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The first time most of us learned that President Donald Trump was thinking about relaxing existing measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic was on Sunday night, just before midnight. That's when his tweet shouted in all caps, "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF."

Trusting Trump with this decision is all the more unnerving because we have seen him at the White House podium behaving irresponsibly. His performances have included not just the usual self-serving boasts and the cringe-inducing attacks on the media and his political enemies, but something else; something new and disturbing.

To be fair, it's understandable that the President is concerned. The stakes are enormous, not just for him personally and politically -- this is after all an election year -- but for everyone in the country. Trump, rightly, is deeply concerned about what's happening to the economy. He's not alone. Soaring unemployment, higher than during the Great Depression, and a crushing economic contraction, could occur as a result of efforts to stop or at least slow the spread of a pandemic that threatens to kill millions.

With large areas of the US shut down, stock markets crashing, industries facing collapse and soaring unemployment, the US government is set to pass the most expensive bailout in US history in attempts to save the US economy.Democrat and Republican leaders of Congress, along with White House officials, have been scrambling to make a deal in around-the-clock negotiations and finally announced early on Wednesday that they have reached an agreement. The Senate is expected to vote on the bill on Wednesday.

The bill is worth about $2tn, which will go to businesses, corporations and directly into the pockets of Americans. It has six main components: Direct payment to most Americans. $250bn to bolster unemployment insurance. $350bn in loans for small businesses that may be forgiven if firms use them to keep workers on payroll. $500bn in aid for hard-hit industries and states and $50bn for airlines. $130bn in aid to hospitals. $150bn to help state and local governments.

There has been some compromise. Republicans agreed to some major changes from their original bill. More money will be given to large companies in hard-hit industries, but Democrats have also pushed for strict oversight of the loans. More aid will also be given to the healthcare sector and more funds will be earmarked for unemployment insurance after pushes from Democrats.

New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago – cities across the US are closing down because of the Covid-19 epidemic. The economic impact is already dire. Millions are probably already out of work, and economists are certain we are heading for recession. Donald Trump has a solution: get back to work. But it is a solution that many think will make matters worse, leading to the loss of even more lives and a deeper economic crisis.

The administration is now reportedly considering easing some physical distancing directives in order to halt the collapse of the economy.Many experts think that’s a terrible idea.The result would be “an open door to chaos”, said Professor Michael Greenberger, a former counselor to the United States attorney general and now director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland.

Greenberger said he could understand the desire to support the economy but that such short-term thinking could be devastating.“There are no two ways about this. The shutdown of the economy is damaging. It is a balancing of risks. I think we will be in worse shape in the public health sector and the financial sector if we just unthinkingly send people back to business as usual.”

After months of internal hand wringing, the Democratic Party’s biggest financial backers have flocked to former Vice President Joe Biden. And Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator running as the scourge of the elite, is trying to turn it against him.

As the Democratic presidential race shifts into a two-person contest, two campaigns with two very different funding models are now being put to the test: Biden’s bid backed by longtime Democratic donors and bundlers who have now united behind him, and the massive grassroots movement of small-dollar donations that has fueled Sanders. In a sense, the dueling models are a microcosm of the competing visions for the Democratic Party itself: whether it will continue operating under the status quo, or shift towards the grassroots-led model the progressive wing has been pushing for years. Whoever prevails will not just get the party’s nomination, but could possibly determine its future financial model.

“The folks who, for a long period of time would not give me money for the campaign because they did not think [Biden] was going to be the leading candidate turned — particularly turned when Pete [Buttigieg] and Amy [Klobuchar] came on board and since [Michael] Bloomberg dropped out,” says attorney Stephen Cozen, founder of the law firm Cozen O’Connor and a Philadelphia-based Biden donor who has been raising money since he entered the race. “I’ve had a tremendous influx of contributions to the campaign from people who have said ‘You were right all along.'”

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

President Trump has repeatedly touted the anti-malarial medications hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as that much-needed solution.

Scientists have since pointed to major flaws in those original studies and say there is a lack of reliable data on the drugs. Experts warn about the dangerous consequences of over-promoting a drug with unknown efficacy: Shortages of hydroxychloroquine have already occurred, depriving lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients of access to it. Doctors say some patients could die of side effects. Other potential treatments for covid-19 could get overlooked with so much concentration on one option.

Raoult’s findings helped bring the theory to the United States. However, scientists have since discredited the trial, pointing to major flaws in the way it was conducted. The journal that published the study announced on April 3 that it did not meet its standards.

Jeff Bezos announced the creation of the Bezos Earth Fund, which will disperse $10 billion in the name of combatting climate change. The fund is a triumph of philanthropy—and a perfect emblem of a national failing.

In a healthy democracy, the world’s richest man wouldn’t be able to painlessly make a $10 billion donation. His fortune would be mitigated by the tax collector; antitrust laws would constrain the growth of his business. Instead of relying on a tycoon to bankroll the national response to an existential crisis, there would be a national response.

in an age of political dysfunction, Bezos has begun to subsume the powers of the state. Where the government once funded the ambitious exploration of space, Bezos is leading that project, spending a billion dollars each year to build rockets and rovers. His company, Amazon, is spearheading an experimental effort to fix American health care; it will also spend $700 million to retrain workers in the shadow of automation and displacement.

“Mexico was second-deadliest country in 2016″ and “Mexico Now World’s Deadliest Conflict Zone After Syria: Survey,”

The reports say that Syria had about 50,000 conflict deaths last year and that Mexico came in second with 23,000, followed by Afghanistan with 17,000.

Many homicides have nothing to do with organized crime. For example, men kill their intimate partners terrifyingly often. Yet these family violence deaths — and many others — are included in IISS’s figure of 23,000 conflict deaths for Mexico.

A recent study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina — analyzing every day of data between March 15, 2020, and Dec. 12, 2020 — calculated the chances of getting covid-19 or dying from covid-19 in every state (and D.C.). After adjusting for factors such a population density, ethnic composition, poverty and age, a clear picture emerged. Democrat-led states were hardest hit early on, as you’d expect given the places where the disease took hold in the United States. But then the balance shifted. By June 3, Republican states had higher case diagnoses. By July 4, higher death rates. By Aug. 5, the relative risk of dying from covid-19 was 1.8 times higher in GOP-led states.

All pandemic policy involves a trade-off between the level of deaths and the level of commercial interaction. But concerning covid, Republican governors tended to put a greater value on economic activity than preserving the lives of the elderly and vulnerable (and others) when compared with Democrat-led states. In doing so, they elevated their views above the sober judgment of experts.

How is this performance by many Republican governors not discrediting, even disqualifying? Does it not concern people in GOP-led states that, at a key moment in the crisis, they were nearly twice as likely to die of covid than their counterparts in Democrat-led states?

proponents insisted that funneling $1.9 trillion to American households and businesses wouldn’t unshackle a long-vanquished monster: inflation.

nflation prospects increasingly influenced political commentary and Wall Street trading.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is among those tracking the inflation threat. “There’s a very good chance you’re going to have a gangbuster economy for the rest of this year and easily into 2022, and the question is: Does that overheat everything?” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week.

Last week's virtual summit meeting between President Biden and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico was uninspiring, or at least the speeches were. Far more interesting was what the Mexican and American teams discussed before the presidents met.

Then, on the eve of the event, AMLO announced that he would submit an immigration proposal to the American side, modeled on the Bracero program, which sent millions of Mexican men to work on American farms from World War II until 1964. We don't know exactly what response he got, except for a vague comment from the White House that immigration issues had to go through Congress.

Together with AMLO's initiative, the two proposals are almost identical to the old immigration deal that Presidents Vicente Fox and George W. Bush worked on in 2001 and 2002, and which fell by the wayside after 9/11. They all resemble the bills that Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy attempted to pass as comprehensive immigration reform, in 2006, followed by other refashioned and failed tries in 2007 and 2013, by Bush again and later by President Barack Obama.

Gail Collins: Bret, my city (and yours — if you work here you at least have rooting rights) tends to switch back and forth between regular party Democrats and feisty independents. De Blasio, a deep, dull Democrat, was preceded by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, who were very, very different versions of the political outsider.

Gail: And New York has had some. But except for Nelson Rockefeller our gubernatorial Republicans weren’t very exciting. Have we ever discussed the George Pataki years? No? At least with Andrew G. we’d have a Republican who knows how to putt …

Bret: Hemlock or cyanide? Devoured by a saltwater crocodile versus bitten by a venomous sea snake? A year of solitary confinement in a supermax prison or an all-expenses paid trip to Cancún in the company of Ted Cruz? I’m trying to think of equivalently horrible alternatives.

Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.

Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.

By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from one another than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”

A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.

For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.

“I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”

JBS USA, the country's top beef producer and its second largest producer of pork, suffered a cyberattack this weekend, prompting reported shutdowns at company plants in the United States and globally.

Does fallout from the attack mean a tighter meat supply ahead, and as a result, higher prices? That depends on how quickly the issue is resolved, according to experts.

"Retailers and beef processors are coming from a long weekend and need to catch up with orders and make sure to fill the meat case. If they suddenly get a call saying that product may not deliver tomorrow or this week, it will create very significant challenges," Steiner explained.

Something unexpected happened to me during lockdown: I gained deeper appreciation for my ears. I don’t mean aesthetically, (though I’ve got no problem in that department, believe me), but rather functionally.

he other day I realized that I’ve taken to popping my AirPods Pro in just after I wake up, sometimes at the same time I put in my contact lenses. From there my ears are usually occupado all day, often until I sleep, sometimes even during.

If you’re under 35 or so, my paean to the mind-altering magic of ubiquitous digital audio might sound more than a bit outdated; Farhad, do you also get goose bumps when considering the TV remote?

“We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.

aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”

As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”

Tens of thousands of immigrants from Central America and Mexico, including thousands of unaccompanied minors, are journeying to the border. In February, the US Customs and Border Protection says it tracked over 100,000 migrants crossing the southern border, almost a 30% increase over January. Nearly 10,000 were unaccompanied minors, and more than 14,000 of those minors are now in US custody.

Yet White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday refused to characterize the situation as a "crisis," instead, calling it a "circumstance."

That's right -- kids tightly packed in detention facilities, sleeping on mats on the floor with aluminum-like blankets. For all of the hue and cry from the left hammering former President Donald Trump for keeping "kids in cages" at our southern border, Biden has now served in two administrations -- first as vice president and now as President -- in which migrant children are being held in terrible conditions.

Thanks to their ultralow fees and stellar long-term performance, these investment vehicles have soaked up more and more money since being developed by Vanguard’s Jack Bogle in the 1970s

as of 2016, investors worldwide were pulling more than $300 billion a year out of actively managed funds and pushing more than $500 billion a year into index funds. Some $11 trillion is now invested in index funds, up from $2 trillion a decade ago. And as of 2019, more money is invested in passive funds than in active funds in the United States.

Indexing has also gone small, very small. Although many financial institutions offer index funds to their clients, the Big Three control 80 or 90 percent of the market. The Harvard Law professor John Coates has argued that in the near future, just 12 management professionals—meaning a dozen people, not a dozen management committees or firms, mind you—will likely have “practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.”

Last week, President Biden introduced a $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan, calling it “a once-in-a-generation investment in America.” In a speech, he outlined many of the package’s details, including how to “pay for” it. A close look at those so-called pay-fors, however, shows Democrats are thinking about fiscal responsibility the wrong way. They could be on the verge of sparking some unpleasant short-term overheating of the economy, in which price increases accelerate and the purchasing power of our dollars falls somewhat. And if the final legislation were to grow much larger — toward the $10 trillion level many progressives in Congress are pushing — it could send such inflation soaring.

She’s right that it is possible for Congress and the Biden administration to go bigger, faster — but only by shifting to a completely different budgeting framework: Instead of passing legislation that leans on taxing corporations and the rich to keep spending from increasing the deficit, they would have to develop a robust plan with a focus on containing inflationary pressures as that heightened government spending hits the real economy.

So it was unfortunate that in his long-awaited infrastructure speech, President Biden promised “not a contract will go out, that I control” that isn’t for “a company that is an American company with American products, all the way down the line, and American workers.”