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Trump's appointment of a new Supreme Court justice marks the third of his tenure in office, giving Republicans a historic opportunity to deliver on the key conservative priority and campaign promise of transforming the federal courts through lifetime appointments.

Barrett, who is 48 years old, is likely to serve on the court for decades and will give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, a shift in its makeup that could have dramatic implications for a range of issues that could come before it, including the future of the Affordable Care Act and any potential disputes regarding the 2020 election.

They moved to confirm Barrett over the objections of Democrats who have argued that the process has been a rushed and cynical power grab that threatens to undermine Ginsburg's legacy.

Senate

Senate Republicans, who hold a majority in the cham

Senate Republicans, who hold a majority in the chamber, pushed ahead with one of the quickest nomination proceedings in modern times following the death of the late Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month

"By any objective standard, Judge Barrett deserves to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. The American people agree. In just a few minutes, she'll be on the Supreme Court," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said ahead of the final confirmation vote

The confirmation battle has played out in a bitterly-divided Senate, but the outcome has not been in question for much of the fight. With few exceptions, Senate Republicans quickly lined up in support of Barrett after her nomination by President Trump, while Democrats united in opposition.

Two Republican senators crossed party lines to vote with Democrats in opposition to a key procedural vote on Sunday -- Collins and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.Murkowski announced that she would ultimately vote to confirm Barrett in the final vote

Senate Republicans largely rallied around the nomination, however, praising Barrett as exceedingly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court

Senate Democrats, in contrast, have decried the nomination and the confirmation process. Democrats have warned that Barrett's confirmation will put health care protections and the Affordable Care Act in jeopardy. They have argued that the confirmation process has been rushed and accused Republicans of hypocrisy in moving ahead with the nomination after blocking consideration of former President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016.

Democrats, who are in the minority, have been limited in their ability to oppose the nomination, but have protested the process in a variety of ways.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the nomination, Democratic senators on the panel boycotted the vote, filling their seats instead with pictures of people who rely upon the Affordable Care Act in an effort to draw attention to an upcoming case on the health care law's constitutionality and their arguments that Barrett's confirmation would put the law at risk.

During confirmation hearings, Democrats sought to elicit answers from Barrett on a number of controversial topics the Supreme Court could take up. Barrett repeatedly declined, however, to specify how she might rule on a range of topics, from the Affordable Care Act to Roe v. Wade and the high court's ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

Barrett explained during the hearings that she shared a philosophy with the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, whom she clerked for, but argued she would not be an identical justice if she is confirmed.

Johnson, however, noted the onus is not on the family to pursue charges. It is up to District Attorney Larry Krasner. The family does intend to file a wrongful death suit.

The attorney described the final moments of Wallace's life as they were captured in the body cam footage, saying the officers made no attempt to diffuse the chaotic situation upon their arrival. On the contrary, he said, it was clear the officers intended to kill the mentally unstable man.

According to the family, they called 911 to summon an ambulance that would help them calm Wallace who was experiencing a psychological episode. But instead of healthcare professionals trained to handle such situations it was the two officers who showed up.

Johnson said he looked like a person in "obvious mental health crisis." "You will see a person walking around not even speaking," said Johnson, remarking that it looked as if Wallace was "in a cloud."

The video captures audio of one officer telling the other to "shoot him" before both opened fire, Johnson said.

Wallace was approximately a car and a half-length away.

Johnson also claims the video shows Wallace was incapacitated after the first shot.

"I understand he had a knife ... and I think that does not give you carte blanche to execute a man," he said.

The officers involved in the shooting claim Wallace advanced toward them with the knife but the family disputes that account. Several videos recorded by bystanders show at least one officer shouted for Wallace to put down the weapon.

The officers' names have not been released. Both have been suspended from active patrol and remain on desk duty.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has pledged to release the video and audio tapes.

Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner released a joint statement Thursday night saying the footage and 911 audio files will be released by the end of next week.

he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i

was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.

he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,

Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.

appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.

Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”

“The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’

Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.

that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots

Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.

Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”

“in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”

the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.

It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).

Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.

On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.

but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.

Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.

Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.

But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.

It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.

People could no longer say, ‘I don’t see color. We’re post-racial.’ People went, ‘No, systemic racism is here.’ Eva Paterson, Yes on Prop 16 co-chair

For years, the group didn’t see the numbers it needed to overturn it. But the pandemic’s outsized effect on people of color and the police killing of George Floyd, Paterson believes, helped tip the scales for the first time. 

“People could no longer say, ‘I don’t see color. We’re post-racial,’” she said. “People went, ‘No, systemic racism is here.’”

Polls earlier this month showed it trailing badly, fighting an uphill battle with conservative white and Asian Americans who believed it would hurt them in university admissions, even though its proponents say no quotas will be established. 

He recently praised President Donald Trump as the nation’s first truly “color-blind” president. The campaign’s biggest donation came from an Austin, Texas, group, called Students for Fair Admissions, which gave $50,000.

“One thing Prop. 16 has done, even before people vote yes or no on it, is reveal California’s true face. It’s not one we should be proud of,”

Paterson isn’t too fazed by those polls. She said the campaign always knew it wouldn’t get a majority of support on the measure without helping people see through the confusing ballot language.

Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Golden State Warriors and other cultural icons in the Black community, from Tracee Ellis Ross to Dwayne Wade. It’s also racked up endorsements from nearly every major newspaper in the state and The New York Times. 

A new poll by David Binder Research found that it’s currently tied at 45% yes and 45% no, with 10% undecided. The campaign also pointed to a new Capitol Weekly poll showing it ahead 53-47.

“I was a part of 30 Black students admitted in my class in 1972 at Berkeley Law,” Paterson recalled. “The year after affirmative action was eliminated, there was not one Black student admitted to Berkeley Law. Not one.”

One of the biggest misconceptions with affirmative action, Paterson said, is that it gives employment or educational opportunities to people who are under-qualified. In reality, she argued, there are discriminatory factors at play that make some candidates simply appear more qualified than others.

White students at well-funded high schools, for example, have more access to Advanced Placement courses than Black students at schools with less funding.

While the ban on affirmative action is often discussed in the context of school admissions, it has left its mark elsewhere, too. 

Students from both schools could get an A grade in every class, but the students with access to AP courses will have an inflated grade point average because of the way those grades are weighted.

Before 1996, the California government used to award nearly a quarter of its public contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses. When Prop 209 disbanded that program, those businesses lost out on around $825 million a year, according to a study from the Equal Justice Society.

“If you’re not forced to look beyond your comfort zone,” she said, “then people of color and women don’t get in the door.”

The new court may also make it easier for companies to degrade the environment, and harder for government agencies to address racism. Here too, states can step in with policies and laws to patch holes ripped open by the court. They can take aggressive action when it comes to protecting our air, reforming policing, expanding civil rights and more.

Second, state officials, especially attorneys general, must enforce those newly enacted laws and existing protections in state courts. Because federal enforcement actions will face hostility from the federal bench, states will need to be vigilant and aggressive.

For example, if the Supreme Court further constrains the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, states can go after corporations for violations of state securities and consumer protection statutes.

The third prong of the plan rests on progressive advocacy groups and lawyers outside government to litigate rights enshrined in state constitutions. This will be particularly important in states where leaders hew to a conservative agenda.

The final part of this plan applies to all progressives: In a conservative legal environment, we need to rethink the arguments we make and the language we use. The positions that conservatives have been taking for years can sometimes serve progressive aims.

Of course, Washington will have a key role to play, and our proposals will work best in the states that already have strong progressive traditions; it will take time for state-level victories to catch on elsewhere.

The split suggests that Moderna’s vaccine doesn’t just block the virus in most cases, but also shields the people who do get sick from the worst outcomes of the disease. It also eases concerns that a vaccine for Covid-19 may make the disease worse, not better.

Pfizer’s outside board of experts analyzed 94 volunteers and estimated that the effectiveness of its vaccine was over 90 percent. They did not specify how many people who got sick had received the vaccine or the placebo.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are similar not only because they use mRNA but also because they coax our cells to make the same viral protein, called spike. Other vaccines that don’t use mRNA also make the spike protein their target. The success of Moderna and Pfizer may bode well for them as well.

AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are also conducting Phase 3 trials on adenoviruses that carry the spike protein gene. And other companies, including Novavax and Medicago, are running advanced trials on vaccines that deliver the spike protein itself, or pieces of it, to the body.

While scientists have investigated mRNA vaccines for years, no vaccine has yet been licensed as safe and effective to use in people.

It’s possible that the distribution of one or both vaccines will begin by the end of the year.

“This is not going to dig us out of what’s ahead this next month,” Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, warned about Thanksgiving and the coming holiday season.

Both companies said they expected to apply within weeks to the F.D.A. for emergency authorization to begin vaccinating the public. In addition to the evidence for effectiveness, the companies must also submit two months of safety data on at least half of the participants.

An additional concern is that both vaccines must be stored and transported at low temperatures — minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit for Moderna, and minus 94 Fahrenheit for Pfizer — which could complicate their distribution, particularly to low-income areas in hot climates.

Researchers say the positive results from Pfizer and Moderna bode well for other vaccines, because all of the candidates being tested aim at the same target — the so-called spike protein on the coronavirus that it uses to invade human cells.

The drugmaker Moderna announced on Monday that its coronavirus vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, joining Pfizer as a front-runner in the global race to contain a raging pandemic that has killed 1.2 million people worldwide.

the Trump administration’s program to accelerate development of vaccines and treatments for Covid-19, said that if any early vaccine candidates received permission for emergency use, immunization could begin sometime in December.

Both companies plan to apply within weeks to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization to begin vaccinating the public

But a vaccine that would be widely available to the public is still months away, while the need for one is becoming increasingly urgent

Covid-19 is killing more than 1,100 Americans a day, and the last million cases occurred in just six days.

This vaccine presents the opportunity of using doctors’ offices, clinics and pharmacies as vaccination sites,” he said, adding that he would not be surprised, should both vaccines become available, if vaccination sites requested Moderna’s.

Moderna said it would have 20 million doses ready by the end of 2020

Moderna is the second company to report preliminary results from a large trial testing a vaccine. But there are still months to go before it will be widely available to the public.

The company announced on Oct. 22 that it had completed enrollment of its 30,000-person study, and that 25,650 participants had already received two shots.

Moderna has received a commitment of $955 million from the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for research and development of its vaccine, and the United States has committed up to $1.525 billion to buy 100 million doses.

According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's latest model, by March 1, the U.S. may see nearly 439,000 total deaths from COVID-19. But Mokdad and his colleagues have calculated two alternative scenarios, depending on the path the country takes. If governmental mandates to limit the spread are eased, the model predicts more deaths: perhaps 587,000 by March 1.

There has been good news this month, with Pfizer and Moderna each announcing that their experimental vaccines are highly effective in preventing disease – 95% in the case of Pfizer's, and nearly 95% for Moderna's.

"That means that schools and other institutions that serve primarily children may be continue to need to follow the nonpharmaceutical interventions longer than older adult communities, for example, just because they will not be eligible for the vaccine right away," she says.

"We are in a worse place than we were even in the spring, because in the spring it was primarily New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut that were experiencing a strain on their health care systems," Rivers says. "Right now we are seeing intense community transmission really all across the country. And that doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room to make sure that we are able to deploy extra resources to those places."

As the pandemic stretches on, people get tired of being vigilant about masks and social distancing and not gathering with others indoors. Many people have suffered economic pain from the virus and the restrictions that have followed, and are eager for their lives to return to normal.

Public health officials are pleading with Americans not to celebrate Thanksgiving the way they usually do but instead use this occasion to invent new traditions. One idea is to drop off food contactlessly to another household and then share the meal over video.

it has rushed through authorization of a massive arms sale that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East.

The Trump team has prepared legally required transition memos describing policy challenges, but there are no discussions about actions they could take or pause.

The Trump team's refusal to work with the incoming team stands in stark contrast with the conduct of previous administrations during transitions.

It's a strategy that radically breaks with past practice, could raise national security risks and will surely compound challenges for the Biden team

that the difference between Trump and Biden isn't a matter of the end goal, such as a departure from Afghanistan or a nuclear-free Iran, but simply a matter of how each leader wants to get there.

Other analysts say that damaging Biden's options might come second to a more important goal for Trump, who has floated the idea of running again in 2024.

A second official tells CNN their goal is to set so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out.

the US will withdraw 2,500 more troops from both Afghanistan and Iraq by January 15, 2021, five days before Biden takes office.There are currently about 4,500 US troops in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq.

"The price for leaving too soon or in an uncoordinated way could be very high. Afghanistan risks becoming once again a platform for international terrorists to plan and organize attacks on our homelands. And ISIS could rebuild in Afghanistan the terror caliphate it lost in Syria and Iraq,"

"We're not going to see in two months a total withdrawal from Afghanistan ... so some of this is just symbolism. ... Joe Biden can come into the White House in 2021 and put those troops back in."

China hawks in the Trump administration believe there are actions they can take now that will box Biden in, one administration official said. Steps include sanctions and trade restrictions on Chinese companies and government entities that officials believe will be politically impossible for the President-elect to undo. Axios first reported these moves.

Now the White House is building a wall of sanctions meant to prevent that from happening, creating new penalties linked to Iran's human rights abuses, its support for organizations such as Hezbollah and its ballistic missile program -- activities Iran is unlikely to stop.

Trump has floated the idea of a military strike on Iran but was dissuaded, according to The New York Times.

More visible are the administration's efforts to stymie Biden's pledge to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump rejected in 2018.

For Tehran, a central condition of rejoining the nuclear pact would be to benefit from the economic relief the deal promised but didn't deliver because of Trump's maximum pressure campaign.

They argue that in contrast, Biden's approach will be effective because he will work with partners to create what China fears most: an international united front against Beijing. That's something Biden allies say Trump has been unable to do. If Trump levies extra sanctions, the penalties will simply provide Biden with additional leverage, they say.

The web of new measures "will make it more difficult for Joe Biden to lift these sanctions and persuade companies and banks to return to Iran, especially when any sanctions lifted by Biden could be restored by a Republican president in 2025,"

under Trump, Iran has become closer to, not farther from, being able to create a nuclear weapon and that many Democrats will feel it is worth the political cost to return to the international deal meant to prevent that.

This month, the Trump administration authorized $23 billion in advanced weaponry sales to the United Arab Emirates that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East -- a deal the Biden team has expressed reservations about. The authorization came less than two months after the UAE joined a US-brokered agreement to normalize relations with Israel.

Critics worry the move could set off a new arms race in the region.

"That was something the UAE very much wanted the Trump administration to do before leaving office, and they did it very quickly and they notified even a much bigger potential package than what had been expected,

Trump's top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, is expected this week to pay the first visit by a US secretary of state to an Israeli West Bank settlement, capping an administration approach that has bucked traditional US policy and international consensus.

The President-elect is unlikely to change other norm-shattering steps by the Trump administration, including moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Dunne said. "They're just going to leave them," she said. "You're not going to undo everything."

For months, Pompeo has been pushing to designate Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels as terrorists despite pushback from State Department and United Nations officials. He may soon be successful, two State Department officials tell CNN, and if so, the move could handicap Biden's ability to develop his own policy in Yemen, because rolling back a terrorist designation is not easy, the officials said.

There are also fears that such a designation could impact humanitarian aid deliveries.

researchers found that people with obesity who caught the coronavirus were more than twice as likely to end up in the hospital and nearly 50 percent more likely to die of Covid-19. Another study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, showed that among nearly 17,000 hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the United States, more than 77 percent had excess weight or obesity.

Similar links were unmasked during the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, when researchers began to notice that infected people with obesity were more likely to wind up in the hospital and to die. Flu vaccines administered in subsequent years performed poorly in individuals with extra weight, who fell ill more often than their peers even after getting their shots

Large amounts of fat, for instance, can compress the lower parts of the lungs, making it harder for them to expand when people breathe in.

When obesity enters the picture, Dr. Beck said, some of the immune cells found in 30-year-old people “look like those of an 80-year-old.”

If the immune systems of people with obesity are more prone to pathogen amnesia, then they may need different dosages of a vaccine. Some products might not work at all in people carrying extra weight

Ms. Franklin’s case of Covid-19 was more moderate than her sister’s. But she still deteriorated quickly, to the point where she could no longer reach the bathroom without assistance.

Given this uncertainty, we are going to need to be patient. The negative tests we might want to celebrate over the next few days won’t actually tell us much. We can only hope for the best.

This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations

In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.

Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.

Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products

Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.

As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum

Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved

The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.

Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.

When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.

In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)

I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur

It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen

a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination

It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.

It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”

Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.

We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.

The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.

The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.

The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.

What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.

In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”

As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.

No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.

Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control

Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.

In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.

I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.

We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.

Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.

First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.

How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.

Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.

others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.

The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.

But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit

The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.

The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time

The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.

Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media

We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.

These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation

I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak

Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”

Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.

The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.

This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.

it has reserved enough manufacturing capacity to produce more than 1 billion doses—a goal which it aims to double by the end of next year. But that production will take time, leaving the alliance with just 700 million doses in advance market commitments in the short term—a sum significantly smaller than the number of doses reserved by many wealthy nations, and far short of its goal of providing enough doses to inoculate at least 20 percent of participating countries’ populations.

In an ideal world, the pie would be shared equitably across nations, ensuring that no country is precluded from access to these lifesaving resources. It’s a goal that COVAX, an international alliance established to ensure that all countries have equal access to the vaccine, believes it can achieve if countries are willing to work together.

According to recent modeling by Northeastern University, proportional distribution of vaccines could avert nearly twice as many deaths as a vaccine distribution limited to only high-income countries.

Further modeling conducted by the Rand Corporation concluded that inequitable vaccine distribution could cost the global economy up to $1.2 trillion in GDP. Conversely, if low- and middle-income countries were granted equal access, according to Rand, the cost to the global economy would be considerably less.

“If rich countries monopolize vaccines at the outset, it will take us a lot longer, and many more people will die, than if we distribute on a global, equitable basis.”

He said more than one million Israelis are descended from those who originally lived in Morocco.

The United Nations and much of the rest of the world refused to affirm Morocco’s claim over the area, and the United States had supported a 1991 cease-fire between the kingdom and the Western Sahara’s pro-independence Polisario Front.

After a border incident last month, the Polisario declared war on Morocco, shattering a three-decade cease-fire and threatening a full-blown military conflict in the disputed desert territory in northwest Africa.

The deal is likely to be highly popular in Israel,

By contrast, Sudan has stopped short of declaring full and normalized relations with Israel and recently threatened to withdraw from the agreement if Congress does not give it immunity from terrorism lawsuits that families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks want to bring against the country for harboring Osama bin Laden years before the attacks.

the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson called on the President to commute the sentences of and pardon all the inmates scheduled for execution; and 23 elected and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief on Wednesday in support of Bernard's appeal due to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr joined Bernard's legal team late on Thursday and had filed a petition with the Supreme Court requesting to delay the execution for two weeks so they could get up to speed on Bernard's case.

"Brandon's execution is a stain on America's criminal justice system. But I pray that even in his death, Brandon will advance his commitment to helping others by moving us closer to a time when this country does not pointlessly and maliciously kill young Black men who pose no threat to anyone," Bernard's attorney Robert Owens said in a statement.

The court's decision left Trump as Bernard's last hope. The President did not act.Trump was made aware of the case -- and of the calls by celebrities and activists to commute Bernard's sentence -- over the past several days

"the jury heard ample evidence indicating that Bernard did not have a leadership role in the gang -- and was not even a full-fledged member."

Five of the sentencing jurors came forward saying that if they had been aware of the undisclosed information, they would not have agreed to sentence Bernard to death, Owens said.

"The decision to move forward with all these super spreader events in the midst of a pandemic that has already killed a quarter of a million Americans is historically unprecedented," Dunham said.

According to Chief Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson's order denying the preliminary injunction, up to 125 people enter the facility for an execution, including nearly 40 out-of-state Bureau of Prisons employees who are part of the execution team.

Interactions between the execution team and Federal Correctional Center Terre Haute staffers are "extremely limited, and members of the execution team generally do not even enter the FCI or interact with inmates there. Plaintiffs do not interact with inmates on death row or with anyone in the execution facility,"

when Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, tried to advance the legislation setting up the Latino museum on the National Mall.

“My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity — what Theodore Roosevelt called hyphenated Americanism — is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.”

“Surely in a year where we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, this is the time, this is the moment to finally pass the legislation unanimously recommended by an independent commission to establish an American women’s history museum in our nation’s capital,”

He argued that Latinos were just as entitled to their own cultural institution as African-Americans and Native Americans, to whom Smithsonian museums have been dedicated in recent years.

That concern, along with budgetary ones, has been one of the main points of opposition to a Latino museum in recent years amid extensive lobbying campaigns in its favor.

“The so-called critical theory undergirding this movement does not celebrate diversity; it weaponizes diversity,” he said. “It sharpens all those hyphens into so many knives and daggers. It has turned our college campuses into grievance pageants and loose Orwellian mobs to cancel anyone daring to express an original thought.”

Even if Congress approved the museums, it would likely take about another decade to open their doors.

Congress may have to pass yet another short-term stopgap resolution to give them more time to find an agreement.

If a sweeping government funding bill is released without pandemic relief, that would spell serious trouble for the effort to pass Covid aid before Congress breaks for the holidays and could signal the impending demise of the last-ditch effort to secure a stimulus deal.

As of late Monday night, there still was no final consensus, with familiar sticking points: Democrats want state and local money to help ensure workers who provide vital services are not laid off. Republicans believe much of that money will be wasted. And the GOP lawmakers who are open to more state and local aid say there also need to be lawsuit protections for businesses and other entities, but Democrats argue that the GOP proposals on that idea go too far.

House and Senate appropriators are planning to unveil a $1.4 trillion spending bill Tuesday to fund federal agencies until the end of September 2021, which leaves little time before the Friday deadline for what's expected to be a massive package to pass both chambers.

It's clear to virtually everyone in Washington that a deal is within reach that includes several key provisions: An extension of jobless benefits, money for vaccine distribution, funds for schools, small business loans -- among a handful of other issues.

Self-imposed deadlines have a way of slipping in Congress and it's always possible lawmakers won't release a massive funding deal Tuesday despite their intention to do so. If that happens, it could mean that talks over both stimulus and government spending are breaking down and lawmakers may be forced to punt the issue further down the road by walking away from a pandemic stimulus deal during the lame duck session of Congress and passing a short-term funding patch rather than a far broader, comprehensive spending deal.

"Either 100 senators will be here shaking our heads, slinging blame and offering excuses about why we still have not been able to make a law -- or we will break for the holidays having sent another huge dose of relief out the door for the people who need it."

There were clear signs on Monday that Democrats could be forced to abandon a push for at least $160 billion in aid to cash-strapped states and cities in order to get a bipartisan agreement on some relief provisions.

during a 22-minute phone call Monday evening, the speaker told Mnuchin that the GOP insistence to include lawsuit protections for businesses and other entities "remain an obstacle" to getting an agreement on state and local aid -- since Republicans have demanded the two be tied together.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers unveiled the legislative text of a $908 billion compromise Covid relief plan on Monday

If the aid is ultimately dropped from the plan, it would amount to a major concession from Democrats, who had advanced roughly $1 trillion for aid to states and cities as part of a $3 trillion-plus plan that passed the House in May and that the Senate never considered. Democrats had argued the money was paramount to ensure that workers performing vital services -- ranging from first responders to health care workers -- could continue to say on the job.

If Democrats do drop their demand for state and local aid, the consensus bill put forward by the bipartisan coalition on Monday that sidesteps that issue as well as liability protections could serve as a ready-made starting point for what could be agreed to more widely on Covid relief.That bill has a price tag of $748 billion and includes policy ideas that have proven popular across party lines such as a boost to the Paycheck Protection Program

"I am convinced the majority leader will actually bring legislation to the floor that will either take up our $748 billion bill or the total of $908 billion, or perhaps he will pick and choose from what we put together in a bill of his own and attach it to the omnibus spending bill."

According to a summary released on Monday, the bill would provide $300 billion for the Small Business Administration and funds that would give small businesses the chance to benefit from another loan through the PPP with certain eligibility restrictions.There would be $2.58 billion for CDC vaccine distribution and infrastructure and an extension of pandemic unemployment insurance programs for 16 weeks along with a $300 per week expansion of federal supplemental unemployment insurance benefits

Putnam concludes that during the Progressive Era (1890-c. 1910) “the institutional, social, and cultural seeds” of what he labels the “Great Convergence” were sown. Out of those seeds emerged more than six decades (up until the late 1960s) of “imperfect but steady upward progress toward greater economic equality, more cooperation in the public square, a stronger social fabric, and a growing culture of solidarity,”

“then suddenly and unexpectedly . . . the Great Convergence was reversed in a dramatic U-turn, to be followed by a half century of Great Divergence.”

the USA “entered the Sixties in an increasingly ‘we’ mode—with communes, shared values, and accelerating efforts toward racial and economic equality—and we left the Sixties in an increasingly ‘I’ mode—focused on ‘rights,’ culture wars, and what would be almost instantly dubbed the ‘Me Decade’ of the 1970s.”

Each Upswing chapter from 2 through 5 is devoted to a separate field--economics, politics, society, or culture. And each deals with the trends from the 1890s, when the Progressive Age began, up to the present era.

the “we” of the Great Convergence was often meant for white males more than for all Americans.

Although Putnam discusses many historical explanations for the transformation beginning in the late 1960s, like the backlash against the gains of African Americans and women, he is wise enough to realize that major historical occurrences, like the transformation considered here, almost always have innumerable causes.

It was then, in reaction to a “Gilded Age” similar to our own, that the turn toward a more cooperative, less self-centered society began

describes the Progressivism of the that time as a diverse movement “to limit the socially destructive effects of morally unhindered capitalism, to extract from those [capitalist] markets the tasks they had demonstrably bungled

“Communitarian sentiment,” he declares, “was at the heart of the Progressive mood. Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and other progressives were explicit in rejecting ‘individualism,’

The 1920s, with its three consecutive Republican presidents, slowed down the growth of communitarianism.

with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II, it renewed itself until it began in the late 1960s to reverse itself

some of the accomplishments of the Progressive Era: “the secret ballot; the direct primary system; the popular election of senators; . . . women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities;

a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and playgrounds all owe their origins to the efforts of a diverse array of Progressive reformers.”

“Progressivism . . . was not confined to the Progressive Party but affected in a striking way all the major and minor parties and the whole tone of political life. . . . It was a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation.”

To make his point that Progressivism was primarily a “bottom up” movement involving countless citizen reformers, he provides brief biographical sketches on some of them such as Frances Perkins (b. 1880), Paul Harris (b. 1868), Ida B. Wells (b. 1862), and Tom Johnson (b. 1854).

Generalizing about the Progressive movement, Putnam writes it “was, first and foremost, a moral awakening.”

Aided in part by the religious thinking of the Social Gospel thinkers, “Americans from all walks of life began to repudiate the self-centered, hyper-individualist creed of the Gilded Age.”

The movement was also pragmatic, not ideological, for “true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.

Putnam believes that Progressives came to realize that “to succeed they would have to compromise—to find a way to put private property, personal liberty, and economic growth on more equal footing with communitarian ideals

These lessons regarding moral urgency, pragmatism, and compromise are ones that Putnam thinks modern reformers need to apply.

he does not yet “see a truly nonpartisan movement” bringing “issue-specific efforts together in a compelling citizen-driven call for large-scale reform.” Nor does he see “a broader vision for the future of America.”

we should, Putnam insists, learn from what they did wrong. Most significantly, they failed to make the “we” they stressed inclusive enough, paying insufficient attention to gender and racial discrimination.

“The question we face today is not whether we can or should turn back the tide of history, but whether we can resurrect the earlier communitarian virtues in a way that does not reverse the progress we’ve made in terms of individual liberties. Both values are American, and we require a balance and integration of both.”

If you have a doctorate in pharmacy or education or biology, it doesn’t matter: Call yourself a doctor,

the suggestion that Dr. Biden not use the honorific was blatantly sexist and emblematic of the way many men question or disparage women’s credentials.

I’ve certainly encountered a number of doctors in my professional life who are uncomfortable using the honorific term Dr. for anyone who doesn’t have an M.D.,” she said. “But I would call that an old-fashioned view. I don’t say this out loud to any of them, but I think: Which of us studied for longer?”

In the 19th century, the title was widely contested, and people were sued for using “doctor” on calling cards or advertisements if they hadn’t graduated from a recognized medical school

Mr. Epstein, 83, an essayist, author and former editor of The American Scholar, has been accused of advancing offensive views before.