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Women and people of color may shoulder a disproportionate amount of emotional stress both in and outside of the workplace.

Women are at least twice as likely to have had depression as men, according to federal data. And Black people are less likely than non-Hispanic white people to receive treatment for depression or prescription medications for mental health

For example, you might notice that you dread starting work each day, or you feel so anxious that you have trouble thinking about everything that you’re supposed to do. Perhaps your emails are piling up and you aren’t communicating with people as much as you typically would. If you’re feeling ineffective in your job, you may also start to engage in more negative self-talk, like: “I’m no good at my job anyway. I’m useless,” Dr. Gold said.

Once you realize you need help, seek out a trusted friend, mentor, co-worker, peer group or therapist, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who researches Black women’s mental health.

Remember that you are a worthy and valuable human being, separate from your job function, productivity and even how you might be evaluated by others,” Dr. Burnett-Zeigler said. “When feelings of self-doubt and not belonging show up, don’t lose sight of the unique talents and ideas that you bring to the workplace.”

It is illegal for an employer to discriminate against you simply because you have a mental health condition.

“In the Netherlands, when people did have lessons about slavery, it was usually about the United States and the cotton plantations in the South,” she said. “The story of slavery is the North American story. That’s why it’s important to make sure that it’s clear that it’s not American history, or even colonial history. It’s our national history.”

No tsunami warnings, advisories, watches, or threats were issued following the earthquakes, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Tsunami Warning System.

For the second year in a row, anniversary commemorations are marked by virus travel restrictions that prevented veterans or families of fallen soldiers from the U.S., Britain, Canada and other Allied countries from making the trip to France. Only a few officials were allowed exceptions.

On June 6, 1944, "In the heart of the mist that enveloped the Normandy Coast ... was a lightning bolt of freedom," French Defense Minister Florence Parly told the ceremony. "France does not forget. France is forever grateful."

Most public events have been canceled, and the official ceremonies are limited to a small number of selected guests and dignitaries.Denis van den Brink, a WWII expert working for the town of Carentan, site of a strategic battle near Utah Beach, acknowledged the "big loss, the big absence is all the veterans who couldn't travel."

Over the anniversary weekend, many local residents have come out to visit the monuments marking the key moments of the fight and show their gratitude to the soldiers. French World War II history enthusiasts, and a few travelers from neighboring European countries, could also be seen in jeeps and military vehicles on the small roads of Normandy.

Some reenactors came to Omaha Beach in the early hours of the day to pay tribute to those who fell that day, bringing flowers and American flags.

On D-Day, 4,414 Allied troops lost their lives, 2,501 of them Americans. More than 5,000 were wounded. On the German side, several thousand were killed or wounded.

The cemetery contains 9,380 graves, most of them for servicemen who lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations. Another 1,557 names are inscribed on the Walls of the Missing.

Normandy has more than 20 military cemeteries holding mostly Americans, Germans, French, British, Canadians and Polish troops who took part in the historic battle.

No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white churches.

“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination.

Dr. Simone Gold, a prominent Covid-19 skeptic who was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, told an evangelical congregation in Florida that they were in danger of being “coerced into taking an experimental biological agent.”

“Go ahead and throw us in the lions’ den, go ahead and throw us in the furnace,” she said, referring to two biblical stories in which God’s people miraculously survive persecution after refusing to submit to temporal powers.

“Fear is the motivating power behind all of this, and fear is the opposite of who God is,” said Teresa Beukers, who travels throughout California in a motor home. “I violently oppose fear.”

Some evangelicals believe that any Covid restrictions — including mask mandates and restrictions on in-person church worship — constitute oppression.

The vaccines do not include fetal tissue, and no additional abortions are required to manufacture them. Still, the kernel of a connection has metastasized online into false rumors about human remains or fetal DNA being an ingredient in the vaccines.

White evangelicals who do not plan to get vaccinated sometimes say they see no need, because they do not feel at risk. Rates of Covid-19 death have been about twice as high for Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans as for white Americans.

There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci are not going to be able to persuade evangelicals, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School who is leading an outreach project to educate evangelicals about the vaccine.

Mr. Rainey helped his own Southern Baptist congregation get ahead of false information by publicly interviewing medical experts — a retired colonel specializing in infectious disease, a church member who is a Walter Reed logistics management analyst, and a church elder who is a nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“It is necessary for pastors to instruct their people that we don’t always have to be adversaries with the culture around us,” he said. “We believe Jesus died for those people, so why in the world would we see them as adversaries?”

Indexing has gone big, very big. For nine in 10 companies on the S&P 500, their largest single shareholder is one of the Big Three. For many, the big indexers control 20 percent or more of their shares. Index funds now control 20 to 30 percent of the American equities market, if not more.

One primary concern comes from the analysts at Bernstein: “A supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active, market-led capital management.”

Passively managed investment options do not just outperform actively managed ones in terms of both better returns and lower fees. They eat their lunch.

Let’s imagine that a decade ago you invested $100 in an index fund charging a 0.04 percent fee and $100 in a traditional mutual fund charging a 1.5 percent fee. Let’s also imagine that the index fund tracked the S&P 500, and that the mutual fund ended up returning what the S&P 500 returned. Your passively invested $100 would have turned into $356.66 in 10 years. Your traditionally invested $100 would have turned into $313.37.

Actively managed investment options could make up for their higher fees with higher returns. And some do, some of the time. Yet scores of industry and academic studies stretching over decades show that trying to beat the market tends to result in lower returns than just buying the market. Only a quarter of actively managed mutual funds exceeded the returns of their passively managed cousins in the decade leading up to 2019,

What might be good for retail investors might not be good for the financial markets, public companies, or the American economy writ large, and the passive revolution’s scope has raised all sorts of hand-wringing and red-flagging. Analysts at Bernstein have called passive investing “worse than Marxism.” The investor Michael Burry, of The Big Short fame, has called it a “bubble,” and a co-head of Goldman Sachs’s investment-management division has warned about froth too. Shortly before his death in 2019, Bogle himself warned that index funds’ dominance might not “serve the national interest.”

The problem is that the public markets have been cornered by a group of investment managers small enough to fit at a lunch counter, dedicated to quiescence and inertia.

Active managers direct investment dollars to companies on the basis of those companies’ research-and-development prospects, human capital, regulatory outlook, and so on. They take new information and price it into a company’s stock when buying and selling shares.

Passive investors, by contrast, ignore annual reports and market rumors. They do nothing with trading-floor gossip. They make no attempt to research what to invest in and what to skip. Whether holding international or domestic assets, holding stocks or bonds, or using a mutual-fund structure or an ETF structure, they just mirror the market. Big U.S.-stock index funds buy big U.S. stocks just because they’re big U.S. stocks.

At least in a Soviet-type centrally planned economy, apparatchiks would be making some attempt to allocate resources efficiently.

Passive management is merely a giant phenomenon, not an all-encompassing one. Hundreds of actively managed mutual funds are still out there, as are legions of day traders, hedge funds, and private offices buying and selling and buying and selling. Stock prices still move around, sometimes dramatically, on the basis of new data and new ideas.

Still, passive investing may well be degrading the informational content of the markets, messing up price signals and making business decisions harder as a result.

When one of these commodities ends up on an index, the firms that use that commodity in their business see a 6 percent increase in costs and a 40 percent decrease in operating profits, relative to firms without exposure to the commodity, the academics found

the price fluctuations of a newly indexed stock “magically and quickly” change. A firm’s shares begin to move “more closely with its 499 new neighbors and less closely with the rest of the market. It is as if it has joined a new school of fish.”

More broadly, the Bernstein analysts, among others, worry that index-linked investing is increasing correlation, whereby the prices of stocks, bonds, and other assets move up or down or sideways together.

Their theory is that ETF trading shifts prices in subtle ways, making it harder for businesses to know when to buy their gold and copper. Corporate executives “are being influenced by what happens in the futures market, and what happens in the futures market is being influenced by ETF trading,”

A far bigger concern is that the rise of the indexers might be making American firms less competitive, through “common ownership,” in which the mega-asset managers control large stakes in multiple competitors in the same industry. The passive firms control big chunks of the airlines American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United, for instance

The rise of common ownership might be perverting corporate behavior in weird ways, academics argue. Think about the incentives like this: Let’s imagine that you are a major shareholder in a public widget company. We’d expect you to desire—insist, even—that the company fight for market share and profits. But now imagine that you are a major shareholder in all the important widget companies. You would no longer really care which one succeeded, particularly not if one company doing better meant another company doing worse. You’d just care about the widget sector’s corporate profits, which would go up if the widget companies quit competing with one another and started raising prices to pad their bottom line.

one major paper showed that common ownership of airline stocks had the effect of raising ticket prices by 3 to 7 percent.

A separate study showed that consumers are paying higher prices for prescription medicines because generic-drug makers have less incentive to compete with the companies making name-brand drugs.

Yet another study showed that common ownership is leading retail banks to charge higher prices.

Across firms, executive compensation seems to be more closely linked to a company’s performance when its shareholders are not invested in the company’s rivals, the study found. In other words, firms stop paying managers for performance when owned by the same people who own their rivals.

The market clout of the indexers raises other questions too. The actual owners of the stocks—not the index-fund managers but the people putting money into index funds—have little say over the companies they own. Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street, not Mom and Dad, vote in shareholder elections

In fact, the Big Three cast roughly 25 percent of the votes in S&P 500 companies.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the chief executive officer of State Street said he thought it was “almost inevitable, when you see this kind of concentration, that it probably will make sense to do something about it.”

But figuring out what the appropriate restrictions are depends on determining just what the problem with the indexers is—are they distorting price signals, raising the cost of consumer goods, posing financial systemic risk, or do they just have the market cornered? Then, what to do about it? Common ownership is not a problem the government is used to handling.

, thanks to the passive revolution, a broad variety and huge number of firms might have less incentive to compete. The effect on the real economy might look a lot like that of rising corporate concentration. And the two phenomena might be catalyzing one another, as index investing increases the number of mergers and makes them more lucrative.

In recent decades, the whole economy has gone on autopilot. Index-fund investment is hyperconcentrated. So is online retail. So are pharmaceuticals. So is broadband. Name an industry, and it is likely dominated by a handful of giant players. That has led to all sorts of deleterious downstream effects: suppressing workers’ wages, raising consumer prices, stifling innovation, stoking inequality, and suffocating business creation

The problem is not just the indexers. It is the public markets they reflect, where more chaos, more speculation, more risk, more innovation, and more competition are desperately needed.

Other leading American health officials, however, have not encouraged the behavior. The C.D.C. — which at the beginning of the pandemic advised against wearing masks, and only changed its guidance a couple of months later — does not advise people with flu symptoms to wear masks, and says they “may not effectively limit transmission in the community.”

So far, Dr. Leung said, there has been no clear evidence from randomized controlled trials — the gold standard in scientific research — that masking reduced transmission of influenza viruses in a community.

For similar reasons, the fact that the flu all but vanished in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic — and that many Americans anecdotally reported that they caught fewer colds than usual in 2020 — is not evidence alone that masks were responsible.

"The medical evidence is clear: access to medication-assisted treatment, including buprenorphine that can be prescribed in office-based settings, is the gold standard for treating individuals suffering from opioid use disorder,"

The administration's move comes at a time when the U.S. is again facing record levels of drug overdose deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 83,000 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. in the 12 months ending in June 2020, the CDC said.

The Department of Health and Human Services is eliminating the requirement that physicians obtain a special federal waiver in order to prescribe buprenorphine,

The American Medical Association also praised the move, saying it will allow earlier intervention by doctors treating patients suffering addiction.

"With this change, office-based physicians and physician-led teams working with patients to manage their other medical conditions can also treat them for their opioid use disorder,"

Harris also said allowing doctors to treat opioid addiction as they treat other medical conditions, without additional regulatory hurdles, will reduce the stigma that has often shaped the healthcare response to substance use disorders.

doctors who possess a Drug Enforcement Administration registration will still be limited to treating no more than 30 in-state patients with buprenorphine for addiction treatment at any one time.

The guidelines are not considered a new law or federal regulation, making it very easy for the President-elect Joe Biden administration to walk back this policy if so desired. Giroir told Stat News that he thinks that scenario is unlikely, saying, "I doubt it seriously."

But in terms of how the U.S. has responded, in terms of how the CDC has responded ... are you able to defend the Trump administration's record on this as anything other than a catastrophic failure?Well, I'm actually very proud of the response that CDC has done. I think if I have one criticism that I do believe is significant is the importance of consistency and unity of message.

Last September, you testified before a Senate panel that masks were an effective tool to combat spread. Also, that a vaccine would not be widely available to the general public until summer or fall of this year, 2021. And a few hours later, the president came out, gave a press conference and contradicted you on both points. He said you were confused. Were you confused?No. I stand by my comments that masks are extremely effective and what I was trying to point out — if you had a vaccine, it was 50% effective and you were the half that it didn't work in, your mask is your best shot.

The gold standard for the nation's public health — has been tarnished." How would you respond to that?That's just not true. The men and women at CDC are highly respected across this nation and around the world. Clearly, there's no doubt that the lack of reinforcement and support from some individuals in the administration of the public health message had impact.

So when the president came out and contradicted you and said, "[Redfield is] confused," do you have an obligation then to stand up and say, no, sir?What I did was just repeat the position that I took, I didn't change the position, I just repeated the position as I did for you just now.

When you say the CDC has done everything it could to get the right guidance out there, to get good public messaging out there, why did the CDC stop giving press conferences for critical months in the middle of the pandemic?Yes, you know, I'm very disappointed in that. Again, the reality is --But you're in charge of it. So why, when we went back and looked at the numbers. In January, you did 10 media telebriefings. In February, you did eight, and then it fell off a cliff. There were two in March, zero in April, zero in May. Why?I would say, you know, that ultimately the ability to do those briefings had to be cleared by the secretary of health's office for us to be able to do those. That's the system that's in place under the current relationship between CDC and the secretary of health.

I interviewed you in April of last year, and I asked you what your sense was of where we were in the arc of this. And here's what you said: "We're nearing the peak of the outbreak, the pandemic, in our country right now. ..." What goes through your mind when you hear those words now?Well, as you know, we were looking at that at the time of what we call the first peak, the spring surge, and obviously that was at a time when we still didn't understand to the fullest degree asymptomatic, silent epidemic. What I say right now is, we're about to be in the worst of it.

When will we get to the point where the vaccine is going to be available to the general public — everybody can get one?Well, you know, that would be speculative, but as I said even earlier in my testimony in Congress, I didn't see that day coming until end of the second quarter, beginning third quarter of 2021.

The objects and structural remnants on display in the museum paint a vivid picture of wealth, power and opulence. Among the stunning examples of ancient Roman artistry are elaborate mosaics and frescoes, a marble staircase, capitals of colored marble and limestone, and an imperial guard’s bronze brooch inset with gold and mother-of-pearl. “All the most refined objects and art produced in the Imperial Age turned up,” Dr. Serlorenzi said.

“The frescoes are incredibly ornate and of a very high decorative standard,”

“Given the descriptions of Caligula’s licentious lifestyle and appetite for luxury, we might have expected the designs to be quite gauche.”

Evidence suggests that after Caligula’s violent death — he was hacked to bits by his bodyguards — the house and garden survived at least until the Severan dynasty, which ruled from A.D. 193 to 235. By the fourth century, the gardens had apparently fallen into desuetude, and statuary in the abandoned pavilions was broken into pieces to build the foundations of a series of spas. The statues were not discovered until 1874, three years after Rome was made the capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy.

The latest excavation of the horti unfolded under the detritus of the residences, which had been evacuated in the 1970s in the wake of a building collapse.

I doubt these new discoveries will do much to rehabilitate his character. But they should open up new vistas onto his world, and reveal it to be every bit as paradisiacal as he desired it to be.”

Whatever pleasure Trump got out of flattering himself, this deceptive promotion of a brand was essentially flattery for the observer.

As kowtowing has become spectacle, flatterers are no longer embarrassed by their abasement. Who can forget the June 2017 cabinet meeting, which opened with a round of competitive sycophancy? Or Kellyanne Conway urging everyone "Go buy Ivanka's stuff?" Or when Anthony Scaramucci, during his brief tenure as White House communications director, addressed the camera directly to repeatedly proclaim "I love the President?"

In 2017, during the President's trip to the Middle East, Saudi King Salman, in presenting Trump with the country's highest civilian medal, affirmed that the Saudis respected him far more than his predecessor. Trump's picture was everywhere during the visit, culminating in the inspired five-floor projection of the President on the exterior of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. All this obsequiousness paid off handsomely, as Trump backed the Saudis' vision of the Middle East.

The more successful flattery is, the less likely the flatterer is to see it as fraud. It becomes habitual, second nature. Even in a time of swift technological change we can count on humans to, as Shakespeare memorably puts it, "commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways."

Flattery diminishes the trust on which the social order is based, and it ultimately threatens this order. Dante associates flattery with an entire class of transgressions against social order -- such as hypocrisy, lying, graft, sowing of discord, false counsel -- by placing them on one level in hell. Fraud connects all them all.

At this stage the UK clearly led the US in the development of radar, which became a key innovation in winning the War. Central to radar was the cavity magnetron, and the British delegation’s use of this amazed their US collaborators. Its exploitation became a key element in the growth of the Bell Company and the MIT Radiation Laboratory, and ultimately became critical in the development of the electronics sector in the US.

The above examples cover a complex set of issues and relate to a specific historical period. But the historical evidence shows that where there are one-sided relationships, with one partner much stronger than the other, the outcome is often exploitative and unbalanced.

the Catholic Church became the most powerful institution of the medieval period.

After the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies conquered large parts of the Middle East, uniting them under the rule of a single caliph

Under the caliphs, great cities such as Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus fostered a vibrant intellectual and cultural life

Crusaders, who wore red crosses on their coats to advertise their status, believed that their service would guarantee the remission of their sins and ensure that they could spend all eternity in Heaven.

No one “won” the Crusades; in fact, many thousands of people from both sides lost their lives.

Romanesque cathedrals are solid and substantial: They have rounded masonry arches and barrel vaults supporting the roof, thick stone walls and few windows.

Gothic structures, such as the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France and the rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral in England, have huge stained-glass windows, pointed vaults and arches (a technology developed in the Islamic world), and spires and flying buttresses. In contrast to heavy Romanesque buildings, Gothic architecture seems to be almost weightless.

illuminated manuscripts: handmade sacred and secular books with colored illustrations, gold and silver lettering and other adornments.

Between 1347 and 1350, a mysterious disease known as the " Black Death " (the bubonic plague) killed some 20 million people in Europe—30 percent of the continent’s population.

Symptoms of the Black Death included fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains – and then death. Victims could go to bed feeling healthy and be dead by morning.

The plague killed cows, pigs, goats, chickens and even sheep, leading to a wool shortage in Europe.

Today, scientists know the plague was caused by a bacillus called Yersina pestis, which travels through the air and can also be contracted through the bite of an infected flea or rat, both of which were common in the Middle Ages, especially on ships. 

In a feudal society, the king granted large pieces of land called fiefs to noblemen and bishops. Landless peasants known as serfs did most of the work on the fiefs: They planted and harvested crops and gave most of the produce to the landowner. In exchange for their labor, they were allowed to live on the land.

By 1300, there were some 15 cities in Europe with a population of more than 50,000.

The Renaissance was a time of great intellectual and economic change, but it was not a complete “rebirth”: It had its roots in the world of the Middle Ages.

The vast Mongolian landscape, whether it be plains, deserts or mountains, is dotted with man-made stone mounds marking the burials of ancient peoples.

Each and every one of them had been completely destroyed by looters looking for treasure. Human remains and miscellaneous artefacts such as bows, arrows, quivers, and clothing were left scattered on the surface.

For the untrained looter, any rock feature has the potential to contain valuable goods and so grave after grave is torn apart. Many of these will contain no more than human and animal bones.

Archaeologists’ interest in these burials lie in the information they contain for research, but this is worthless on the black antiquities market.

The looting of archaeological sites in Mongolia has been happening for a very long time. Regional archaeologists have shared anecdotes of finding skeletons with break-in tools made from deer antlers in shafts of 2,000 year old royal tombs in central Mongolia.

This is not to mention the loss of whatever goods (gold, silver, gems) the looters decided was valuable enough to keep.

Archaeological teams are currently working against climate change, looters, and each other for the chance to unearth rare mummies in the region that are known to pique public interest within Mongolia and abroad.

Others are ice mummies, interred in burials that were constructed in such a way that water seeped in and froze—creating a unique preservation environment.

Efforts to provide training opportunities, international collaborations with mummy experts, and improved infrastructure and facilities are underway, but these collections are so fragile there is little time to spare.

The situation in Mongolia could help us to understand and find new solutions to dealing with changes in climate and the economic drivers behind looting

There’s truth represented by a material record of the “things” left by ancient peoples and in Mongolia, the study of this record has led to an understanding of the impact of early food production and horse domestication, the emergence of new social and political structures and the dominance of a nomadic empire.

Then there’s Elagabulus, whose biography is a veritable catalog of extreme pranks. He taunted his guests by serving them platters of faux food made from wax or wood or marble, while he feasted on real delicacies. Sometimes he served his guests paintings of meals, or napkins embroidered with pictures of the food he was eating. (Imagine walking away from a dinner with an empty stomach but loaded down with paintings of a Roman feast: flamingo tongues, peacock brains, combs cut from the heads of living roosters, etc.) Even when he served actual food, he delighted in mixing the edible and inedible, seasoning peas with gold nuggets, rice with pearls, and beans with glowing chips of amber.

Under Roman law, a slave was not considered to be properly a human being. But the “masters” must have known on some level that their “property” was not really theirs, that subservience and subordination were acts put on under duress. In theory, absolute power is invulnerable; in practice, the emperor is always looking over his shoulder for the assassins in the shadows

So, why does this matter? What if we don’t know where our neighbors got the money for that new deck? Few would want everyone’s financial status to be transparent.

this secrecy helps reinforce the idea that it is only individual choices, not laws and policies, as well as our national history, that comes into building wealth.

“It seems like a straight-up cultural issue, but public policy plays a role in how we view secrecy about money and also the consequences that secrecy has,” said Mr. Wherry, who is also director of the Dignity and Debt Network. People need to understand others are in a similar situation — struggling to pay for college or retirement or health care — to realize it’s not a personal failing and to push for reforms.

“The secrecy surrounding money may also differ to some extent in countries with higher rates of unionization,” Mr. Conley said, “where salaries are more transparent.”

Some say we’re focusing on the wrong thing if we’re looking at the outward signs of wealth. The reality now is that if we’re going to envy our neighbors, it shouldn’t be for their BMW or new swimming pool. It should be for their fat 401(k) or gold-plated health insurance, because the ability to put away large amounts of money to secure our future and our children’s future is the sign of real wealth now.

The top 1 percent of households still spend money on conspicuous consumption but “the thing that really separates them is their spending on inconspicuous consumption,

Over the last few decades, wealthy people have increased how much of their spending they direct to education and retirement, compared with members of the middle class, whose expenditures in those areas have remained more or the less the same.

For example, in 2014, the last year of Ms. Currid-Halkett’s analysis, the top 1 percent of American earners — those making at least $340,000 annually — directed, on average, 6 percent of their total expenditures to education. According to her research, that percentage has climbed significantly since 1996.

Only about 1 percent of the expenditures of the middle class — people making about $40,000 to $60,000 annually in 2014 — was devoted to education, a number that has stayed static for almost two decades,

And about 20 percent of the top earners’ expenditures go to personal insurance and pensions — an annual average of $32,500 in 2014 — compared with just under $4,000 or about 8 percent for the middle class.

biggest signifier of class divide in America today,”

the letters may have wound up saving 700 lives

The experiment, made possible by an accident of budgeting, is the first rigorous experiment to find that health coverage leads to fewer deaths, a claim that politicians and economists have fiercely debated in recent years as they assess the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion

The results also provide belated vindication for the much-despised individual mandate that was part of Obamacare until December 2017, when Congress did away with the fine for people who don’t carry health insurance.

“There has been a lot of skepticism, especially in economics, that health insurance has a mortality impact,

“It’s an innovation to know that just sending a letter to people with information about what it means to be insured versus uninsured can substantially change coverage rates,”

“It’s really important that this is a randomized controlled trial. It’s a really high standard of evidence that you can’t just dismiss.”

Multiple studies showed a decline in mortality rates after states expanded Medicaid, but none could tie the outcome directly to the policy change, since states typically cannot randomly pick which residents do and don’t receive Medicaid

Finding any change requires a very large sample to study.

The Obama administration had planned to send letters to all 4.5 million Americans paying tax fines for not carrying health coverage, only to learn the budget was not quite big enough. About 600,000 uninsured taxpayers were randomly left out of the mailing.

This created a randomized controlled trial, which researchers generally view as the gold standard for studying the results of a specific policy intervention

gaining coverage was associated with a 12 percent decline in mortality over the two-year study period

in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

The goal is to put the offense on a higher level than one of just lying. That way, if the Sanders campaign decides to point to all of the lies Warren has told throughout her career – that her father was a janitor, that she is Native American – her lies won’t matter as much because she’s just electioneering while his lies are rooted in misogyny. It’s a trick that still works for Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly complained about the lack of support Sanders gave to her campaign, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. (Clinton, after losing the primary to Obama in 2008, appeared at two rallies with Obama and did 10 solo campaign appearances to help him get elected. Sanders, after losing the primary to Clinton in 2016, did three events with Clinton and 37 solo events.)

Early accusers of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were deemed golddiggers, looking for an easy settlement to shut them up. Even when there’s some form of evidence, such as when photographs show Donald Trump with E Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape, even while he insists he doesn’t know her, supporters are still willing to take his word for it.

They ran in different social circles. Where Trump would go to a dinner party hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, Bloomberg would go to editor Tina Brown’s house.

“I’m sure Bloomberg has no gold toilets at his house,” said Rebecca Katz, a New York-based Democratic strategist. “It’s a different kind of money with less to prove.”

Bloomberg has seen his national poll numbers rise within the Democratic primary as he’s poured money into advertising for his campaign.

Trump has criticized Bloomberg as well. In early December, Trump mockingly tweeted that “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization” to investigate “President Trump, only”.

Trump around that time tweeted: “Little Michael Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!”

“I’m for guns, he’s against guns,” Trump said. Though Trump, in the past, had praised Bloomberg’s positions on guns.