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Trump's approach to handling the pandemic is clear from his record. His administration has delegated much of the authority for the coronavirus response to states, including testing and contact tracing. He's invested heavily in vaccine development. He signed two coronavirus relief packages and has indicated he'd sign another one after the election.

3. Establish a U.S. public health jobs corps The Biden campaign pledges to "mobilize" 100,000 Americans to work with local organizations around the country to perform contact tracing and other services that would help address unmet needs in populations at high risk for COVID-19.

And he'd focus on uniting states around some common practices, says Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and University of Pennsylvania professor who has briefed Biden on health policy but has no formal campaign position. Instead of "different states doing different things, the goal would be to get all the states singing from the same hymnal," Emanuel says.

Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".

Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.

Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.

everyone knows that Facebook is just our new, digital Town Square, right? You can’t blame Facebook if it’s just a distillation of all our worst and best impulses.

Except that it’s not.

Have you ever been to an actual town and visited its square?

“The peaceful atom”, wrote Jean Monnet, the cognac salesman turned founding father of the EU, was to be “the spearhead for the unification of Europe”.

Europe was a nuclear project before it was much else. In 1957 the EU’s founding members signed the Treaty of Rome to form the European Economic Community, the club’s forebear. At the same time they put their names to a less well-known organisation: Euratom, which would oversee nuclear power on the continent.

Where nuclear power was once a source of unity for Europe, today it is a source of discord

sometimes, people will trust someone simply because the messenger is saying what they want to hear. Psychologists call this “motivated reasoning.”

Keep all this in mind as you consider Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator in Michigan who recently came to national attention thanks to the rantings of former President Trump and a riveting profile written by the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. McBroom chairs the Michigan senate’s oversight committee, a position that empowered him to investigate allegations of voter fraud during the 2020 general election

here is the background and record on McBroom:

For Turkey, 2021 was marked by a freefalling currency, the lira, and record-high inflation. The government's monetary policy has sent the country into economic turmoil.

I'm struggling to make ends meet. The prices have gone up, so I had to take up extra work. I'm doing a part-time job out of necessity.

Turkey is suffering its highest inflation in nearly two decades. From December 2020 to December 2021, prices rose more than 36 percent, everything from food to gas.

Stoic, dignified and comforting, the queen’s words helped anchor the country during the fretful days that followed — not the first time the monarchy has acted as a stabilizing force for the government during tumultuous events.

While these cases are about starkly different issues, they both feature privileged middle-aged men under fire for their behavior, raising age-old questions of class, entitlement and double standards.

Commentators said, half in jest, that the legal ruling against Andrew, 61, helped Mr. Johnson, 57, because it deflected attention from his grilling in the House of Commons, where opposition lawmakers accused him of lying and demanded that he resign. But both men are at the mercy of forces largely out of their control.

For centuries, jungle-covered mountains, swamps and poisonous snakes scared people away from the Darién Gap, the dense rainforest separating North and South America. It's still the only spot where the Pan-American Highway, that runs from Alaska all the way to the tip of South America, dissolves into mud. But thanks to the large numbers of migrants trying to get to the United States, the Darién Gap is no longer a no man's land.

In fact, when NPR first reached the region in September, birds singing and monkeys howling could not be heard. The main sound came from dozens of motorcycles. The passengers sitting on the back were migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, India and African countries. But because they lacked U.S. visas, they had to travel overland, first through South and Central America and then Mexico.

The hardest part is crossing the roadless, 60-mile-wide Darién Gap. To cover the first few miles, migrants can pay to ride on the back of motorcycles that navigate muddy trails. But soon the jungle thickens, and they must start walking.

Electricity is cut off. Guards sit in cars on every corner. Hundreds of people are out of their homes, some without access to their clothing or belongings.

More than four months after the blast shuttered Wheatley’s downtown and injured 20 of the town’s 2,900 residents, the authorities still don’t know where the gas leak came from, or why it happened.

Many are now grappling with whether the center of the town, which was formally recognized in 1865, should be permanently abandoned.

Kianna Ameni-Melvin’s parents used to tell her that there wasn’t much money to be made in education. But it was easy enough for her to tune them out as she enrolled in an education studies program, with her mind set on teaching high school special education.

She began to question how the profession’s low pay could impact the challenges of pandemic teaching.

“People are weighing whether or not it makes sense to go to a classroom when there are alternatives that may seem safer,

As natural gas prices in Europe continue to hit record highs, utility companies in Germany are scrambling to secure millions of euros in extra liquidity to ensure they can meet future contracts.

Last week, another leading German utility, Uniper, announced that high energy prices had forced it to seek extra credit worth 10 billion euros ($11.4 billion). Most of the money, €8 billion, came from Uniper’s parent company, Fortum, based in Finland. The rest is from Germany’s state-owned development bank, KfW, and was secured as a backup to mitigate future price swings, the company said.

Other German energy companies, including RWE and EnBW, said that they had taken similar steps to ensure they had sufficient credit to weather the volatility in the European energy market, but declined to give details.

A renewed buildup of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border has raised concern among some officials in the United States and Europe who are tracking what they consider irregular movements of equipment and personnel on Russia’s western flank.

The renewed movements of Russian forces in the area come as the Kremlin embraces a harder line on Ukraine. Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down have escalated their rhetoric in recent months, attacking Kyiv’s Western ties and even questioning its sovereignty.

The situation also comes as the simmering 7½-year conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region enters a new stage. On Oct. 26, Ukraine’s military confirmed it had used a Turkish-made drone against a position in Donbas, the first time Kyiv has employed the technology in combat, prompting an outcry from Moscow.

But on a recent day, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees, the river had run dry, the crops would not grow and the family’s 30 remaining cattle were quickly consuming the last pool of water.

Scientists agree with her grandfather. Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.

But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.

When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan last summer, it was left with a critical choice: allow the collapse of a state that had mostly been kept afloat by foreign aid or work with the Taliban, its former foes who were in power, to prevent that outcome.

The United States should swallow the bitter pill of working with the Taliban-led government in order to prevent a failed state in Afghanistan. Kneecapping the government through sanctions and frozen aid won’t change the fact that the Taliban are now in charge, but it will ensure that ordinary public services collapse, the economy decays and Afghans’ livelihoods shrink even further.

Their cash-based economy is starved of currency, hunger and malnutrition are growing, civil servants are largely unpaid, and essential services are in tatters.

He has ended up restoring the terror of Josef Stalin. That is not only because he has unleashed the most violent act of unprovoked aggression in Europe since 1939, but also because, as a result, he is turning himself into a dictator at home—a 21st-century Stalin, resorting as never before to lies, violence and paranoia.

Russia’s president thought Ukraine would rapidly collapse, so he did not prepare his people for the invasion or his soldiers for their mission—indeed, he assured the elites that it would not happen

he is still denying that he is waging what may become Europe’s biggest war since 1945.

he great liberal commentator Walter Lippmann wrote at the height of the Cold War: “You can’t decide these questions of life and death for the world by epithets like appeasement. I don’t agree with the people who think we have to go out and shed a little blood to prove we’re virile men.”

Lippmann also wrote, in September 1961: “This being the nuclear age, it is the paramount rule of international politics that a great nuclear power should not put another great nuclear power in a position where it must choose between suicide and surrender.”

The West was obliged to watch in impotent horror as the Russians crushed the anticommunist Poles in 1945, then the Hungarian rebels in 1956, then the Czechs of the 1968 “Prague Spring.” There was also the 1959 Chinese seizure of Tibet. The list is a long one.

As analysts ponder the state of Putin’s mental health, Kozyrev, 70, caused a stir this week with a declaration on Twitter that he considered the president’s war calculus rational. “It’s horrific but it’s not irrational,” he wrote. “To understand why the invasion was rational for Putin, we have to step into his shoes.”

Through the president’s lens, there was a need to bring western-leaning Ukraine back into the Kremlin fold since the Maidan Uprising of 2014 that ousted its pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. However, of the money that Putin thought had gone into his military, billions of roubles was plundered. And the narrative around the West’s state of weakness was propaganda spread among Russia’s ruling elite,

Putin miscalculated, “but that doesn’t make him insane. Simply wrong and immoral”. Kozyrev told The Times: “Even if he takes Kyiv with a couple of other cities, it leads nowhere. This war is unwinnable for Putin because he fights against the people.”

Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, had some negative things to say about his fellow Americans in an interview last December. “Socialism,” he opined, has destroyed the work ethic: “Nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work — I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’”

Without question, rich men are constantly saying similar things at country clubs across America. More important, conservative politicians are obsessed with the idea that government aid is making Americans lazy, which is why they keep trying to impose work requirements on programs such as Medicaid and food stamps despite overwhelming evidence that such requirements don’t promote work

a reminder about demography. America has an aging population, which means that other things being equal, we should be seeing a downward trend in the fraction of adults still working. Indeed, the overall labor force participation rate — the percentage of adults either working or actively seeking work — is somewhat lower now than it was on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This x-axis is proportionately scaled, so the drop off in the admissions rate doesn’t come until about the 65th percentile of family income. But what it shows is still real: It’s much harder to get into an elite college if you’re in the top 30th percentile of income—unless you’re at the very top of the income scale. At which point you’re basically golden.

Children from middle- and upper-middle-class families — including those at public high schools in high-income neighborhoods — applied in large numbers. But they were, on an individual basis, less likely to be admitted than the richest or, to a lesser extent, poorest students with the same test scores. In that sense, the data confirms the feeling among many merely affluent parents that getting their children into elite colleges is increasingly difficult.

“We had these very skewed distributions of a whole lot of Pell kids and a whole lot of no-need kids, and the middle went missing,” said an Ivy League dean of admissions, who has seen the new data and spoke anonymously in order to talk openly about the process. “You’re not going to win a P.R. battle by saying you have X number of families making over $200,000 that qualify for financial aid.”