions for women and for gay and transgender people

“It’s a false dilemma to say it’s one thing or the other,”

Argentina would become only the fourth nation — and by far the most populous — to make abortion legal in Latin America

Joe Biden rarely misses Sunday Mass. So it was notable when the President-elect didn't attend church on November 29, the first Sunday of Advent and the beginning of the season when Roman Catholics like Biden prepare for Christmas.

But the following weekend, Biden was back at his home parish in Wilmington, Delaware -- St. Joseph on the Brandywine -- for Saturday's vigil Mass. He was there again on Tuesday on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation.

That's a level of devotion to regular religious services not seen from recent presidents, who were professed Christians but intermittently attended church or worshipped privately while in office.

megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.

No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.

so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.

Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)

He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.

"It is a big deal because we we able to prove that we can edit human cells and we can infuse them safely into patients and it totally changed their life,"

About a year after getting the treatment, it was working so well that Gray felt comfortable flying for the first time.

NPR has had exclusive access to follow Gray through her experience since she underwent the landmark treatment on July 2, 2019. Since the last time NPR checked in with Gray in June, she has continued to improve. Researchers have become increasingly confident that the approach is safe, working for her and will continue to work. Moreover, they are becoming far more encouraged that her case is far from a fluke.

The justices did the right thing by declining to hear the case brought by red states to overturn the election results. But let’s see what happens down the road.

t’s as if someone filed a case asking the court to exercise its original jurisdiction and declare the moon to be made of green cheese. We would hardly pat the justices on the back for tossing out such a case. More likely, we would shrug and say, “There goes another nut case.”

The justices, I added, would never permit themselves to be drawn into such a sorry charade.

Fast-food restaurants have a problem: Customers are returning but workers aren’t.And, increasingly, neither are their dining rooms.

broke? Or do I want to be broke working 40 hours a week and working my life away?’”

That’s 1,734,000 openings vs. an estimated 1,475,000 unemployed people, the Fed data shows.

In 1971 Congress passed a comprehensive child-care plan. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to have crossed his desk, and arguing that “good public policy requires that we enhance rather than diminish both parental authority and parental involvement with children.”

It is expected to consist of a universal pre-kindergarten programme for three- and four-year-olds and free or heavily subsidised child care for most Americans.

Some public spending on child care has such vast benefits in later life that in broad terms it is an investment that pays for itself.

And it is one of the few remaining places to have fended off the Delta variant, which in recent months has foiled the attempts of countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, to eradicate the virus.

The result is relative freedom for Hong Kongers at home, but strict immigration and quarantine rules which leave the territory isolated.

Carrie Lam, the chief executive, says she does not intend to learn to “live with” covid-19. And until the vaccination rate improves any breaches could be disastrous.

The WHO spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars honing a globe-spanning system of defenses against a pandemic it knew would come. But the virus moved faster than the United Nations agency, exposing flaws in its design and operation that bogged down its response when the world needed to take action.

The WHO relied on an honor system to stop a viral cataclysm. Its member states had agreed to improve their ability to contain infectious disease epidemics and to report any outbreaks that might spread beyond their borders. International law requires them to do both.

Time and again, countries big and small have failed to do so. The WHO, which isn’t a regulatory agency, lacks the authority to force information from the very governments that finance its programs and elect its leaders

Having a vaccine ready to go for every class of pathogen would help America meet the goal—endorsed by Biden and the other Group of Seven leaders last month—of distributing a vaccine for any pathogen that could potentially cause a pandemic within 100 days of its emergence.

The goal is to keep an outbreak from ever again spiraling into a pandemic, Bankman-Fried said. The funding would also allow for R&D into cheap, fast, and more widely available tests for potential pathogens. As I have previously reported, America’s inability to test for the coronavirus during the first months of the outbreak all but ensured that it would swell out of control.

Appropriately enough for the Apollo comparison, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, would take home the largest share of the total, about $14 billion, according to the Guarding Against Pandemics document. BARDA is the federal agency in charge of applying basic medical research to treatments and in-the-field technology—medicine’s answer to DARPA, the famous defense R&D agency whose projects spawned GPS, weather satellites, the internet, and personal computing.

Estimates suggest that in a pre-modern, poor world, life expectancy was around 30 years in all regions of the world.

in the past five years the relationship between the world’s superpower and its Asian challenger has deteriorated in a manner that suggests few are paying heed to history.

Under Xi Jinping, China has become more aggressively assertive abroad and more authoritarian at home.

Under Donald Trump and now Joe Biden, American policy towards China has shifted from hubristic faith that it could be integrated into the existing American-led world order to something closer to paranoid containment, marked by suspicion of China’s intentions and a fearful bipartisan consensus that America’s global pre-eminence is at risk.