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The embrace of a Scandinavian Jesus is not just foolish but part of a broader historical amnesia. Jesus not only looked like a Middle Eastern Jew; this identity also made him part of an oppressed, dispossessed group. A sense of Jewish powerlessness was the social context for his ministry, and his teaching reflected it.

Jesus offered little advice to the privileged, except to humble themselves and give their wealth away. He had much to say about the inherent value of the poor, the meek and the mourning. This message was one reason he suffered a brutal, unjust, suffocating death at the hands of public authorities.

The Christian message has always been more easily and fully understood by those who lack social privilege — by those who see the face of a nonwhite Jesus.

“It’s really a simple question: ‘Am I going to let a disease kill me or am I going to let the system — the police?” he said. “And if something is going to take me out when I don’t have a job, which one do I prefer? Folks who don’t have much else to lose — they understand that this system isn’t built for black people. And that’s why people are in the streets.”

this is an extraordinary moment of pain for the nation, especially for black Americans who are bearing the brunt of three crises — police violence, crushing unemployment and the deadliest infectious disease threat in a century — that have laid bare longstanding injustice

Public health experts, activists and lawmakers say the triple threat requires a coordinated response.

Mr. Mnuchin echoed comments by President Trump and other administration officials who are predicting a V-shaped recovery—a sharp downturn followed by a strong bounceback.

“We’re going to have a really good third quarter. It’s already happening,” Mr. Trump told reporters

Mr. Powell, meanwhile, challenged the premise that there is a trade-off between economic growth and protecting the public’s health

“The threads of our civic life could start unraveling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox,” said historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.

the toll of the coronavirus outbreak made long-standing racial inequities newly stark. Then, images of police violence made those same disparities visceral.

“There are major turning points and ruptures in history. . . . This is one of these moments, but we’ve not seen how it will fully play out.”

There are 30 days until Election Day and millions of votes have already been cast.

On Saturday, the Trump team launched Operation MAGA, aimed at maintaining the energy of its campaign without the president at the helm. The campaign has said it will host virtual events until the vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City on Wednesday.

"He'll be hitting the trail in Arizona, will probably be in Nevada, he'll be back here in D.C., and he's going to have a very full, aggressive schedule as well as the first family, Don, Eric, Ivanka," Trump adviser Jason Miller said on NBC Sunday. "And we have a number of our supporters, our coalitions: Black Voices for Trump, Latinos for Trump, Women for Trump. The whole Operation MAGA will be deploying everywhere."

A human error that briefly led to incorrect election results in a Michigan county has spiraled into a sprawling, baseless conspiracy theory suggesting that glitches in widely-used voting software led to millions of miscast ballots.

Conservative media figures, social media users, and President Donald Trump have spread rumors about problems with Dominion Voting Systems

They've claimed that isolated reports about Election Night glitches raise concerns about election results in states around the country.

President-elect Joe Biden is set to announce who will serve in top roles in his administration in the coming days and weeks.

Ron Klain, one of his most trusted campaign advisers, will serve as his incoming chief of staff. And Jen O'Malley Dillon, Biden's campaign manager, and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a co-chair of Biden's transition team and presidential campaign, will serve in top roles in the White House.

Each of Biden's Cabinet nominees will need to be confirmed by the US Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans. Two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 could determine which party controls the chamber and impact the Cabinet confirmation process.

The United States should be celebrating a day of great hope today, as a Covid-19 vaccine could get authorized for emergency use very soon.

Vaccine advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration are meeting Thursday to discuss the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

That's more deaths than those suffered in the 9/11 attacks.

By early summer, however, the pressure to open back up rose. Officials discovered the state wasn’t immune to the national fatigue with social distancing and mask-wearing. Amid a patchwork of haphazard rules and guidelines, cases crept up.

Today, most of California is back under lockdown amid a dramatic surge in infections. The state has tallied more than 1.3m cases, and broke a record last week with more than 25,000 infections recorded in a single day.

LA officials said that one person is now dying of Covid every 20 minutes, and the county’s public health director, Barbara Ferrer, broke down crying at a briefing while talking about the “incalculable loss” of more than 8,000 deaths.

If the United States wants to get serious about tackling climate change, the country will need to build a staggering amount of new energy infrastructure in just the next 10 years, laying down steel and concrete at a pace barely being contemplated today.

That’s one conclusion from a major study released Tuesday by a team of energy experts at Princeton University, who set out several exhaustively detailed scenarios for how the country could slash its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by 2050.

That goal has been endorsed by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as numerous states and businesses, to help avoid the worst effects of global warming.

American history is, in many ways, a story of grand protests. They generally come in two types.

There are protest movements that, even in ferocious dissent, believe that the American system is ultimately geared to fulfill its inner promises — of equality, unalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness, e pluribus unum, a more perfect union

And there are protest movements that have turned against the system, either because they don’t think the system can meet its promises, or because they never agreed with the promises in the first place.

how can a few missteps by an incumbent president, or a few adroit moves by his extremist challenger, be enough to put the far right within arm’s reach of winning the highest office in the country?

The answer, I believe, has to do with the power of the relentlessly pessimistic narrative told by the far right—and the failure of the rest of society to counter it with a more optimistic vision of the future.

In their speeches, Le Pen and Zemmour give the impression that the country they purport to love is on the brink of collapse. Over the course of decades, they claim, corrupt elites have betrayed the country by attempting to replace its native population with more pliable immigrants.

Taiwan is now on pace to spend more than $19 billion on defense in 2023. But China spends more than $200 billion a year

Instead of building large, conventional hardware (airplanes, tanks, submarines), military experts have urged Taiwan to focus on so-called asymmetric capabilities (anti-ship weapons, surface-to-air missiles, stockpiles of small arms and ammunition), which have served Ukraine well in repelling a larger invader. That, combined with a bigger force of civilian reserves, could make the cost of an invasion too high for China. This approach has earned a nickname in global defense circles: “the porcupine strategy.”

China now has the world’s largest navy, with more than 350 ships and submarines. Its rocket force maintains the world’s largest arsenal of land-based missiles, which would feature in any war with Taiwan.

With Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) preparing to unveil a plan Wednesday for how Congress could regulate AI, lawmakers are suddenly crowding into briefings with top industry executives, summoning leading academics for discussions and taking other steps to try to wrap their heads around the emerging field.

This charm offensive has left some consumer advocates uneasy that lawmakers might let the industry write its own rules — which some executives are outright recommending. In an interview this spring, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argued that the industry, not the government, should be setting “reasonable boundaries” for the future of AI.

“There’s no way a non-industry person can understand what is possible. It’s just too new, too hard. There’s not the expertise,” Schmidt told NBC. “There’s no one in the government who can get it right. But the industry can roughly get it right.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t speak Spanish. But it sure sounds like he does.He’s been using artificial intelligence software to send prerecorded calls about city events to residents in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu and Yiddish. The voice in the messages mimics the mayor but was generated with AI software from a company called ElevenLabs.

Experts have warned for years that AI will change our democracy by distorting reality. That future is already here. AI is being used to fabricate voices, fundraising emails and “deepfake” images of events that never occurred.

I’m writing this to urge elected officials, candidates and their supporters to pledge not to use AI to deceive voters. I’m not suggesting a ban, but rather calling for politicians to commit to some common values while our democracy adjusts to a world with AI.

Four years ago, Altman’s mentor, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, flew from the United Kingdom to San Francisco to give his protégé the boot, according to three people familiar with the incident, which has not been previously reported

Altman’s clashes, over the course of his career, with allies, mentors and even members of a corporate structure he endorsed, are not uncommon in Silicon Valley, amid a culture that anoints wunderkinds, preaches loyalty and scorns outside oversight.

Though a revered tactician and chooser of promising start-ups, Altman had developed a reputation for favoring personal priorities over official duties and for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the start-ups he was supposed to nurture

Tulsa Police Department Capt. Richard Meulenberg told CNN multiple people were wounded — he said it was fewer than ten and no one had wounds that were considered life-threatening. He told The Associated Press the medical complex was a "catastrophic scene."

The shooting occurred a little before 5 p.m. local time on the campus of Saint Francis Hospital, Tulsa Deputy Police Chief Eric Dalgleish told reporters. Officers responded to the scene within three minutes and made contact with the gunman about five minutes later, he said.

The amount of time it took police in Uvalde, Texas, to engage the gunman during last week's deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School has become a key and controversial focus of that probe. Officers waited more than an hour to breach the classroom where the gunman attacked.Dalgleish described the gunman as a Black male believed to be between 35 and 40 years old and said he was armed with a long gun and a handgun. Both weapons appeared to have been fired, Dalgleish disclosed.

When it comes to Covid, the United States specializes in denialism. Deny the human-to-human transmission of the virus when China’s first cases were publicized in late 2019. Deny that the virus is airborne. Deny the need for boosters across all adult age groups.

here are many more examples, but now one stands out – learning from other countries.

In early 2020, with the major outbreak in the Lombardy region of Italy that rapidly and profoundly outstripped hospital resources and medical staffing, Americans expressed confidence that it won’t happen here. That it couldn’t happen here. And then it did.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to follow soon after with what's known as a permissive recommendation, which means that the shots will not be officially recommended but may be given to people who want them, said a source who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity since they had not been given permission to discuss the details with reporters.

"There are solid data from Israel for age 60+ (the only group reported on to date) for enhanced protection (vs severe illness) out to 3 months compared with 3 doses. It is reasonable to extend that and provide it as an option, since the 3rd dose has pronounced benefit in age 50+," Topol wrote in an email to CNN.

Dr. Eric Rubin, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine who sits on the FDA's VRBPAC, said he hadn't yet seen enough data on fourth doses to make a determination about whether they are needed for anyone beyond those who are already recommended to get them -- adults who are severely immune deficient."The only data that I've seen has been for participants followed for just a few weeks. The most important information is going to be how well a fourth dose protects highly vulnerable people against serious disease and death, and I don't know when that will be available," Rubin said in an email to CNN. Rubin said the FDA might have access to that data, but he had not seen it yet.