Showing posts with label Joe Biden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Biden. Show all posts

Monday, January 11, 2021

In The News (3)

We Came All This Way to Let Vaccines Go Bad in the Freezer? America did not sufficiently plan for how to get millions of people vaccinated. ........... Operation Warp Speed has failed to come anywhere close to its original goal of vaccinating 20 million people against the coronavirus by the end of 2020. Of the 14 million vaccine doses that have been produced and delivered to hospitals and health departments across the country, just an estimated three million people have been vaccinated. .......... Poor coordination at the federal level, combined with a lack of funding and support for state and local entities, has resulted in a string of avoidable missteps and needless delays. We have been here before, in other words. With testing. With shutdowns. With contact tracing. With genomic surveillance. ............ Officials have long prioritized medicine (in this instance, developing the coronavirus vaccines) while neglecting public health (i.e., developing programs to vaccinate people).   

Why Is It Taking So Long to Get Americans Vaccinated? The country is millions of doses behind expectations. Here’s how it could pull ahead. ............ “We are at a pace right now to deliver vaccines in L.A. over five years, instead of over half a year” ............ Joe Biden, who has promised to “move heaven and earth” to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days. ............. the administration will do so by invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up vaccine manufacturing, deploy mobile vaccination units and lobby Congress for more state and local funding. But even Mr. Biden warned that it might take until March to see significant improvement. ........ While the administration has paid pharmaceutical companies more than $12 billion to develop the vaccines, it has allocated only $340 million to states for their distribution — a small fraction of the $8.4 billion health departments told Congress they needed for training, record-keeping, staffing and communications. ........... New York, for example, has given out only 32 percent of its roughly 930,000 doses ........ In Israel, which has vaccinated 15 percent of its population, more than 100,000 young adults have received surplus doses that otherwise would have gone to waste .......... once vaccines become more widely available, the federal government plans to rely on some 40,000 pharmacies to vaccinate the broader population. ..........  In Georgia, so many rural health care workers have declined the vaccine that the state decided to expand access to its doses because they were “literally sitting in freezers.” ........ With the exception of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the pace of vaccination in the United States is comparable to or better than that of most other countries. 

As the Georgia Runoffs Arrive, a New Book Says the Senate Is Broken The South Carolina senator’s soaring rhetoric about minority rights revolved around protecting the interests of wealthy slavers in the South and their vision of white supremacy. It’s not for nothing that the historian Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.” ............ “In the 87 years between the end of Reconstruction and 1964,” Jentleson writes, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.” ........... “All you have to do is call the cloakroom, tell them the senator you work for intends to place a hold on the bill, and the bill is filibustered,” Jentleson writes. “One phone call, one objection, and the threshold on any bill or nomination goes from a majority to a supermajority.” .................  “All you have to do is call the cloakroom, tell them the senator you work for intends to place a hold on the bill, and the bill is filibustered,” Jentleson writes. “One phone call, one objection, and the threshold on any bill or nomination goes from a majority to a supermajority.” ............ In “Kill Switch,” McConnell is expressly portrayed as a 21st-century version of Calhoun — infinitely blander, less extravagantly fanatical but more coldly efficient.  

The Pro-Trump Movement Was Always Headed Here For years, professional grifters, trolls, true believers and political opportunists have sowed conspiratorial lies. We are now witnessing the reaping. .......... They listened to their president say he would never concede, that American elections were no longer free or fair. Then he implored his audience to march on the Capitol building. .............. Those who’ve been cocooned in Facebook groups and fed a steady diet of lies from election-denial outlets like Newsmax and One America News are coming to a realization that there is no grand plan for Mr. Trump to magically retain office. ................ The president of the United States was caught on tape for over an hour angrily spouting QAnon conspiracy theories about voter fraud in an attempt to pressure Georgia state officials to overturn the election results. ............... the culmination of more than five years of hatred, trolling, violent harassment and conspiracy theorizing that has moved from the internet’s underbelly to the White House and back again. ................ the demand side, in which millions of Americans are actively courting conspiracies and violent, radical ideologies in order to make sense of a world they don’t trust. ............... our reality crisis is born of selfishness, shamelessness and suffering. It is bone deep. And it will only continue to escalate.  

The ‘Horrifying Events’ at the Capitol A reader reacts: “This should mark the end of the Trump presidency, before he can cause more damage.” ............... Mr. Trump is guilty of sedition at the least, and treason at the worst. This should mark the end of the Trump presidency, before he can cause more damage. Mike Pence should call the Cabinet together and invoke the 25th Amendment.  .......... Peaceful, unarmed Black protesters have repeatedly been tear-gassed and shot at by the police over the past several years, but a group of violent armed white men, insurrectionists attempting to overthrow the presidential election, were allowed to run roughshod in the nation’s capital? The double standard is monstrous. .............. After the actions Wednesday by both some legislators and the mob, no one should have any doubt that we must pass a constitutional amendment rescinding both the Electoral College and the Second Amendment. For our nation’s security, we need to elect the president directly, and we need to disarm civilians.  

We Need a Second Great Migration Georgia illuminates the path to Black power. It lies in the South. Follow me there.



Wednesday, January 06, 2021

In The News (2)


Climbing the Himalaya With Soldiers, Spies, Lamas and Mountaineers Why does India have so many people? .......... “The answer,” he told me, “is the Himalaya.” ........ had created such an immense river network that it left behind staggeringly rich soil across a vast swath of Asia. It’s no accident, he said, that on either side of these mountains lie the world’s two most populous nations, India and China. If you include Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, all of which also greatly depend on rivers sourced in the Himalaya, we’re talking about nearly half of humankind tied to these mountains. ............. The pros never put an “s” at the end of the word; it’s just Himalaya, which in Sanskrit means “abode of snow.” ............. The air is thin at 15,000 feet; everything feels closer, yet the vast scale of the landscape reduces you. It’s easy to see why a philosophy stressing the illusory nature of an individual consciousness, as Buddhism does, might prosper here. ” ................  Even though our image of Tibet is of a closed-off, sealed-up place, that’s erroneous: It had been a cosmopolitan trading hub and cultural powerhouse for hundreds of years. ............ It’s virtually impossible to draw a line through these peaks, and the nations have competing versions of where the boundary lies. Both are determined not to give up an inch. .................. Maybe it’s a self-selecting group: Only if you have such wisdom and presence of mind can you scale walls of ice, reach the roof of the world where the oxygen level is about one-third that at sea level, lose fingers and toes to frostbite and come back alive. ..................  The climbers clearly revere the mountains, and you can sense how alive they felt in that landscape where they were nothing but a string of dark, slow-moving specks crossing the brilliant white snow. ............... nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived

You Think This Is Chaos? The Election of 1876 Was Worse. As President Trump pushes Congress to block certification of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, his Republican allies look to the showdown on Capitol Hill a century and a half ago as a model.

An Insurgency From Inside the Oval Office President Trump’s effort to overturn the election he lost has gone beyond mere venting of grievances at the risk of damaging the very American democracy he is charged with defending. ......... What else Mr. Trump could try to do to stop it remains unclear because he seems out of options. But he is not yet willing to acknowledge the reality of his situation, much less follow John Adams’s example.

Echoes of Another Pandemic: How The Times Covered the 1918 Flu The influenza outbreak killed more than 20,000 New Yorkers and 675,000 Americans. It might have dominated the news, if not for World War I. ........ “There were no secrets about it in real time. But you also have to remember, there was far less to report because the science of virology did not even exist, so nobody knew what caused influenza.”  ....... Many of his recommendations, like hand washing and avoiding crowds, stand up today, but he also instructed people to not wear tight clothes, tight shoes or tight gloves in order “to make nature your ally and not your prisoner.” .............  President Woodrow Wilson never made a statement on influenza ........ “One of the things that remained in the domain of the states and localities is public health. And there was no national public health effort at that time. There was no C.D.C.” ..............  an effective vaccine was not developed during the pandemic. 

A Democratic Twist in Georgia  The story of Georgia’s runoffs turned largely on the participation of Black voters ......... Vice President Mike Pence broke the news to Trump last night that he would not be able to deliver him a second term as president when Congress convenes today 





The Lull Before the Surge on Top of the Surge Tuesday: Slammed by the coronavirus and behind on its vaccine rollout, California is about to be hit by a tidal wave of post-holiday virus infections, the governor warns.


Tuesday, January 05, 2021

In The News (1)

100 Notable Books
Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine The furious race to develop a coronavirus vaccine played out against a presidential election, between a pharmaceutical giant and a biotech upstart, with the stakes as high as they could get. 




At long last we have a Brexit deal – and it's as bad as you thought  We already know its contours: a barely-there treaty that will make trade harder and destroy jobs. Labour should oppose it


Relief Package Grows as Campaign Issue in Georgia Senate Races The two Republicans tried to claim credit for bringing help to Georgians, despite President Trump’s initial waffling over whether to sign the bill. The Democrats said the $600 payments to Americans were too low. .......... The election seemed to be headed for a record turnout in a runoff, with 2.1 million Georgians having already cast ballots either at early voting sites or by mail-in ballots. The heaviest turnout so far has been in Democratic areas around Atlanta.  


Democrats’ Georgia Hopes Rest on Jon Ossoff, 33. How Did He Get Here? Some well-timed introductions and a knack for opportunity have helped Mr. Ossoff’s rise in Georgia politics. Now he is pursuing his most ambitious goal yet, a U.S. Senate seat.  .............  Mr. Ossoff first emerged on the national stage in 2017, when his bid for a House seat in a special election provided Democrats the first opportunity to express resistance to President Trump. Though he lost a close race in a well-off district in suburban Atlanta, the energy surrounding his candidacy enabled him to shatter fund-raising records and build the political network that has put him within reach of the Senate. .............. showed Mr. Ossoff to be the best-funded Senate candidate in history after pulling in $106.7 million from mid-October to mid-December — almost $40 million more than Mr. Perdue’s tally ............. He has stayed on message, hammering Mr. Perdue over his finances, and perhaps more important, he has not made any major mistakes on the campaign trail or in interviews. ........... Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 race for governor, has built a permanent progressive campaign infrastructure in the state. Already, more than two million Georgians have voted in the 2020 Senate runoffs. ............ “You remind me of another time in my own life,” Mr. Lewis said to Mr. Ossoff ..............  had “the most unique blog strategy” and quoted Mr. Ossoff saying that blogs were “effective in reaching out to the people who make the news, the people who determine what’s hot and what’s not.” ............... “Jon believed in having local journalists in places like Africa telling their stories and not having white men coming in.”   


2020 Was the Year Reaganism Died The government promised to help — and it did.  In times of crisis, government aid to people in distress is a good thing, not just for those getting help, but for the nation as a whole. ............ voodoo economics, the claim that tax cuts have magical power and can solve all problems ............. Oh, and the new recovery package does include a multi-billion-dollar tax break for business meals, as if three-martini lunches were the answer to a pandemic depression. ........ Opposition to helping the unemployed and the poor was never evidence-based; it was always rooted in a mix of elitism and racial hostility. So we’ll still keep hearing about the miraculous power of tax cuts and the evils of the welfare state. ..........  what we should fear most is a government that refuses to do its job.

How will you be told when it's your turn for a COVID-19 vaccine? It's complicated  Vaccine rollout has largely been left to the states, and with an "isolated and decentralized health system" in the U.S., as Dai put it, people may not know when they're eligible to get their vaccine. And they may have to be proactive in finding where they can get one and in proving that they meet the criteria to be next in line. ...........   about 50 million people will have received their first of two shots of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of January ....... the government should have enough supply so that every American who wants a vaccine can get it by summer 2021. ..........  As vaccines become more available, New York's plan says its residents will also be to check a website for a "vaccine eligibility screening tool and a vaccine administration site locator."  .......  CVS said in a statement that the public will be able to make appointments to get the vaccine at their pharmacies online or via an 800 number once the vaccine is more widely available.

How to persuade someone to take the COVID-19 vaccine  if most people get vaccinated, "we could really turn this thing around" toward the end of 2021. ........  Many people who plan to get vaccinated are confounded by those who are hesitant. ........... "Shame is likely to achieve the opposite reaction we’re hoping for. Look to more constructive emotions like love, hope and the desire to protect to get people to act." .............. Don't treat people's concerns as dumb. Listen to them, validate them, and figure out how to address them. "The first thing is just understanding the base of those concerns and not trying to dismiss them, but trying to grapple with them" ............. "In a perfect, limitlessly resourced world," the authors of the United Nations paper wrote, "we’d have the opportunity to craft highly specific campaigns for each community and identity." .........  It's unlikely you'll change the mind of a militant anti-vaxxer, but experts say they're rare. Those who are skeptical of vaccines are far more common. To figure out where someone stands on COVID-19 vaccines, be curious. Ask questions like, "Why do you think that?" or "Where are you hearing this?" or "Why do you trust this?" ............  if someone thinks COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu, you know which belief you have to correct. ........ trying to correct someone's perception can have a “backfire effect.” When you encounter facts that don’t support your belief, it actually grows stronger. .............  Human beings are hard-wired for bias. If you’re a new mom who believes vaccines cause autism, do you look for research that shows whether they actually do, or do you Google “vaccines cause autism” to find stories to affirm your belief? Likely the latter, which is driven by “motivated reasoning," our psychological tendency to perpetuate our own beliefs and dismiss anything that runs against our own views. However, if you and the person you are trying to persuade share the same identity or social circle, she may be more apt to hear what you have to say. ................ Research shows immediate connections in our social networks matter the most for changing behavior, partly because they set norms about what everybody else is doing. ............. You can also reach out to mutual friends to tell them you know a particular claim is false. ........ "Of course we're going to get the vaccine. That's what everyone's going to do, because that's how we're going to stop this. This is what we've all been waiting for."  

Unemployment aid: When would the $300-per-week benefit begin? "One thing that people don't realize is that the average unemployment benefit is at poverty level in many states." ....... the programs expire in mid-March ........ It could take about two to three weeks for states to start paying out the extra $300 in weekly benefits ..........  lawmakers may be debating more jobless aid in 2021. "I don't think we will be done with the pandemic and the recession in 11 weeks" 

Even With 10 Million COVID-19 Cases, A Doctor Says India 'Dodged A Bullet' India has a population of 1.4 billion people. With fewer than 7,500 coronavirus cases per million people and a COVID-19 fatality rate of just below 1.5%, India's per capita infections and mortality rate are among the lowest in the world. "[The virus] could have been completely out of control in India," she says. .......... It could be our age structure, that we have much fewer elderly people and therefore mortality and severe disease in the population was relatively low. We were hit later in the pandemic so we had a better opportunity to prepare. We may have prior exposure to other coronaviruses which may have led this disease to be less severe. We seem to have higher rates of asymptomatic infection so it may also mean that the virus is behaving differently in our population. .................. A lot of countries in Africa and South Asia are behaving like India with lower severe disease and lower mortality. ............. I'm glad to hear that the government is planning to use the election infrastructure for delivering vaccines. ........... Even with vaccines, I think we are again very lucky in India because we've got all these wonderful vaccine companies that are going to be able to provide to India perhaps more vaccines to more of our population than many other developing countries will have access to. I'm actually more worried about the rest of the world.

हाम्रो साहित्यले छुटाएका कथाहरू लेखकहरू सम्पन्न र विद्वान् हुँदा साधारण ज्यामीहरूका कथा यथार्थवादी ढङ्गले लेखिएनन् । लेखकहरू सहरका हुने भएकाले गाउँका कथा यथार्थवादी रूपमा आएनन् ।  

Monday, December 28, 2020

In The News (30)

Jimmy Kimmel Calls Giuliani the ‘Gift That Keeps on Grifting’ “I guess this explains why Trump has been passing the MAGA hat around, asking his fans to donate to his legal defense fund,” Kimmel said of Rudy Giuliani’s alleged request to be paid $20,000 a day.




The culling of minks in Denmark prompts a political crisis.  with the minister of agriculture forced to step down and the government in danger of collapse. ........... Denmark is home to some of the world’s largest mink farms, with an estimated population of more than 15 million. .......... “The mink farms are a reservoir where the coronavirus is thriving”  

The Pandemic in Six-Word Memoirs “The world has never felt smaller.” ........... Avoiding death, but certainly not living. — Sydney Reimann ......... Cleaned Lysol container with Lysol wipe. — Alex Wasser ........... Hallway hike, bathtub swim, Pandora concert. — Susan Evind 

Giuliani Got a Bad Batch of ‘Just for Henchmen’ Hair Dye, Colbert Says “Remind me, is it a good sign when your lawyer starts melting?” Stephen Colbert joked after Rudy Giuliani appeared to sweat hair dye during a news conference. 

Douglas Stuart Wins Booker Prize for ‘Shuggie Bain’ The autobiographical novel, about the lonely gay son of an alcoholic mother in 1980s Scotland, was one of four debut books in this year’s shortlist. 

When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure — and their inherent falsehood.

David Fincher’s Impossible Eye With ‘Mank,’ America’s most famously exacting director tackles the movie he’s been waiting his entire career to make. .................. If you want to build worlds as engrossing as those he seeks to construct, then you need actors to push their performances into zones of fecund uncertainty, to shed all traces of what he calls “presentation.” And then you need them to give you options, all while hitting the exact same marks (which goes for the camera operators too) to ensure there will be no continuity errors when you cut the scene together. Getting all these stars to align before, say, Take No. 9 is possible but unlikely. ................. For one, he reveres “Citizen Kane.” “I don’t think it’s the greatest American movie ever made,” he said, “but it’s in the top three — and they made it in 1941.” (“The Godfather Part II” and “maybe ‘Chinatown’” round out his podium.) .............. his father “never understood Hollywood’s inherent cynicism — he didn’t understand the magnetic pull for the sociopath that Hollywood has.” .........  His shots come to represent the gliding, unmediated gaze of some impossible — and faintly malevolent — eye: “I want it to feel omniscient,” Fincher said. .......... The fundamental formal pleasure of watching a Fincher film is that every last micron of the experience has been considered, and then reconsidered, with an abundance of love, skill and precision. .......... his camera typically moves only when an actor does — and at the same speed .......... (Fincher described playing his favorite video game, Madden NFL, as “the only time I’m not thinking about movies.”) ............ “David had a laser pointer out, and he was circling this one section of a wall in the upper part of the frame, saying, ‘That’s a quarter of a stop too bright.’ I had to leave the room. I had to go outside and take some deep breaths, because I thought, Oh, my God — to see like that? All the time? Everywhere? I wouldn’t be able to do it.” ................. “I think because people are blinded by his outsize visual dexterity, he doesn’t get enough credit for his understanding of story.” ...........  “If David wanted to take the time, he could write his movies himself.” ...............  “strategically deployed silence can be just as breathtaking.” ........... He once stole baby dolls from her room, packed them with “hamburger and ketchup,” as he recalled in an article in Interview, and then “threw them onto the freeway,” treating motorists to the spectacle of infants exploding on the asphalt. .................  an experience of productive demystification: The people behind “Star Wars” were not deities but fellow Bay dudes figuring things out through trial and error. ................  “when he started out, Dave was so arrogant it was unreal. He still has very little patience for people who are not as smart as he is, which is a lot of people.” .................   compared Fincher’s repeated takes to working in theater, where an actor discovered new things in the same material night in, night out .................  He’s a taskmaster to a fault, and he’ll argue to the death with you. He’s a prosecutor — he makes me so uncomfortable. ‘Why would you write that? Why would you think that makes sense?’ ...............  Fincher’s way of dealing with people can rankle, Roth added, “but he’s as loyal as the day is long, he’ll support you and he knows what he wants — in Hollywood, that’s an incredible thing.” .......... Fincher’s sets can get tense. He has acknowledged that on “Panic Room” — a film whose every last shot he designed using previsualization software before ever stepping on to the set — ............. Jake Gyllenhaal, a star of “Zodiac,” told this paper in 2007 that Fincher “paints with people” and called it “tough to be a color.” ...............  When I asked Fincher what happened with Gyllenhaal on that film, he described an “extremely simple” situation: “Jake was in the unenviable position of being very young and having a lot of people vie for his attention, while working for someone who does not allow you to take a day off. I believe you have to have everything out of your peripheral vision.” But “I think Jake’s philosophy was informed by — look, he’d made a bunch of movies, even as a child, but I don’t think he’d ever been asked to concentrate on minutiae, and I think he was very distracted. He had a lot of people whispering that ‘Jarhead’” — a 2005 war movie starring Gyllenhaal — “was going to be this massive movie and put him in this other league, and every weekend he was being pulled to go to the Santa Barbara film festival and the Palm Springs film festival and the [expletive] Catalina film festival. And when he’d show up for work, he was very scattered.” He had “his managers and his silly agents who were all coming to his trailer at lunch to talk to him about the cover of GQ and this and that,” Fincher said, adding, “He was being nibbled to death by ducks, and not particularly smart ducks. They got in his vision, and it was hard for him to hit the fastball.” ................  But. It’s: Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day. And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again.” ................. “Once you get here, the only thing I care about is, Did we tell the story?” ................  “Mank” raises difficult questions about the ultimate ability of art to change society: Hearst effectively crushed Welles’s movie upon release, and even though “Kane” became legendary for its unflattering depiction of Hearst, it never posed a real threat to his power. ................ how advancements in technology had allowed him to tell more ambitious stories ................  “I had the horsepower to now think in terms of ‘What do you want to do,’ as opposed to ‘What are you capable of?’”  

How My Pet Snake Taught Me to Really See   Childhood has a way of alchemizing disparate information into wonder ........... The snake is as much symbol as animal, and this oversaturation of meaning prevents us from seeing the snake clearly. In reality, they are gentle, healthful to the environment, “more scared of you than you are of it,” a sort of tragic hero of the ecosystem that is, when gazed upon without malice, beautiful.   


No One Loves Arby’s Like I Do One look at the Colonel, and you could see the price of war. He was paralyzed from the waist down. ............ For years I made my dad give me crew cuts so I could look like the Colonel. Until third grade I would tell people that I wanted to be an Army Ranger when I grew up. .......... As I grew up, I learned that war was not my childhood fantasy of toy soldiers and brass trinkets; it was grim, relentlessly destructive and often pointless. ..............  I didn’t choose to be Mormon, or to grow up in the South, but those conservative structures did give me comfort — they provided an uncomplicated worldview, one with easy answers. ......... The only thing we would agree on now is roast beef. But at least it’s something.


In The News (29)

The Fight to Win Latino Voters for the G.O.P. For 10 years, Libre — an arm of the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity — has been working to foster conservatism in Hispanic communities. Now, the group is going all-in on Georgia’s Senate runoffs.
1918 Germany Has a Warning for America Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign recalls one of the most disastrous political lies of the 20th century.
Bitcoin Hits New Record, This Time With Less Talk of a Bubble The crazy cousin of traditional currencies, which fell below $4,000 in March, passed $19,783. More investors now are buying it for the long term.
A New Political Force Emerges in Georgia: Asian-American Voters The Asian-American population in the state has doubled in two decades, and many live in the Atlanta suburbs, which voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. by large margins.
The House members already facing the redistricting chopping block The upcoming reapportionment of congressional seats could hasten the departures of a number of longtime members of Congress.
American High Schools Go Woke Consultants cash in on radical changes to curricula nationwide
The Mastermind Behind Biden’s No-Drama Approach to Trump Only one top Biden adviser isn’t joining him in the White House—but she’ll still stay close. ......... “As [Biden] will be the first to say, he’s the only Irishman who doesn’t carry a grudge,” Dunn told me. “I’m not Irish, but I will carry his grudges.” 




Op-Ed: On the COVID frontlines, we’re tired of hearing lame excuses for risky behavior We’re tired of seeing patients who got the virus after their kid’s “limited” birthday party or because they went out to a restaurant dinner with “close friends” or flew to a celebration in a state “that didn’t have much COVID.” ...............  Wear a mask whenever you leave the house. Stop doing dumb stuff, like going to parties, destination weddings and the French Laundry. Stop listening to know-nothings who spout “science” on YouTube and Twitter. ............ So avoid crowds. Wash your hands. Stay home. Why is this so hard? ............... how a single wedding of 55 people in Maine infected 27 guests. None of them died and some didn’t even have symptoms. So, no big deal, right? Wrong. The infected guests went on to infect others, who in turn spread it themselves. Over the next 38 days, the wedding was responsible for infecting at least 176 people, and seven of them died. .............  We’ve reached that place in the movie where there are so many zombies we have to hide in the basement. Except the zombies are down there with us, fresh from an “essential” shopping trip, and now their kid has a cough. ..............  The fire burns all around us and we are dry grass, from sea to shining sea. ..........  Now we are in danger of losing perhaps half a million people or more. ............  How can the world’s strongest democracy be unwilling to fight a winnable war on our own soil to protect our own lives and those of our neighbors? A lot of us won’t even don masks to aid the fight. ............  Like the last man shot in war, you might get the virus before you get the vaccine.  


Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine The furious race to develop a coronavirus vaccine played out against a presidential election, between a pharmaceutical giant and a biotech upstart, with the stakes as high as they could get.  ...........  Their apparent success showed that in an era of polarized politics, science was able to break down barriers between government, countries and industry to produce one of the few pieces of good news in a year of suffering and division.  


Making the Most of the Coming Biden Boom The economic outlook is probably brighter than you think. ......... Donald Trump is tweeting while America burns .......... Joe Biden will eventually preside over a soaring, “morning in America”-type recovery. ...........  I won’t even be surprised if we see G.O.P. efforts to impede the wide distribution of a vaccine. ........... we’ll still need to invest on a large scale to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, improve the condition of America’s families (especially children) and, above all, head off catastrophic climate change. 

In The News (28)

Best Movies of 2020 The screening rooms were closed. The festivals were virtual. The blockbusters were in storage. Even so, our critics found abundant and inspiring signs of cinematic life in the pandemic.  ........ A big-screen fundamentalist, I love going out to the movies, to first- and second-run cinemas as well as to art houses, museums and cinémathèques. I know which theater and studio in Los Angeles (where I live) has the biggest screen, the best sound, sightlines and seats — me, I like to sit in the middle of the theater, perfectly centered. ......... the sometimes shocking science videos demonstrating how far sneezes and coughs can travel (27 feet!) ........... the clock-and-capitalism-determined flow of everyday life. .......... Every so often, someone asks what I think will happen to movies. I haven’t a clue, beyond my conviction that good, bad and indifferent ones will continue to be produced, distributed and exhibited. ............. The press screenings and catch-up trips to local theaters that have punctuated my weeks for more than two decades vanished, and my internet connection turned into a 24-hour cinémathèque. 

The Stimulus Compromise Is $908 Billion Better Than Nothing The Senate’s plan is flawed. Doing nothing would be much worse.
How Atlanta’s Politics Overtook the Suburbs, Too Communities that defined themselves in opposition to the city have increasingly grown to resemble it.
As Brexit Deadline Looms, Boris Johnson Takes Personal Control of Talks With negotiators at impasse, the prime minister hopes he and European leaders can hammer out a trade deal to replace the one that expires on Dec. 31.




Obama, the Best-Selling Author, on Reading, Writing and Radical Empathy He invited authors and historians to the White House and had already published a best-selling memoir. That didn’t make writing his latest book, “A Promised Land,” any less of a grind. .......  his belief that, in these divided times, “storytelling and literature are more important than ever,” adding that “we need to explain to each other who we are and where we’re going.”  

‘Is Austin on Your List?’: Biden’s Pentagon Pick Rose Despite Barriers to Diversity With retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III’s nomination to be the first Black defense secretary, the Pentagon comes face to face with its record as a place where people of color struggle to climb. .........   For much of his career, General Austin was accustomed to white men at the top. But a crucial turning point — and a key to his success — came a decade ago, when General Austin and a small group of African-American men populated the military’s most senior ranks. ...........   the entrenched system that has defaulted to white men at the top when 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty in the United States are people of color. ........ a tendency by corporate America to raid the best talent ......... One thing the American military does is throw together young men and women of all different races, at least at first. ............ He could not help but notice that the higher up he went, the whiter the Navy got, until soon there were no people of color around him. ......... General Austin, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, was raised in Thomasville, Ga., the same town that produced Henry O. Flipper, who was born a slave and in 1877 became the first African-American graduate of West Point and the first Black officer to lead Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry. ............. He had learned a lesson: In the American military, if he did not specifically ask that minority candidates be included on the lists for various posts, he would not get any. .......... Mr. Biden, in an op-ed in The Atlantic on Tuesday, called General Austin’s management of the Iraq withdrawal “the largest logistical operation undertaken by the Army in six decades” and compared it to what will be required to help distribute coronavirus vaccines throughout the United States, a job the next defense secretary will find in his portfolio. “I know this man,” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday, formally introducing his nominee for defense secretary.  





It's Time To Break Up Facebook he’s human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic. .......... Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. ............... Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it. ............  Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. ...........  We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American. .......... Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth. ..............  A century later, in response to the rise of the oil, railroad and banking trusts of the Gilded Age, the Ohio Republican John Sherman said on the floor of Congress: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. ............... In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers. ...........  From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility. Back then, we competed with a whole host of social networks, not just Myspace, but also Friendster, Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal and others. The pressure to beat them spurred innovation and led to many of the features that distinguish Facebook: simple, beautiful interfaces, the News Feed, a tie to real-world identities and more. .............. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category. ............ About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. .................  I heard more than one friend say, “I’m getting off Facebook altogether — thank God for Instagram,” not realizing that Instagram was a Facebook subsidiary. .................  The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. ...............  The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later. ............ other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon).  





The Hidden ‘Fourth Wave’ of the Pandemic America hasn’t begun to face this year’s mental health crisis. ...........  Nine long, deadly months into the pandemic, Americans report severe psychic distress. It’s dark, we’re stuck inside, and we’re isolated from friends and family. ...............  Americans’ assessment of our mental health is “worse than it has been at any point in the last two decades.” ............  In addition to so much death, the next three months could bring a level of collective grief, anxiety, depression and overall stress that may eclipse all that we’ve experienced so far this terrible year. ............. “Once we get the pandemic under control, people are going to come up for air, and they will not be OK” ............  Many people often feel terrible about the holidays because they rarely go as well as they do on TV, and this year, more than ever, the disconnect will be unavoidable — and triggering. ............ Eat well, sleep well, maintain social connections, spend time outside in the sun and get a lot of exercise, which has been shown to provide significant improvements for a range of mental health problems.  

Saturday, December 26, 2020

In The News (27)

Congress votes to avert government shutdown for now as Covid relief talks drag on
Missing stimulus check money: How to claim the Recovery Rebate Credit on your taxes The deadline to file for a missing stimulus check this year has passed, but you can still claim your payment as Recovery Rebate Credit on your taxes in 2021.

The W.T.O. Is Having a Midlife Crisis Fixing the global trading system means first coming to grips with why it is broken. ....... The W.T.O. has ordered countries to gut programs that encouraged renewable energy and laws that protected workers from unfair foreign competition, as if international commerce were more important than climate change and workers’ rights.  



Can We Do Twice as Many Vaccinations as We Thought? Data suggests significant protection even without a second shot. If studies prove that’s true, it could be a game changer.

The Next 3 Months Are Going to Be Pure Hell Lessons from Lewis and Clark on living through the darkest days and longest nights. ....... “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation” .......  During the coronavirus pandemic, the number of adults exhibiting symptoms of depression has tripled, and alcohol consumption has risen. We are prisoners of our homes and our minds, Zoom-fatigued, desperate for social contact. As a nation, we are diminished and exhausted, and millions remain out of work. .............. Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, but came within 43,000 votes of losing the election because of the anti-democratic relic of the Electoral College. ............ more than 500,000 Americans likely will have died from Covid-19 by the end of March. ...........  How to get through it? Hibernation ....... Looking inward, discovering the nuance and overlooked dimensions of things long neglected.  

When a Family Is Fractured For most people, estrangements and family rifts are a source of chronic stress that threatens “mental, social and physical well-being.” .......... a relationship-severing dispute may reflect years of accumulated resentments that were never expressed or addressed. ......... family rifts were surprisingly pervasive and often result in long-lasting emotional and physical distress. ........... For most people, estrangements are a source of chronic stress that threatens “mental, social and physical well-being” ...........  Unresolved rifts can precipitate chronic stress in one or both participants that undermines their emotional and physical health. The resulting anxiety or depression can worsen heart disease and diabetes, cause reproductive problems, undermine immunity and even shorten the person’s life ............. rifts can sometimes be health-saving for the person who precipitates them ............. “Estrangement can be a way to manage unsustainable tension and anxiety.” ..........  Reconciliation is often not easy, but the folks Dr. Pillemer interviewed who achieved it said it was well worth the effort. .........  for a reconciliation to work, rehashing of past hurts and rebuttals had to cease and the relationship restored on a new footing that goes forward, not backward ............  “Going over the past was just not going to work for us; we learned how to move ahead together.”  

It’s Time to Scare People About Covid Our public messaging about the virus should explain the real costs — in graphic terms — of catching the virus. ............ It’s time to make people scared and uncomfortable. It’s time for some sharp, focused terrifying realism. .........  I’m not talking fear-mongering, but showing in a straightforward and graphic way what can happen with the virus. ............. a soft-focus video of a person on a ventilator, featuring the sound of a breathing machine, but not a face. It exhorted people to wear a mask for their friends, moms and grandpas. .............   bodies naturally rebel against the machine forcing pressurized oxygen into the lungs, which is why patients are typically sedated. ............ Covid long hauler, the 5 percent to 10 percent of people for whom recovery takes months. ........... “One consistent research finding is that even when people see and understand risks, they underestimate the risks to themselves” .......... We hear from many who resist taking precautions. They say, “I know someone who had it and it’s not so bad.” Or, “It’s just like the flu.” ............... studies have shown that emotional ads featuring personal stories about the effects of smoking were the most effective at persuading folks to quit. And quitting smoking is much harder than social-distancing and mask-wearing.   

When Culture Really Began to Reckon With White Privilege Black artists didn’t wait around for institutional change. They are making it happen.  ............  “We see you. We have always seen you,” the letter read a few lines later. “We have watched you pretend not to see us.” ......... set out to expose how white gatekeepers and predominantly white-led cultural institutions systematically oppress artists and audiences of color that they claim to support. ........  They demanded that organizations, many of which have long congratulated themselves for their open-mindedness and liberalism, reckon with their own racist practices from inside out. .......... “The key to antiracism is sharing power,” Carden told The Times in August. “It takes a lot of work and a lot of humility, and it requires that white people step aside.” ............. Whiteness, like any other source of power and site of privilege, must be challenged and moved out of the way as our dominant gaze so we can all finally see each other and ourselves.

The Coronavirus Vaccines Were Developed in Record Speed. Now, the Hard Part the most important factor in a given vaccine’s success is not necessarily how well that vaccine works. It’s everything else: how quickly and strategically the vaccine is distributed across the country, how well received it is and whether people continue to abide by other edicts, like mask wearing and physical distancing. .......... That’s especially bad news for the United States, which has invested billions of dollars into vaccine development, but very little into actually getting people vaccinated.  ....... The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials has said that its members need at least $8.4 billion to develop and run successful coronavirus vaccination programs. So far, the federal government has allocated less than $400 million. ......... 100 million Americans could be immunized against the coronavirus in the next 100 days: 20 million in December, 30 million in January and 50 million February. ........ it will be crucial to wear face masks and practice physical distancing for a good while still ......... they have not yet been tested in children, pregnant women or nursing mothers  


Saturday, November 07, 2020

In The News (6)

Schumer: ‘Now we take Georgia, then we change the world’ Two runoff elections could decide the balance of power in the Senate ..........  Republican Sen. David Perdue will face off on January 5 against Democrat Jon Ossoff after finishing ahead 49.78% to Ossoff’s 47.9%. Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler will compete against Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock. Loeffler finished with 25.94% of the vote and Warnock finished with 32.89%. Loeffler was sharing GOP votes with the well-known Rep. Doug Collins and fended off three other Republican candidates. Warnock topped six other Democrats who also competed for the seat. ................  After the Democrats maintained control in the House and won the presidency, Republicans are framing the Georgia races  as the last stand between the country and a socialist Democratic agenda. ................. Meanwhile, Democrats have made the pitch that in order for Biden to be effective in fighting the coronavirus, improving health care and rebuilding America's economy, he'll need Democrats in charge of both the House and Senate.  


Democrats are in position to 'take a sledgehammer' to the South's red wall: Juan Williams 'This is radical,' he said ........ After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously said that the South was going to be Republican "for a generation.” ......... Southern politics has been solid red for most of the last 50 years. But thanks to the implosion of the Republican Party under President Trump, Democrats are in position to take a sledgehammer to the red wall that has been the basis of Republican strength in Congress. Over the last month, polls put Democrats within striking distance of flipping U.S. Senate seats in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and even Mississippi (Mississippi!)." 

Juan Williams: Democrats rise in the New South Southern politics has been solid red for most of the last 50 years. .......... Trump’s history of stirring racial division is also a driving force in getting moderate white voters to be open to supporting black candidates. ........ Those white voters, often younger people who have moved to the South in recent years, are more likely than older white southerners to know Blacks, Latinos and Asians as neighbors and co-workers. ......... The glue to bind this new political alliance is a message of racial peace coming from moderate, educated candidates, both black and white, who can’t be easily caricatured by Republicans as crazy left-wingers. ........... “White residents now make up fewer than three in five voters in Georgia, and a wave of migration to the Atlanta area over the past decade has added roughly three quarters of a million people to the state’s major Democratic stronghold.” 

Jill Biden will be historic first lady: Just call her ‘Professor FLOTUS’  she continued teaching at Northern Virginia Community College during the eight years she served as second lady ........... She intends to be the first FLOTUS in the role's 231-year history to pursue her career and keep a paying job while living in the White House and serving as first lady. ............. “The beauty of (being FLOTUS) is that you can define it however you want," she told Vogue in July 2019. "And that’s what I did as second lady – I defined that role the way I wanted it to be. I would still work on all the same issues. Education would be right up there, and military families. I’d travel all over this country trying to get free community college.” .............. "I don’t like to see my son attacked, and certainly I don’t like to see my husband attacked, but to me, these are distractions," she said. “This election is… about the American people....The American people don’t want to hear these smears against my family.” ............. Biden, 69, has a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware, which she earned in 2007 under her original name, Jill Jacobs. ............ "Teaching is not what I do. It's who I am," Biden said in a pre-speech tweet. .................... At least initially, most of her students were unaware of the full identity of "Dr. Biden" as either a U.S. senator's wife or as second lady, according to an interview with Vogue in March. She asked Secret Service agents to dress like college students and sit unobtrusively out in the hallway, on laptops, and it worked. .................. Biden, born in Hammonton, New Jersey, and raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, was getting divorced when she met her husband (she married Bill Stevenson after graduation from high school but they had drifted apart by their junior year at the University of Delaware). .............  According to the story, the then-U.S. senator from Delaware, a widower with two young sons who had lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident, saw her picture in an ad (she did a little local modeling), and sought her out; their first date was in spring 1975. ............. “Jill is always grading papers,” Obama said. “Which is funny because I’d forget, ‘Oh yeah, you have a day job!’ And then she pulls out her papers and she’s so diligent and I’m like, ‘Look at you! You have a job! Tell me! Tell me what it’s like!’"





Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s Win, House Losses, and What’s Next for the Left The congresswoman said Joe Biden’s relationship with progressives would hinge on his actions. And she dismissed criticism from House moderates, calling some candidates who lost their races “sitting ducks.” ..............  we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore ............. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat. ...............  the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. ............. if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. ............. If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. .................. We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. ............ There’s a lot of magical thinking in Washington ............ So the D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing. .................  this anti-activist sentiment .............. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss. .................  the history of the party tends to be that we get really excited about the grass roots to get elected. And then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election. ..............  so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district. ..............  If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is. ................. The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive. ............... Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do. .............. Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years? ..............  the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.



I had the privilege of being part of a volunteer team who phonebanked Nepali-speaking registered voters in swing states...

Posted by Anil Jung Shahi on Saturday, November 7, 2020

In The News (5)

Meet the contenders for Biden’s Cabinet The president-elect is expected to nominate a mix of progressives, moderates and even a few Republicans as he seeks to satisfy a broad coalition. 
The Election That Broke the Republican Party By lashing themselves to the president’s desperate conspiracies of fraud, GOP officials have undermined their own legitimacy.  

Thursday, November 05, 2020

In The News (3)



Even If Joe Biden Wins, He Will Govern in Donald Trump's America The 2020 election did not go according to plan for the Democrats. It was a far cry from the sweeping repudiation of Trump that the polls had forecast and liberals craved. After all the outrage and activism, a projected $14 billion spent and millions more votes this time than last, Trump’s term is ending the way it began: with an election once again teetering on a knife’s edge, and a nation entrenched in stalemate, torn between two realities, two orientations, two sets of facts......  the congressional Republicans who enabled him instead notched unexpected gains ....... The GOP appeared likely to retain the majority in the Senate and cut into the Democratic House majority, defying the polls and fundraising deficits. Republicans held onto states such as Florida, South Carolina, Ohio and Iowa that Democrats had hoped to flip. They cut into Democrats’ margins with nonwhite voters, made gains with Latinos in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley, and racked up huge turnout among non-college-educated white people, while halting what many conservatives feared was an inexorable slide in the suburbs. ......... “Democrats always argued, ‘If more people voted, we would win,’” says GOP strategist Brad Todd, co-author of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. “Well, guess what? Everybody voted, and it didn’t help the Democrats. There is a multi-racial, working-class ethos that is animating the new Republican coalition.” ........... he will be governing Trump’s America: a nation unpersuaded by kumbaya calls for unity and compassion, determined instead to burrow ever deeper into mutual antagonism. Win or lose, Trump has engineered a lasting tectonic shift in the American political landscape, fomenting a level of anger, resentment and suspicion that will not be easy for his successor to surmount ..............  The COVID-19 pandemic has just entered its worst phase yet, rampaging across the country virtually unchecked. The economic fallout from the virus continues to worsen without new federal aid. ..............  something is completely rotten in the foundations of our democracy ........  our identity crisis continues. ....... He made little alteration to his bull-in-a-china-shop attitude, even though the hellscape he raged against was now one that unfolded on his watch. ......... Biden shattered campaign-finance records—his campaign hauled in $952 million, dwarfing the incumbent by more than $300 million ...... “These Trump rallies and Trump parades and all those kinds of things, they don’t strike me as the type that would be answering a polling call” ................. “He’s still going to be the leader of the party and the biggest voice, and he’ll at least flirt with the idea of running again. It’s going to continue to be a populist, grievance-fueled party.”  

US election 2020: Why racism is still a problem for the world's most powerful country  It's the mindset that led President Woodrow Wilson, in office from 1913 to 1921, to oversee the re-segregation of multiple federal agencies. This is the same president who publicly backed the Ku Klux Klan. It's the mindset that at the turn of the 20th Century saw the vilification of black people as wide-eyed "happy negroes" content with their lot as poor share croppers and shoe shiners. ..................  African Americans don't have that luxury. The past is the present, the racism is the same. ......... A big issue in the campaign was urban crime and the Clinton administration's controversial 1994 Crime Bill that critics say increased mass incarceration and led to the disproportionate jailing of tens of thousands of black men. Joe Biden helped get that legislation on the books, and his involvement has come back to haunt him. ..............  the fear of a bad encounter with the police lives in the mind of every African American. 


In The News (2)

Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures

The left just got crushed


Three Reasons Biden Flipped the Midwest Trump gave away his gains with key groups from four years ago and Biden reclaimed lost Democratic ground.

A Dreadful New Peak for the American Pandemic The country recorded more than 100,000 coronavirus cases today—the highest single-day total since the pandemic began.

Democrats frustrated, GOP jubilant in Senate fight

Biden Edges Close to 270

Despite ‘racist’ charges, Trump did better with minorities than any GOP candidate in 60 years

Can Republicans Become a Multiracial Working-Class Party?



Wednesday, November 04, 2020

In The News (1)

Once Again, a Nation Cuts It Too Close for Comfort Democrats are dashed in their hopes for a quick or decisive knockout. 

Republicans clinging to Senate majority as Dems under-perform The key races include GOP-held seats in Maine and North Carolina, while Georgia could send two Senate elections into overtime. 




China shapes a new U.S. economic era: The return of industrial policy The latest episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast explores the new industrial policy emerging in America to counter China’s ascent.