I’ve eaten at restaurants, gone to a mall and attended concerts. That is life in France.

greenhouse of a vineyard with 100 mostly older fans sitting in neat rows. Although attendance was deliberately kept low, we nervously rearranged some chairs to watch the concert through an open window on the lawn outside. But, in fact, there were no outbreaks there and I’ve not heard of others at similar venues. Empty Paris hotels show that everything is not normal, but overall, it feels like life. Last week, new cases in France rose to 1,000 per day, but that’s still a tiny fraction of U.S. cases and is down a little this week. A true second wave could happen, but daily infections data would suggest that probably fewer than 1 in every 2,000 French people are contagious at any one time. If that is the case, the government is well-positioned to keep infections in check through local-only lockdowns if necessary. Strangely, the government only required sales clerks to wear masks in stores at first, but for the last week, the law has required everyone wear a mask indoors, including restaurants when you’re not seated. People are wearing them — and are lining up a few feet apart outside bakeries for their daily baguettes. France and the rest of Europe are just showing what grown-up governments in well-off societies do, which makes our U.S. disaster all the more painful to watch (and for me to rejoin next week, alas). And while President Trump obviously is the source of our juvenile response, Congress also passed three emergency bills with trillions of dollars for relief but almost no instructions or resources for reopening. Before the last emergency bill, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) and several dozen others sponsored the Reopen America Act, which would give states funding for testing, contact tracing and personal protective equipment so long as they submit plans that meet basic, safer reopening standards. Nothing so sensible made it into the legislation then. It’s still relevant today. We knowTrump won’t act. Congress must. It’s time to follow Europe. Watch Opinions videos: Read The Post’s View: The pandemic has made Europe stronger David J. Skorton: We need a covid-19 reset. So we developed a comprehensive plan to do just that. Leana S. Wen: Here’s what it could look like if schools reopened today Nancy Gibbs: Why parents now face an impossible choice David Von Drehle: Americans are suffering. Trump offers them a doctor who warns of sex with demons.


Has your travel bucket list changed during the pandemic? You’re not alone.

We didn’t get a heads-up that the coronavirus would shut the world down. There was no opportunity to steal away one last time before locking down indefinitely. We had to be grateful for the travel we already had enjoyed, and maybe start planning escapes for the distant future. “The appetite for travel has not gone down; it’s in our DNA to travel,” said Stephen McGillivray, chief marketing officer for Travel Leaders Group, one of the largest networks of travel agents. “The interest is just as robust … but it’s for ’21 and beyond.” What will those trips in the beyond look like? The pandemic, and the contemplation that’s followed, has led me to retool my travel bucket list. I’ve spent some downtime looking at old travel photos, reliving the memories and reflecting on the experiences worth repeating — and the new experiences worth trying. And it seems I’m not alone. With most international travel off-limits to Americans, McGillivray says travelers right now are much more interested than before in trips to Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as in domestic vacations, and less interested in cruising. Data from Hopper, a flight- and hotel-booking app, show a similar pattern: The app’s most-booked recent destinations for the next six months are primarily in the United States, led by Miami, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. For trips that are a year out, however, there’s a noticeable shift. For that time frame, Hopper’s most-booked destinations are almost entirely international, with France, Brazil, Aruba, the Netherlands and Japan making up the top five. Customers of travel-booking company Porter & Sail, meanwhile, are predominantly interested in long-haul and resort-based trips to destinations such as Namibia, Bhutan, Indonesia and Mexico for 2021, according to co-founder and chief executive Caitlin Zaino von During. These specific destination trends might not last; Zaino von During says customer interest has been shifting “wildly” throughout the pandemic. But the broader trend is telling. “That future-thinking planning is focused on wide open spaces, beautiful jungles, being pampered in resorts, amazing, bucket-list kind of travel that delivers that serotonin hit of excitement, just knowing you’ll be there soon,” Zaino von During said. I can sympathize. After being holed up in my studio apartment for half the year now (and counting), disappearing into a jungle sounds more appealing than ever. And now that we know travel is not guaranteed, there’s a stronger incentive to take advantage


Arizona State swimming’s solution for coronavirus uncertainty: Redshirt the entire team

The swimming and diving facility at Arizona State remains closed, and the team has yet to practice together since March, when sports came to a halt because of the novel coronavirus. Unable to lead his swimmers through daily practices, Coach Bob Bowman said he has thought to himself: How can this program emerge from the pandemic better than before? About a week ago, a radical solution came to mind: Every member of the swimming and diving roster will redshirt during the 2020-21 school year. That means they have a clear focus for the first time in months. The athletes will prepare for next summer’s Olympic trials and the Tokyo Games, knowing they won’t compete at the college level until the 2021-22 season. Not long after Pac-12 Championships, the NCAA swimming season — and for some athletes, their college careers — came to an abrupt end. Skipping the upcoming season ensures that will not happen again. “Those kids didn’t get an extra year of eligibility like the spring sports did,” said Bowman, the longtime personal coach of Michael Phelps and the 2016 U.S. Olympic men’s team head coach. “So we just lost the [NCAA] championship. I was like, ‘We cannot do that with our best people. They cannot lose two out of four.’ That was a big part of the thinking.” Bowman began considering who the program should redshirt this year. It seemed natural to preserve a year of eligibility for the team’s top scorers, but then Bowman thought, “Why don’t we do it for everybody?” This plan that Bowman developed about a week ago was well received by the athletes and their parents. Bowman pitched his idea up the chain of command — through Arizona State’s athletic department, the compliance office, the university president and the conference — before the school announced the decision Sunday evening. Arizona State has athletes in the 2021 class verbally committed to join the program, and they have been promised scholarships. Schools are allotted 9.9 scholarships to distribute among their men’s teams and 14 for women. But Arizona State didn’t use all of those available scholarships during the 2019-20 season, which mitigates the logistical hurdle. Bowman said the program didn’t have any scholarship divers this past season, even though typically some are allotted to diving. “By some small miracle, it actually works out that we can do it,” Bowman said. “It would be tough for


SpaceX and NASA still plan to fly astronauts home this weekend, but Hurricane Isaias could complicate landing

with Boeing, SpaceX is under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying people to the station. And this mission, known as Demo-2, is designed to test the Dragon spacecraft to ensure it operates properly before NASA allows the company to fly operational missions of astronauts to the station. Like the launch, the return journey is a perilous one. The spacecraft will be traveling 17,500 mph and hit the atmosphere with such force that flames will engulf the capsule, testing the heat shield. As it gets closer to Earth, two drogue parachutes will deploy, and then four main chutes are to guide the spacecraft down to the sea, where rescue crews will be standing by. In the case of an emergency, Air Force search and rescue teams as well as contractors from ManTech, a private security company, will be on standby with C-17 cargo aircraft to deploy to either the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Another team is posted in Hawaii to respond if the mission goes way off course and lands in the Pacific. "If the spacecraft comes down where it is supposed to, in the condition expected, then SpaceX is 100 percent responsible for the recovery of the crew and the spacecraft,” said Mike McClure, a ManTech program manager who used to command the Air Force’s rescue detachment. “If, however, the spacecraft lands someplace else, or the condition of the spacecraft and the crew drives SpaceX or NASA to request [Department of Defense] assistance, then our team will spring into action.” Despite the many challenges of a water landing, Hurley and Behnken said they were not concerned. “Splashdown is closer than it was the last time we were asked questions about it,” Behnken said. “But I still don’t feel nervous about it. Really, we’re focused on the things that we’ll need to do to be as safe as possible as we come back.” It’ll be a fairly long flight, some 18 hours between undocking and splashdown. And the astronauts will be busy monitoring the capsule’s systems, making sure everything is on track and operating properly. But they’ll also have some time to get some rest. “We’ll spend a good share of that sleeping,” Hurley said. Read More: Photos and video Companies in the Cosmos Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley How to dress for space Listen to Moonrise Living in space The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing


The insects that seem to defy physics — and have humans under their spell

expert in moths and butterflies — is likely, in the words of the natural historian Richard Fortey, to be “as familiar with the speckles and dappling of a butterfly wing as he would be with the faces of his own family,” capturing this dynamic pattern of color has proved challenging. The explorer and first natural historian of Lepidoptera, Maria Sibylla Merian, who was the epitome of an Enlightenment woman, the author of the best-selling “The Wonderful Transformation and Strong Floral Food of Caterpillars” (1679) and the discoverer of the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies, resigned herself to the fact that she could not re-create the dazzling brilliance and aura of butterflies with watercolors. The fleeting and ephemeral nature of the colors was affected by the angle of vision, which shifted the iridescence through a suite of multicolored transitions in a manner that appeared to defy physics. Although having a brain no larger than a pinhead, and weighing less than a paper clip, monarch butterflies navigate great distances. Unable to regulate their temperatures, they travel south from as far north as Canada. Williams describes how — like pilgrims walking along Spain’s Camino de Santiago — they make their way south along one of three butterfly highways toward Mexico, where they vacation during the winter months. The California coast harbors a host of overwintering monarch zones, including Pismo Beach and Morro Bay. But more than half of these have been abandoned in recent years, and the number of migrating butterflies is steadily falling. This is in part because of the loss of their habitats, which have been subsumed by intensive monoculture, orchards, vineyards and farms. It is also a result of changes in the frequency of species such as the milkweed plant that play key roles in their life cycle. Despite their radiant beauty and often-described gentle nature, male monarchs indulge in brutal sexual behavior, knocking down females and forcing themselves upon them while they are in a half-dazed state, according to a description Miriam Rothschild provided in a 1978 essay titled “Hell’s Angels.” But close to the time of migration, their behavior undergoes an abrupt change. Instead of flitting around chasing females and feeding on nectar from flowers, they become highly social, gregarious and focused on flying south. But not all butterflies develop a travel bug. Fender blues are homebodies and do not vacation, and whereas the majority of monarchs fly


Meryl Kornfield joins the General Assignment News Desk

Announcement from General Assignment Editor Keith McMillan, Senior Director of Audience Ryan Kellett and Live News Editor Josh Freedom du Lac: We are delighted to announce that Meryl Kornfield is joining the General Assignment news desk, where she’ll cover breaking news and write enterprise. Meryl, who came to The Post through the American University Investigative Workshop, impressed her editors during a stint with Investigative, where she worked on the Opioid Files and the Afghanistan Papers. When Meryl finished every task before editors could come up with more, they approached GA, thinking she might be well-suited to the faster pace. Meryl joined GA on a temporary basis in February as coverage of the pandemic began to ramp up. She worked five shifts a week writing for the coronavirus live updates file, the steady stream of essential news that has become immensely popular with readers. Somehow she also found time to write a Faces of the Dead profile about a man who died days after his wife of 71 years after they both caught covid-19. She wrote with care about tourists trapped on a Nile cruise ship because of the coronavirus and about a family that died in a tornado near Nashville. Meryl interned at the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Palm Beach Post. She is a Miami native and proud University of Florida graduate with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. "In the Before Times," Meryl says, "I think I liked traveling and hiking." She has visited 30 countries and was a member of the Florida TrailGators, her college's hiking club. Please join us in welcoming her to GA in a full-time capacity on Aug. 3.


World Digest: July 31, 2020

AFGHANISTAN As many as 15 Afghan civilians were killed and many others wounded Thursday when clashes broke out on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afghan officials said. Ahmad Bahir Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, which borders Pakistan, said 15 people were killed and 80 wounded. The Afghan Defense Ministry said at least nine, including a child, were killed and blamed Pakistani forces for the attack. In a statement, the ministry warned that the Afghan air force and special forces units are on high alert and prepared to reciprocate if violence continues. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry rejected the Afghan assertion, saying Friday that “Afghan forces opened unprovoked fire on innocent civilians gathered towards Pakistan’s side of the international border.” “Pakistan troops responded to protect our local population and acted only in self-defense,” it said. Afghan forces fired first, it said, and casualties also occurred on Pakistan’s side of the border. Movement at the border has been restricted because of the coronavirus, but some rules were relaxed to allow crossings for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Crowds had gathered on both sides to cross, Reuters said. — Sharif Hassan, Siobhán O'Grady VIETNAM Vietnam, which for more than three months appeared to have beaten back the novel coronavirus, confirmed Friday its first death from the pandemic after a cluster of cases emerged in the coastal city of Danang. The death of the 70-year-old man comes about seven months after the nation recorded its first virus cases. He was being treated for kidney disease at a Danang hospital when he tested positive for the coronavirus Monday. The fatality, followed by a second also announced Friday, is the latest sign that Vietnam’s virus situation is worsening amid the local surge in Danang. The country is joining a number of other areas that had appeared to control outbreaks, such as Japan and Australia’s state of Victoria, only to find they can’t entirely keep the virus out. Vietnam was one of the few countries in Asia to have zero confirmed deaths. Laos and Cambodia still have not reported a fatality tied to covid-19. On Friday, Vietnam confirmed 56 new cases, with most of those in Danang. The country’s overall number of infections is 546. — Bloomberg News Eastern Libya military court gives journalist 15 years: Moscow demands that Belarus free 33 detained Russians: Two killed in crash of high-speed train in Portugal:


Trump’s mail ballot claims are part of a long history of voter suppression

The continuing tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic has offered an unexpected opportunity to change American voting fundamentally through the adoption of vote-by-mail policies. President Trump, however, is sounding the alarm — or, more accurately, the dog whistle. On Thursday, he tweeted that mail voting was a “catastrophic failure” with no accurate count, warning that 2020 would be “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” He even floated delaying the election, a prospect that was quickly denounced by Republicans and Democrats alike. Vote-by-mail solutions have long made sense as a way of ensuring people’s voting rights, and they make even more sense now, when they would protect citizens from potentially deadly exposure to covid-19 at the polls. Trump’s opposition to them must be understood as the most recent act in a long, remarkably consistent historical drama defined by the unremitting commitment to impeding non-White voters from exercising their right to political participation. This political tradition dates back to the advent of Black suffrage and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. In the wake of the Civil War, Black men began exercising their right to vote in the South. Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison was awed by “this wonderful, quiet, sudden, transformation of four millions of human beings from … the auction-block to the ballot-box.” Southern Whites and ex-Confederates, however, were largely horrified at this change. It, indeed, was a “transformation” for them as well. They lost their monopoly on political control. These new voters brought formerly enslaved people to public office. In “Freedom’s Lawmakers,” historian Eric Foner estimates that approximately 2,000 African American men served at the local, state and federal levels of government during Reconstruction. This was a complete reversal of the social order. Local police forces were no longer entirely White, and several Black Southerners became election officials. Black hands counted White votes and vice versa. In this period, the Ku Klux Klan formed, dedicated to terrorizing African Americans, often with the aim of keeping them from the polls. In 1892, the Chicago Tribune interviewed an anonymous Wall Street banker who had been a high-ranking member of the terrorist organization during its early prominence in the South after the war. He was unequivocal about its founding purpose: “[It] formed to guard against Negro supremacy in the South … A Presidential election was near at hand and it was of the highest importance for the Whites to take such


Coronavirus: Critical Choices

as being referred to as "multiple shots on goal," which would be great if one or multiple, several of these candidates end up panning out and Phase 3 studies showed that they are, in fact, effective at preventing COVID-19 on a population level. That would be wonderful. But I think there are other steps that we just also have to consider. We need to keep in mind that it's not the vaccine that's going to save your life. It's the vaccination. We have to do that public education. We also have to make sure that our supply chain is intact. I would not want to be in a situation where we run out of vials and syringes and needles because we have not had a national strategy for ensuring our supply chain, the way that we run out of reagents and swabs for testing. And we also need to keep in mind that the vaccine is still a long way off, and that there are steps that we have to be taking now, including physical distancing, mask-wearing, washing our hands, in order to get us to that point of getting a vaccine. MS. SELLERS: Physical distancing, mask-wearing, and washing our hands. Thank you very much, Dr. Leana Wen, for joining us. I'll be back shortly to speak with Dr. David Skorton about the coronavirus and how to tackle it. Thank you. [Video plays.] MS. SELLERS: Good afternoon. If you are just joining us, I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer at The Washington Post. I'm about to speak with Dr. David Skorton. He is the president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and he wrote an op-ed in today's paper, drawing on the expertise from many medical experts about how to tackle the virus. Welcome, Dr. Skorton. DR. SKORTON: Thanks so much, Frances. It's an honor to be here, and that was a very interesting interview with Dr. Wen. Thank you for that as well. MS. SELLERS: I'm glad you were able to join us for that. So, tell us about the roadmap that you laid out this morning in The Washington Post, drawing on expertise, as I said, from medical colleges, academic institutions, and others. DR. SKORTON: Well, over the last few months when we have been faced with the horror of this pandemic--there's no other way to describe it--there's been a lot of advice coming from various


Huge change in character of our most challenging high schools

1998 were almost entirely different from the top schools this year, based on 2019 data. When it comes to preparing average high school students for college, there has been a remarkable change in the past 22 years. In 1998, the top 20 on the list consisted of 16 neighborhood schools in affluent communities and four magnets that attracted some of the best students. The magnets in that group were Stanton College Prep in Jacksonville, Fla., Richard Montgomery in Rockville, Md., H-B Woodlawn in Arlington, Va., and North Hollywood in North Hollywood, Calif. I excluded some of the most famous magnets, such as the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va., because they were too selective for a list designed to show which schools challenged average students. If their average SAT or ACT scores were above those of the neighborhood schools with the highest averages, they were put on a special Public Elites list. This year, the top 20 consist of 14 public charter schools and six magnets. I added private schools in 2012, but none of them ranked that high this year. The affluent neighborhood public schools that dominated the list in 1998 have fallen behind. That is interesting and somewhat encouraging, given that seven of those charters (all of them part of the IDEA Public Schools charter network in Texas) have student populations that are at least 75 percent low-income. The magnets include Carnegie Vanguard in Houston, Downingtown STEM Academy in Downingtown, Pa., the Marine Academy of Science and Technology at Florida International University in North Miami, Jefferson County IB in Irondale, Ala., and Suncoast Community in Riviera Beach, Fla. The Jacksonville magnet Stanton College Prep is also there, the only school to be in the top 20 in both 1998 and 2020. Stanton offers both AP and IB courses. About 23 percent of its students are Black or Hispanic, compared with only 4 percent at the nation’s most selective magnet, Jefferson. Stanton has increased its ratio of the number of college-level exams to the number of graduating seniors from 4.090 to 16.308 in those 22 years. The rise of previously unsung schools involving even average students in college-level courses is not the result of government programs or national initiatives. The movement has been led by mere local educators who believe ordinary teenagers are capable of learning much more than they are usually taught.


Manufacturing group accuses Metro of sidestepping ‘Buy America’ clause for new rail cars

would require 8 percent of the project to be manufactured in the Mid-Atlantic region. By contrast, the federal “Buy America” provision requires that 70 percent remain domestic. Metro is ordering more than 250 rail cars for its 8000 series and has options to buy up to 800 as it phases out older-model cars and modernizes its fleet. The 8000 series will replace its 2000-series cars, which were built in 1982, as well as the 3000-series cars built in 1987. The first shipment of 8000-series cars could arrive in 2024, Metro has said. The 8000-series cars will be Metro’s eighth model since the rail system opened four decades ago. Currently, there are no U.S.-based manufacturers of subway cars, but Kawasaki Heavy Industries Rolling Stock Company of Japan built Metro’s most recent model at a plant in Lincoln, Neb. Each of the cars is valued at $2 million and the 8000-series is expected to cost as much if not more. Late last year, after representatives from the China Railway Rolling Stock Corp. (CRRC) began pitching their services to Metro, Congress — led by the senators representing Maryland and Virginia — passed a law banning any transit agency from contracting with a company that is not sanctioned under U.S. trade requirements. While Metro cannot directly contract with Chinese companies, the Alliance for American Manufacturing claims parts from CRRC or companies from other unsanctioned countries could end up in Metro rail cars without guard rails, such as the “Buy America” clause because a contracted foreign builder could theoretically use parts from anywhere. Stessel said Metro’s requirement that eight percent of the 8000-series contract be manufactured regionally belies the national impact the total contract will have. Local companies will be relying on domestic parts and services to do their work, he said. But Paul said it’s paltry compared to what “Buy America” would require. “What Metro is doing that concerns us is that it looks like it’s trying to evade ‘Buy America’ rules," he said in an interview. “Yes, it is using local dollars, but it’s it’s able to use local dollars because in part it gets federal dollars for other needs, other capital and operating needs. And so it strikes us as a pretty devious attempt to evade the federal procurement rules.” Paul said Metro is capable of devoting much more of its contract to domestic companies. He also said a lack of U.S.-based


Data isn’t just being collected from your phone. It’s being used to score you.

they are based — is concealed from us. It is mostly impossible to know when one has become the casualty of a score, let alone whether a score is inaccurate, outdated or the product of biased or discriminatory code programmed by a faceless software engineer. There is no appeal. Surveillance scoring bears a faint resemblance to credit scoring in the 1960s. In that pre-computer era, private investigators working for banks, retailers and insurance companies tailed consumers and scoured newspapers for information about arrests, promotions, sexual orientation, drinking habits and cleanliness to decide a consumer’s creditworthiness –— until Congress established rules in the 1970s giving consumers the right to review and question their credit scores. Today’s data snoops obtain infinitely more information about their targets, and in real time. And the impact of surveillance scoring is far more pernicious. The tech industry insists that its every advance improves our lives. But that’s a myth. Surveillance scoring enables companies to cloak old-school discrimination in an aura of technological infallibility and wonder. Secret surveillance scores create micro-markets in which some consumers are no longer welcome. They divide Americans into “haves” and “have-nots,” with the losers relegated to the status of second-class citizens. Consumers need a 21st-century solution to this emergent threat. Congress, awash in tech money, is mired in an outdated legal paradigm: “disclosure” of privacy policies and “consent” via a click. No one pretends that these industrial age contract law concepts will do anything to curb data larceny, let alone regulate or bar secret surveillance scores. We petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and regulate surveillance scoring. The commission’s response? A blog post urging the firms that develop and apply scores to regulate themselves. This is only the latest example of Washington’s capitulation to the tech industry, whose continuous loop of privacy violations, abject apologies and payment of inconsequential penalties confirms that consumers cannot rely on the federal government for protection. Secret surveillance scoring places us at the precipice of the “singularity,” a dystopian turning point after which machines will make judgments about humans that will determine our fate. We either seize control of our future, or risk losing it. Read more Jeff Bezos: How did tech CEOs do on Capitol Hill? Google ‘robber barons.’ Simina Mistreanu: Fears about China’s social-credit system are probably overblown, but it will still be chilling Alexandra Petri: Congress agrees big tech creepy, can’t agree how


Autocratic governments are using coronavirus as a pretext to clamp down on opponents

the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project’s (ACLED) data, which tracks reported political violence and protest events. We used the ACLED measure for repression events, defined as state forces using violence against its civilians. To identify opposition areas in Uganda, we used data collected by the nongovernmental Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) on the percentage of votes that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni won in the 2016 election. We consider districts with less than the median level of votes for Museveni as opposition districts, and pro-government districts otherwise. As part of a national strategy to fight the coronavirus, Museveni instituted a national lockdown on March 18. We compare how many repression events we found in pro-government and opposition districts before and after the implementation of the lockdown. In our analysis, we controlled for levels of poverty, the level of ethnolinguistic diversity and population density. Government repression increased following Uganda’s national lockdown, across both opposition and pro-government districts. Different districts saw different degrees of repression. Until March 2020, the degree of repression in Uganda was more or less the same across districts that voted for the incumbent and those that did not. This changed in March 2020. That’s when the government seriously tightened its coronavirus restrictions, banning the use of public transportation and restricting commerce and any public gatherings. The image above shows that after Uganda shut down for the pandemic, state violence increased much more in opposition districts than in those that voted for Museveni in 2016. Could opposition areas be refusing to comply with coronavirus protocols more than pro-government areas? How security forces responded to political party meetings suggests that this repression is not focused on enforcing public health measures. Security forces reportedly used tear gas to break up an opposition party gathering this month, arresting opposition party members. However, Museveni’s National Resistance Movement has been allowed to gather and operate as before. We analyzed ACLED data from Zimbabwe alongside results from the 2018 elections, collected from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. Again, we considered opposition districts to be any district that received below the national median of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s vote share. In the months since Zimbabwe’s first reported coronavirus case, more than three-quarters of the times that security forces attacked civilians, they did so in opposition districts. Harare and Bulawayo saw the largest increases in repression since March. Those districts also recorded some of the lowest rates of support


Hong Kong leader postpones elections, further eroding political freedoms

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong government said Friday it would delay legislative council elections for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, undermining one of the few partially democratic institutions left in the Chinese territory as Beijing tightens its grip. The decision to put the Sept. 6 elections on hold — unprecedented in the city's political history since its handover from Britain to China in 1997 — was widely seen as another direct blow to Hong Kong's autonomy after Beijing imposed a new security law that sharply expanded powers to quash dissent in Hong Kong. It also closed off one of the few remaining forums for Hong Kong voters to express their voice. The legislative council races loomed as a potential slap against China and its stunning moves to curb Hong Kong's political freedoms after a waves of pro-democracy protests last year. The council elections were expected to bring a significant show of support for opponents of Beijing's increasing controls. In advance, Hong Kong officials disqualified a dozen pro-democracy candidates. Now, Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, said the makeup of the 70-seat council will be decided by Beijing until new elections are held. "This reflects that they — not us — are in fear, in fear of the people and of their voices," said Alvin Yeung, leader of the opposition Civic Party and one of the disqualified candidates. Lam said in a news conference that she was invoking emergency powers to postpone the vote, calling it the most "difficult decision" she has had to make since the onset of the virus here in January. “We have made the decision to postpone the election for one year,” Lam said, after spending half an hour laying out her government’s response to the pandemic and the potential health risks of holding the vote. Because of the pandemic, “we would not be able to meet the requirements of an open and fair election,” she said. In response to reporters’ questions, she added: “There is absolutely no political agenda.” The postponement, Lam said, was supported by Beijing since it is in the “public interest.” Unconvinced, opposition politicians and observers said the moves are designed to stack the political system with those loyal to the Chinese Communist Party and snuff out even moderate political opposition in Hong Kong. A month ago, Beijing subverted Hong Kong’s usual political processes to pass a new national security


elections were the “biggest” in Hong Kong, with 4.4 million voters registered. Having so many people gathered, she said, poses a “great risk,” and registered voters who live in mainland China may not be able to travel into the city to cast their votes. Countries such as Singapore and South Korea have held elections amid the covid-19 outbreak, which was severe in both places. In the 21 days since Singapore’s election, the city-state, which has a population density similar to Hong Kong’s, has not seen a jump in covid-19 cases, and daily community transmissions are in fact down to the single digits. Epidemiologists have noted that Hong Kong has begun to see gains in fighting this third wave of infections, and they predicted that daily cases, which have been a little over 100 in recent days, will likely drop in about four to six weeks. In Washington, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Friday that the election delay was “only the most recent in a growing list of broken promises” by Beijing on Hong Kong’s autonomy. “This action undermines the democratic processes and freedoms that have underpinned Hong Kong’s prosperity,” McEnany said. On Thursday, President Trump proposed a delay to the November presidential election, claiming without evidence that widespread mail balloting would be a “catastrophic disaster.” Republican leaders quickly said no such U.S. election delay was possible. In other fallout from Hong Kong’s move, Germany joined Britain and other nations in suspending its extradition agreement with Hong Kong. A statement from Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, called it a “further infringement on the rights of Hong Kong’s citizens.” Analysts have pointed out, too, that the Hong Kong government could have delayed the vote by a shorter period of several months and put in place a system such as postal or electronic voting. Other institutions of government, including courts that are currently prosecuting thousands of people arrested in pro-democracy protests last year, continue to be open as usual. “Delaying it for a whole year is clearly overreach,” said Antony Dapiran, a lawyer and writer on Hong Kong politics. “It gives them time to suppress the opposition for another year.” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said the move follows a pattern in which the pandemic has been used as cover to suppress political dissidents in mainland China. Hong Kong, she said, has long been a standout in the


Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?

station to depressurize. In one of the most congested areas, about 430 to 560 miles high, “there is enough human-generated orbital debris … to create more debris even if no new satellites were launched,” Weeden told a congressional committee this year. Catastrophic collisions could occur between every five to seven years, he said. The first-ever satellite crash happened in 2009, when a dead Russian satellite collided with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, creating almost 2,000 pieces of debris at least four inches in diameter and thousands more smaller pieces. Much of the debris will remain in orbit for years to come, each a threat to other spacecraft. This year, two dead satellites nearly collided. If they had, it would have created yet another field of debris that could have threatened other satellites. And with more satellites being launched, the chance of more close calls and collisions will only rise. “We’re going to see an even steeper exponential growth in the number of close calls,” said Todd Harrison, an aerospace analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We cannot afford to have more collisions because it produces long-lasting debris that ultimately could limit our ability to use this part of space. It could have far-reaching economic consequences as well as strategic consequences if we screw up that area of space we use for security.” One of the reasons the Trump administration moved so aggressively to form the Space Force, the newest branch of the military, was to defend U.S. assets in space, which are used for reconnaissance, guiding precision munitions and communications. But the Space Force doesn’t want to be in the business of warning companies and governments every time one of their satellites comes uncomfortably close to another. “They don’t want to be in the business of doing warnings for everyone on the world,” Harrison said. “That’s not a military function.” To transfer that authority to the Commerce Department, as the Trump administration called for two years ago, Congress would have to allocate funds and give the agency the authorization to do so. SpaceX, however, is moving quickly and says it could begin offering Internet service from its Starlink constellation in the United States in Canada this year, while “rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021." In a discussion with reporters late last year, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer,


A day after Trump floats an election delay, the White House denounces a postponement in Hong Kong

The White House on Friday condemned Hong Kong’s decision to postpone September legislative elections by a year because of the coronavirus, denouncing the action a day after President Trump floated the idea of delaying the U.S. presidential election in November. “We condemn the Hong Kong government’s decision to postpone for one year its legislative council elections and to disqualify opposition candidates,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said at a news briefing. Reading from a prepared statement,she characterized the move as part of an effort by China to deny “promised autonomy and freedom to the Hong Kong people.” On Thursday, Trump drew immediate rebukes from across the political spectrum after proposing to delay the Nov. 3 election and claiming without evidence that widespread mail balloting would be a “catastrophic disaster” leading to fraudulent results — an assertion he repeated later Friday when speaking to reporters. State governments have increasingly embraced mail-in voting in response to the pandemic, casting it as a way to have fewer people risk infection while casting ballots in person. Democrats seized on Trump’s proposal, suggesting it was evidence that he fears losing to their party’s presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, who has been leading in the polls. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said in a news conference that she was invoking emergency powers to postpone the vote — unprecedented in the city’s political history since its handover from Britain to China in 1997. Postponing the election, she said, was the most “difficult decision” she has had to make since the onset of the virus in January. Because of the pandemic, “we would not be able to meet the requirements of an open and fair election,” she said. Opposition politicians and observers characterized the move as designed to stack the political system with those loyal to the Chinese Communist Party and snuff out even moderate political opposition in Hong Kong. McEnany said from the White House podium that the postponement “undermines the democratic processes and freedoms that have underpinned Hong Kong’s prosperity, and this is only the most recent in a growing list of broken promises by Beijing.” Trump floated the idea of delaying the U.S. presidential election in a Thursday morning tweet, which concluded with the question: “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” At a news conference later in the day, he said that while he does not want to delay


Pandemic’s weight falls on Hispanics and Native Americans, as deaths pass 150,000

June and early July. The disparity may be persisting, but CDC data lags state statistics, and the agency’s most recent numbers were not complete enough to include in the analysis. (The federal data about age and gender among covid-19 deaths were not broken down at the state level over time, so those demographic factors were not included in the analysis.) In California, Hispanics account for 39 percent of the state population, but 46 percent of all virus deaths and 57 percent of virus deaths reported in the last week of June. In Texas, where Hispanics are 40 percent of the population, they account for an approximately proportional share of all virus deaths. In the last week of June, however, they made up 57 percent of the deaths. Poor data reporting, which initially masked the disease’s disproportionate burden on Black communities, has continued to hinder researchers trying to study consequences for Hispanics. A recent report, however, links long-standing inequality to the surges in Hispanic infections and deaths. Crowded housing, exposure to air pollution and jobs in the meatpacking industry, which President Trump declared were “essential,” put Latinos at a particularly high risk for coronavirus infection and death, said Carlos E. Rodriguez-Diaz, a George Washington University professor who is the lead author of a recent paper published by the journal Annals of Epidemiology. Rodriguez-Diaz and his team found that, in most parts of the country, counties where more Latinos live saw more cases and deaths — especially in the Midwest, home to most of the nation’s meat-processing plants, many of which hire large numbers of Latino migrants. The researchers called for Medicaid expansion to address disparate access to health care and for better outreach, testing and infectious-disease surveillance to serve the diverse experiences of the country’s Latino communities. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, where almost a third of residents are Hispanic, the virus has killed more than 2,000 people. Bertha Esteban Diego, a 25-year-old from Mesa, was one of them. She died June 2 while giving birth to her second son, about two weeks after she was diagnosed with the virus. She and Gaspar Santiago were planning their church wedding. Instead, the couple’s friends raised money for a funeral. Santiago told a local TV station that his family’s story is an example of the danger the virus poses to Latino communities. “We say, ‘This is not real, it won’t happen to me,’” Santiago


arrive at the Costco. You arrive at the Walmart. There is not an end to the Walmart. Is this even the same floor you entered on? It must be, but you cannot see the exit. All you see is enormous cages full of rubber balls. This is fun. You are having fun, now. You arrive at the mall. The first level of the mall is fine. There are stores with sweaters and stores with perfumes and stores with electronics. You descend one level in the mall and all the stores are dimmer. There is a store that is having a sale of crystals. There is another store that is having a sale of dolls. There is another store that sells something sticky. You descend another level. There is a sign saying They Will Be Right Back. There is a pretzel, but it is far too big. “Hello?” you say. The mall is empty but there is no echo. It is as though something has eaten the sound. You find the escalator but it only goes down, and you do not want to descend again. You are in the parking garage. It is full of cars like your car. You hit the button on your key and all of the cars begin honking in unison. The first car you try opens up. Can that be right? Your head is starting to ache. You smell casserole. You drive around a roundabout. You drive around another roundabout. The traffic circles are supposed to be calming. They are not working. When you return to the houses, all the doors have purple X's and letters of complaint. You do not remember which number was yours. You call out to your family, but all of the families answer in unison. Where is yours? Is it still at the Olive Garden? You try to wake up. But you are living the Suburban Lifestyle Dream. You get the lawn mower. You get the newspaper. You wave, down the street, at a new arrival with wild and frightened eyes. Sign up to receive Alexandra Petri’s columns by email as soon as they’re published Watch Opinions videos: Read more from Alexandra Petri: Congress agrees big tech creepy, can’t agree how HomestyleFamilyRecipes.com will not cave to cancel culture Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV Submit a question for Petri’s Aug. 4 live chat Read a transcript of Petri’s July 28 live chat


Students can safely return to college if tested for coronavirus every two days, study says

Coronavirus infections can be controlled at universities this fall if students are tested for the virus every two days, according to a study published Friday. The study was done by researchers from the Yale School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and published in JAMA Network Open. The study used computer simulations to show how the virus might spread among a hypothetical cohort of 5,000 students. In the simulations, 4,990 students were assumed to be coronavirus-free, while 10 were assumed to be infected. Researchers found screening every two days using a rapid, inexpensive test — even one that was not always accurate — would “maintain a controllable number of covid-19 infections” if coupled with “strict behavioral interventions” such as quarantining positive students in isolation dormitories. The study estimated screening would cost $470 per student per semester and did not consider the effects of reopening schools on staff and communities where colleges are located. It also said that monitoring students for symptoms was not sufficient and that logistical challenges such as the availability of tests or isolation dormitories “may be beyond the reach of many university administrators and the students in their care.” But the pace and extent of viral testing that the study envisions could be difficult to carry out. Brett P. Giroir, a top federal health official overseeing coronavirus testing, acknowledged to lawmakers Friday that getting results back to all patients within two to three days is not possible now. Giroir told a House panel that 75 percent of test results are coming back within five days. Still, the study suggested that with sufficient resources, universities could reopen. “We believe there is a safe way for students to return to college in fall 2020,” the study said. A. David Paltiel, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health and the study’s lead author, said the study was undertaken as a consortium of university presidents in the Boston area looked for a way to safely reopen. Paltiel said the frequency of testing is more important than its accuracy. Repeated tests would eventually find the positive cases, he said. While there are risks in any plan to reopen campuses in a pandemic, according to Paltiel, there are also risks to letting students stay at home. “The problem doesn’t go away simply because you don’t reopen campus,” he said. “We can’t let the perfect be the enemy


Irene Pollin, longtime co-owner of Washington Wizards, Capitals and Mystics, dies at 96

Irene Pollin’s daughter, Linda, was 16 years old when she died in 1963 after an operation to correct a congenital heart defect. Linda was the second child Mrs. Pollin and her husband, Washington real estate developer Abe Pollin, had lost to a heart condition; their son Kenneth, called Jay Jay, had died 11 years earlier, after his first birthday. “The death of the child ends part of the parent’s own future,” Mrs. Pollin once reflected. “In fact, part of them dies with the child.” After Linda’s death, Mrs. Pollin and her husband descended into what both described as deep depressions. Abe Pollin emerged from his in part by building an affordable housing project named for his daughter in the District and by channeling his energy into the purchase of the Baltimore Bullets in 1964. He and Mrs. Pollin, a co-owner of the NBA team and active partner in her husband’s development work, moved the franchise in 1973 to Prince George’s County, where they built the Capital Centre, and later to Washington, where their $220 million investment in what became the Verizon Center (now Capital One Arena) was credited with revitalizing the downtown neighborhood. In addition to the Wizards — the NBA team’s name since 1997 — their sports empire grew to include the WNBA’s Washington Mystics and the NHL’s Washington Capitals as the Pollins established themselves as one of the most prominent couples in the city’s civic and philanthropic life. For the 46 years that she and her husband owned the Wizards, Mrs. Pollin spent her evenings cheering on the team. But for much of that time, she devoted her days to what she described as a new calling after the devastating losses of her children. The mother of two other sons, Mrs. Pollin returned to school in her 40s to complete her college degree and then pursue a master's degree in social work. She became a psychotherapist and social worker and created innovative counseling centers serving patients with chronic disease and their families. “I wanted,” she once told The Washington Post, “to give people the kind of help I so desperately needed and could never find.” Mrs. Pollin died July 28 at her home in Amherst, Mass., according to a family statement. She was 96. The cause was pulmonary failure, said a family spokesman, Matt Williams. As a developer, Abe Pollin was known primarily for the apartment buildings that


On a call with SEC leaders, worried football players pushed back: ‘Not good enough’

single team in the SEC. That’s a given. And we can’t prevent it.” As the 2020 season barrels closer, several high-profile programs already have grappled with outbreaks. Some have had to temporarily suspend workouts, including Michigan State and Rutgers, which are both in isolation after several players tested positive. Players in the SEC and other conferences have the option to opt out of this season and retain their scholarships. But just a handful of players at top schools have done so, preferring to skip the season and preserve a year of NCAA eligibility rather than risk infection. Caleb Farley, an NFL-bound cornerback from Virginia Tech, said this week that he lost his mother to breast cancer and couldn’t stomach the idea of losing another family member. Ra’Von Bonner, a reserve running back at Illinois, told The Post the risks of playing outweighed the reward. Players on the SEC call, who were part of a student-athlete leadership council, raised similar concerns, with one player asking: “For so much unknown in the air right now, is it worth having a football season without certainty?” Sankey, who earned a $2.5 million salary in 2018, responded: “Part of our work is to bring as much certainty in the midst of this really strange time as we can so you can play football in the most healthy way possible, with the understanding there aren’t any guarantees in life." The players were especially concerned with what happens once their universities reopen. When they returned for workouts this summer, their campuses were largely empty. Most of the people they interacted with were those inside their cloistered and regimented football programs, where regular testing and the potential ire of their powerful coaches made adherence to public health guidelines a must for many athletes. MoMo Sanogo, a linebacker at Mississippi, asked the officials on the call why his school planned to bring thousands of students to campus for fall classes. Sanogo said he has four classes per week and he fears some of those classmates will go to bars and parties at night, then unknowingly infect football players during class. The answer Sanogo received shed light on the pressure that university presidents, who rely on college football for prestige and revenue, face to reopen their campuses this fall, even as the pandemic surges. “It’s one of those things where if students don’t come back to campus, then the chances


To save the hemlock, scientists turn to genetics and natural predators

a long-term effort to identify predatory insects that could limit adelgid numbers on a permanent basis, similar to, for example, how wolves control elk populations in Yellowstone National Park. This “biological control” strategy has gone awry before, but when done carefully, it can reduce populations of damaging pests — for example, introduced insects have aided California’s citrus industry. But biocontrol has rarely succeeded in natural forests. Starting in the 1980s, scientists searched Japan, where the adelgid came from, and the West Coast of North America, where adelgids also live, for insects that munch on them. Researchers have spent more than 20 years testing a beetle called Laricobius nigrinus, native to British Columbia. In April, scientists reported that in sites in the eastern United States where they released Laricobius, the beetles damaged around a third of the adelgid egg sacs laid in the winter. As a result of the feeding, fewer adelgids emerged in the spring at these sites. But that’s hardly cause for celebration, because the adelgid has two life cycles per year. A follow-up paper published in June by the same authors reported that adelgid numbers at the study sites rebounded in the summer, thanks to the insect’s high reproductive rate; one adult female can produce up to 500 offspring. Biocontrol researchers Forest Service researchers have also found that hemlocks in full sun grow faster than in shade, even with adelgids feeding on them. Rhea hopes that growing hemlocks in forest clearings and deploying beetles and flies will eventually allow trees to reach maturity and reproduce before the adelgid kills them. To Preisser, however, the ongoing struggle to establish sustainable adelgid predators population in the forest suggests biocontrol may be a dead end. He advocates seeking stands of adelgid-resistant trees adapted to different locations, growing them in large-scale demonstration plots to determine which genes provide the most adelgid resistance and breeding the best performing trees together, an effort that Preisser concedes will be expensive and time-consuming. Even with modern practices, a hemlock may need to grow for seven to 10 years before its seeds can be collected, says Ben Smith, a forestry researcher at North Carolina State University’s Mountain Research Station in Waynesville who is developing a hemlock breeding program there. “To crop breeders, that’s an eternity,” Smith says. “For tree breeders, it’s not terrible.” Preisser is not sticking around to find out. Frustrated by difficulties in persuading funders


Skywatch: What’s happening in the heavens in August

It’s no dream that midsummer’s bright planets, shooting stars and a comet populate the heavens. When the curtain of night falls, Jupiter and Saturn lollygag between the constellations Capricornus and Sagittarius. Jupiter — at a brilliant -2.7 magnitude — is closer to the handle of Sagittarius’s teapot shape in the southeast early in the night. The ringed Saturn — closer to Capricorn — is 0.1 magnitude, bright, but noticeably more dim than Jupiter. Tonight (Aug. 2), the gibbous moon has slipped by the two planets, and the moon becomes full tomorrow (Aug. 3), according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. Buckle up for the brightness. Late in the evening, around 11:15 p.m., Mars ascends the eastern heavens in the Pisces constellation. The Red Planet seems bright now at about -1.1 magnitude, bright enough to see from the city, and strengthens to -1.5 magnitude near Aug. 20 and -1.7 magnitude at month’s end, according to the observatory. Since Mars is relatively close to Earth now, by October and November, our neighboring planet will be as bright as Jupiter. By mid-August, Mars rises near 10:45 p.m. in the east. Around midnight, as Aug. 8 turns into Aug. 9, see Mars and the waning moon reign over the morning heavens. Predawn dog walkers and beachcombers can find Mars high in the south before daybreak. Mars will see NASA’s (nasa.gov) latest rover Perseverance and its tag-along, drone-size helicopter Ingenuity land in mid-February 2021. They left Earth on July 30. Earth’s other neighbor, Venus, rises around 3 a.m. in the east, standing at the intersection of the constellations Orion, Taurus and Gemini. The dazzling planet is quite bright at -4.5 magnitude to start August. Find it in the morning heavens before sunrise, in the east. Wake early to catch the last quarter moon’s fingernail sliver passing the dazzling planet Aug. 15 in the Gemini constellation. Hope for clear skies as the Perseid meteors zip through the night heavens to peak Aug. 11-12, according to astronomer Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory. At the peak hours, after midnight Aug. 12, you may be able to see 20 or 30 shooting stars as the last quarter moon rises just after midnight, which could wash a few shooting stars out, Chester said. When you go outside to hunt meteors, avoid streetlights and porch lights, and acclimate your eyes to darkness. This shower’s parent comet is Swift-Tuttle, discovered in July


In 1950, my family suffered a different outbreak in our town: A polio epidemic

It didn’t take long to happen. Two weeks into the pandemic, a pedestrian on the sidewalk in Charlottesville crossed the street when she saw me. I said hello; she didn’t return the greeting or wave her hand. She just moved away from me. Suddenly, I’m 70 years back in time. It’s 1950. I’m not me. I’m my mother. “People would cross the street when they saw you coming. Everybody knew about the polio epidemic and how bad it was here,” my mother would tell me, recalling how, in summer 1950, the world treated our western Virginia town of Wytheville, described by a Richmond newspaper as “the nation’s hardest hit.” Our town, with a population of 5,000, suffered greatly from the polio epidemic, when 189 people were stricken, almost two dozen died and the only fully operating businesses were the two funeral homes. Wytheville had the highest per capita rate of polio in the country, the Virginia State Health Bulletin reported in 1951. My 9-year-old brother, nicknamed Skipper, died of polio that summer, six weeks before I was born. I always knew how hard my brother’s death had been on our family. My brother suffered the bulbar type of polio, the kind that can paralyze the circulatory and respiratory system, and his originated in the throat. His illness was not the more familiar “infantile paralysis” that left victims such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt on crutches and in leg braces. Skipper was ill for only one day. He’d been admitted to a hospital in Roanoke, about 75 miles from Wytheville, after he woke up and had lost the power of speech. He’d been to a doctor that day. That night, before he went to sleep, my brother told my mother he was no longer normal. My older sister, Melva Stephens Potts, who had polio and recovered but died of cancer in 1996, remembered squeezing oranges to get her strength back. I remember confronting my mother repeatedly, when I was at least 8 years old, about how people treated each other during the epidemic. I would tell her that my aunts had told me not one nurse attended my birth, coming as it did during the epidemic, and the doctor came into her room only in time to “catch” me. I always conveyed how angry that made me. “Those people were mean,” I told her. “No, they were afraid,” she always said.


kind that can paralyze the circulatory and respiratory system, and his originated in the throat. His illness was not the more familiar “infantile paralysis” that left victims such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt on crutches and in leg braces. Skipper was ill for only one day. He’d been admitted to a hospital in Roanoke, about 75 miles from Wytheville, after he woke up and had lost the power of speech. He’d been to a doctor that day. That night, before he went to sleep, my brother told my mother he was no longer normal. My older sister, Melva Stephens Potts, who had polio and recovered but died of cancer in 1996, remembered squeezing oranges to get her strength back. I remember confronting my mother repeatedly, when I was at least 8 years old, about how people treated each other during the epidemic. I would tell her that my aunts had told me not one nurse attended my birth, coming as it did during the epidemic, and the doctor came into her room only in time to “catch” me. I always conveyed how angry that made me. “Those people were mean,” I told her. “No, they were afraid,” she always said. “I can’t make you understand.” I understand now. Misinformation and lack of information frightened people during the polio epidemic, not unlike today. Earlier this year, I would watch New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s daily briefings on my television as he cautioned us not to “underestimate this virus,” urging action over fear. “We’re fighting the virus and we’re fighting panic,” he would say. Often, when my mother talked about the epidemic, she’d say that if people didn’t cross the street to avoid you, “They’d put handkerchiefs over their mouths.” And now it’s happening to me. At 69, I am in an age group vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19. I wear a mask and gloves. My husband, who is in remission from acute myeloid leukemia, was tested three times for covid-19 when he spiked a fever while undergoing chemotherapy. He tested negative. He didn’t have the virus; he did have pneumonia. He was treated at the University of Virginia Medical Center. Before he was discharged I had to go to the hospital to learn to flush his PICC line, a tube leading from inside his body to the outside so he can receive chemo easily. The


How a secretive Pentagon agency seeded the ground for a rapid coronavirus cure

The scientists were working through the night over a weekend in February in their Vancouver offices, running a blood sample from an early American covid-19 survivor through a credit card-sized device made up of 200,000 tiny chambers, hoping to help save the world. Their mission was part of a program under the Pentagon’s secretive technology research agency. The goal: to find a way to produce antibodies for any virus in the world within 60 days of collecting a blood sample from a survivor. Established years before the current pandemic, the program was halfway done when the first case of the novel coronavirus arrived in the United States early this year. But everyone involved in the effort by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) knew their time had come ahead of schedule. The four teams participating in the program abandoned their plans and began sprinting, separately, toward the development of an antibody for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. “We have been thinking about and preparing for this for a long time, and it’s almost a bit surreal,” said Amy Jenkins, manager of DARPA’s antibody program, which is known as the Pandemic Prevention Platform, or P3. “We are very hopeful that we will at least be able to have an impact on this outbreak. We want to make a difference.” In that program and others, DARPA has quietly been seeding the ground for the United States to produce a rapid cure for a pathogen like covid-19 for years. The U.S. government’s response to the pandemic has been impugned as slow and haphazard, with flawed test kits, limited contact tracing, insufficient protective gear, late encouragement of masks and at times baffling messages from President Trump. But DARPA’s story is a counterexample of U.S. government foresight, one that began more than a decade ago with the aim of finding super-fast ways to protect American troops if they were to confront a deadly new virus in the field. If it weren’t for DARPA’s investments over the past decade and earlier, largely outside the glare of Washington’s partisan politics, the American race toward a vaccine and antibody therapy to stop the coronavirus most likely wouldn’t be moving as quickly as it is today. “Being at DARPA at this time ... is exciting in some ways because we get to see the research work that was funded that was done ten to fifteen years


How a little-known company navigated the shortages and shutdowns of the pandemic while pointing the way to a less China-centric future

was a second coronavirus hot spot. Brazil, where a populist president scoffed at the pandemic, would eventually become a third. The company applied its China playbook to these countries as the virus spread, tagging affected parts and moving to reroute supplies. Flex was making progress on other fronts, with component shortages down by one-third since the Feb. 22 peak. By the end of March, inventory had increased by $101 million from the previous quarter, according to regulatory filings. Holding extra inventory in an era of just-in-time deliveries is expensive. To conserve cash for a lengthy recession, Advaithi instituted an across-the-board 20 percent salary cut for executives, many of whom earned six-figure salaries. The CEO absorbed a 50 percent cut in her $1.1 million salary. By March 20, three of Flex’s medical industry customers, including Philips, had asked whether the company could take on the job of manufacturing ventilators. Hospitals in the United States and around the world were running short of the lifesaving equipment. To meet the urgent need, Flex had to redesign the devices to shrink the customary 12 to 24 months needed to design, produce and secure regulatory approval for medical hardware. The problem was that the engineering team for the company’s medical business is located in Milan, in the middle of the hardest-hit Italian region. After the government locked down the Lombardy region on March 8, some Flex employees took test equipment home to continue working. With the Big Three automakers having announced plant closures on March 18, Flex reassigned to the ventilator effort supply chain specialists from its automotive unit and other projects that faced slowing demand. Working remotely, a team of 75 supply specialists at a Columbia, S.C., manufacturing site helped secure needed parts. Under normal circumstances, one of the customers, a Pennsylvania-based ventilator maker, would have shipped Flex the equipment to install in a new site. But since Flex’s customer couldn’t spare any production equipment amid the crisis, workers in Pennsylvania walked the existing assembly line using an augmented reality system to capture each required step. Like an Internet-age paint-by-numbers kit, Flex used those images to replicate the original manufacturing facility at a new site in Juarez, Mexico. Working 24-7, the company converted a 1.2 million-square-foot automotive parts warehouse into a medical products factory by mid-April. “We had to duplicate everything. Typically we’d go up and spend weeks in their facilities learning all the


A covid-19 outbreak among children at a Georgia summer camp is a warning

in all age groups,” many showing no symptoms. The Georgia camp outbreak is the latest sign that children cannot escape the pandemic. They carry significant viral loads. They do not get as sick or die as often as adults. The big unanswered question is how much do they spread or transmit the disease, and what are the ramifications for reopening schools? Is the Georgia summer camp episode a harbinger of what’s to come if in-person classrooms resume in the fall? A report published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, based on 145 patients with mild to moderate illness in Chicago, showed that young children may have nearly as much viral genetic material as older children or adults. An earlier preliminary study by Christian Drosten in Germany also found “viral loads do not differ significantly” between young and old age groups. Children seem to suffer less as a result of infection, although a small group have become quite sick. The reported number of deaths from the virus among children under the age of 18 in the United States is less than 1 percent of total deaths, and only 1 percent of total hospitalizations, even though children make up 22 percent of the population. Of all those testing positive, children make up about 7 percent. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine paper says more than 90 percent of children who test positive “will have mild symptoms,” and “only a small percentage of symptomatic children (estimates range from 1 to 5 percent) will have severe or critical symptoms.” How children might transmit the virus is critical, yet not fully understood. A large study in South Korea found that children under age 10 spread the virus within a household at the lowest rate, but those ages 10 to 19 were more likely to spread it than adults. This study, however, was not in schools. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports those nations that did a good job of tamping down community spread of the virus have managed to open schools without major outbreaks, but there are examples, such as Israel, where reopening came with serious school outbreaks. Much seems to depend on community spread. In the United States, the virus is still on the move across many states. The Georgia summer camp outbreak is a warning that children may not be spared sickness, nor the adults around them.


PM Update: Storms possible tonight, and a few could be severe or cause flooding

* 9:30 p.m. update: Original post August began with temperatures in the balmy 80s today. Seasonably appropriate, agree? Partial sunshine in the afternoon potentially adds fuel to storms developing to our west, and they may increase in strength as they work toward D.C. and the Interstate 95 corridor. A flash flood watch in effect for the region indicates the potential for slow-moving storms to deliver 1 to 3 inches of rain overnight, but the National Weather Service notes in its watch text there’s the chance of even more rain: “There is some risk for a corridor of much higher rainfall totals and the potential for more significant flash flooding occurring somewhere in a zone between the northern Shenandoah Valley and the Washington DC Metropolitan Area," the NWS states. This could cause flooding of creeks and streams along with urban area flash flooding, if these storms materialize. Please follow our @capitalweather Twitter and @dcweatheralerts accounts on Twitter as we continue to monitor the weather. The threat of hazardous weather may continue until Tuesday, as we watch Isaias’s impact on our region, too. Listen to our daily D.C. forecasts: Apple Podcasts | Amazon Echo | More options Through tonight: Mugginess increases toward sultry levels. Dew points could hit or exceed the very humid 75-degree mark, adding discomfort to low temperatures in the mid-70s to near 80 degrees. View the Tomorrow (Sunday): Southwest breezes may be noticeable, gusting above 15 to perhaps 20 mph at times in the afternoon. We’ll also need to watch the combination of heat and humidity — the heat index — which could approach the near-dangerous 105-degree threshold in a couple of spots. Hydrate, please! See Ian Livingston’s forecast through the weekend. And if you haven’t already, join us on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For related traffic news, check out Gridlock. Isaias may impact the entire East Coast In case you have not seen all of our Isaias coverage, make sure you start with the latest update on East Coast impacts. By the time the tropical cyclone arrives in the Mid-Atlantic, it should mainly be a heavy rain threat for our region, with flooding concerns even ahead of Isaias from potentially severe storms over the next few days. Not ideal. If you are looking for drier weather and don’t mind serious heat, consider Phoenix your new hotspot destination — it barely gets below 90 degrees there, even at


Coronavirus pandemic causes another health concern — closed public restrooms

crisis.” The public restroom crisis is not limited to Seattle, nor did it begin during the pandemic. Those who study the issue say American cities have spent decades divesting from such facilities, leaving private businesses such as Starbucks and McDonald’s to pick up the slack. “The government has basically given up on installing public toilets,” said Steven Soifer, a social work professor at the University of Mississippi who leads the American Restroom Association, which advocates for better public infrastructure. “It took something like the coronavirus to bring it out in the open.” Private companies might require guests to buy something before using the restroom, advocates said, creating a barrier for homeless or otherwise marginalized people. In places where public urination laws are enforced, those who can’t pay may face repercussions. “You’re criminalizing having a bladder,” said Taunya Lovell Banks, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law who recently wrote a law review article about the lack of public toilets. “If you’re caught by the police and ticketed, you have to register as a sex offender. It’s beyond the pale.” Banks noted that businesses may be less likely to allow homeless people to use their facilities, and people of color also are less assured of gaining access. For female-bodied people, urinating discreetly in the absence of restrooms is not always possible. “It’s a class issue, it’s a race issue, it’s a gender issue,” she said. “[During the pandemic,] middle-class white people who normally have greater access to toilets in public spaces are all of a sudden being denied access. Now they’re woke to it.” Covid-19 has made things much worse. Market reports show that sales of urine funnels, external catheters and other restroom substitutes have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Public urination is on the rise in New York City, and leaders in Montpelier, Vt., fear that closures have left the city without an adequate restroom supply. In Chicago, delivery drivers can’t use the restrooms at restaurants when they pick up food, leaving some to resort to urinating in alleys. Governments and businesses alike are justifiably concerned about the risk of covid-19 transmission in restrooms. Research has found that flushing creates “toilet plumes” that can spread particles carrying the coronavirus. Places that do have open restrooms often need to limit occupancy and clean them frequently. Soifer said some restrooms have blocked off every other urinal. But closing restrooms is


of color also are less assured of gaining access. For female-bodied people, urinating discreetly in the absence of restrooms is not always possible. “It’s a class issue, it’s a race issue, it’s a gender issue,” she said. “[During the pandemic,] middle-class white people who normally have greater access to toilets in public spaces are all of a sudden being denied access. Now they’re woke to it.” Covid-19 has made things much worse. Market reports show that sales of urine funnels, external catheters and other restroom substitutes have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Public urination is on the rise in New York City, and leaders in Montpelier, Vt., fear that closures have left the city without an adequate restroom supply. In Chicago, delivery drivers can’t use the restrooms at restaurants when they pick up food, leaving some to resort to urinating in alleys. Governments and businesses alike are justifiably concerned about the risk of covid-19 transmission in restrooms. Research has found that flushing creates “toilet plumes” that can spread particles carrying the coronavirus. Places that do have open restrooms often need to limit occupancy and clean them frequently. Soifer said some restrooms have blocked off every other urinal. But closing restrooms is its own public health risk. If delivery drivers, for instance, don’t have a place to safely relieve themselves and wash their hands, they risk spreading infection via the food and packages they drop off. Waste that ends up in the streets also could contribute to the spread of covid-19 or other diseases. Ben Valdez, a Los Angeles-based ride-hailing driver and an organizer with Rideshare Drivers United, said he carries an empty bottle in the car in case of emergency — along with lots of disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer. “I literally have to plan my evening around being near a restroom,” he said “If I know I have no restroom available to me, I can’t drink anything or eat anything. I’ve had numerous occasions where I’ve had to decline a ride because I’ve been in that situation.” Valdez said many gas stations now have “out of order” signs on their restrooms — likely an effort to limit transmission risk rather than an actual plumbing issue. Some hotels have limited access to lobby restrooms as well. With a driving radius that often reaches 100 miles, Valdez has found no institutions he can consistently count on to find a facility. In San


Governments and businesses alike are justifiably concerned about the risk of covid-19 transmission in restrooms. Research has found that flushing creates “toilet plumes” that can spread particles carrying the coronavirus. Places that do have open restrooms often need to limit occupancy and clean them frequently. Soifer said some restrooms have blocked off every other urinal. But closing restrooms is its own public health risk. If delivery drivers, for instance, don’t have a place to safely relieve themselves and wash their hands, they risk spreading infection via the food and packages they drop off. Waste that ends up in the streets also could contribute to the spread of covid-19 or other diseases. Ben Valdez, a Los Angeles-based ride-hailing driver and an organizer with Rideshare Drivers United, said he carries an empty bottle in the car in case of emergency — along with lots of disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer. “I literally have to plan my evening around being near a restroom,” he said “If I know I have no restroom available to me, I can’t drink anything or eat anything. I’ve had numerous occasions where I’ve had to decline a ride because I’ve been in that situation.” Valdez said many gas stations now have “out of order” signs on their restrooms — likely an effort to limit transmission risk rather than an actual plumbing issue. Some hotels have limited access to lobby restrooms as well. With a driving radius that often reaches 100 miles, Valdez has found no institutions he can consistently count on to find a facility. In San Francisco, officials have expanded the city’s Pit Stop program, which they think is a leading model for providing restroom access. The city set up 37 toilets to bolster the 24 already in place before the pandemic. The toilets are staffed by nonprofit partners, who clean them between each use and monitor for drug use and overdoses. Since the city began staffing toilets, said Beth Rubenstein, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Public Works Department, the number of flushes per day went up “exponentially.” In neighborhoods where the Pit Stop toilets have been installed, the city has seen fewer calls for waste cleanup on the streets. “It ensures cleanliness and safety,” Rubenstein said. “I know that the increased number of toilets [during the pandemic] has been very much used. Our essential workers use them as well, including our Public Works staff.” — Stateline


The new rules for packing a bag during the pandemic

Before the pandemic, packing for a flight had a lot to do with your travel style and destination. A carry-on bag for a beach vacation might include a sun hat and a beach read. You could count on business travelers to wear noise-canceling headphones and pull out laptops right after takeoff. Now, packing considerations should start with coronavirus precautions. With the number of coronavirus cases continuing to climb, public health experts and the State Department are discouraging nonessential travel. “I would really encourage people to think about whether or not they need to be flying right now,” says Brian Garibaldi, medical director of the Johns Hopkins Biocontainment Unit. “There are very few states in the country right now where infections are low enough that I feel comfortable getting on a plane.” But Americans are on the move. The number of people passing through airport security checkpoints has been rising steadily since April, and the Transportation Security Administration reported daily figures exceeding 700,000 many times throughout July. If you are traveling in the near future, here are some things to keep in mind while you pack. Health experts recommend using carry-on luggage instead of checking a bag during the pandemic. Garibaldi says risks are highest for contracting or spreading the coronavirus when you’re in enclosed spaces with other people. One perk of carrying on a bag is that you can avoid lingering around a potentially crowded luggage carousel when you land. “If you have your bag with you, you’re going to minimize the amount of time you have to spend waiting for your bag on the other end,” he said. Norman Beatty, assistant professor of medicine in the University of Florida division of infectious disease and global medicine, says a traveler’s decision should be made based on whether they need to check a bag, however, “it would theoretically be safer to carry on your luggage; that way it would be less direct contact with others who may be infected.” Nahid Bhadelia, the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit at the Boston University School of Medicine, echoed the advice in an email. “If you carry the bag, you have a better sense of where it’s been and who has touched it, so one could say that’s slightly safer,” she says. While they recommend carry-on bags, health experts aren’t strongly warning against checking luggage at this time. “In general, as the [Centers


India’s decision to check the power of Chinese tech should be followed by other democracies

human population to harness creativity, entrepreneurship and energy to change their lives. The potential of digital platforms is magnified in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Devices and online services have helped in mobile medicine, critical care and remote education, and enabled supply chains. Social media platforms also form the backbone for digitalization of our democracies, allowing for greater freedom of expression, citizen engagement and participative governance. All of this could well describe India’s Internet experience. However, the very tools that empower also have the potential to inhibit — mainly, by creating a semipermeable membrane that allows selective passage of information. The risk expands when the rules of this membrane are set by the arbitrariness of algorithms of state-sponsored platforms or dictated by the state of origin. Digital influence operations during elections in the United States and other countries in the West are a case in point. We have seen the impact of nonaccountability of platforms, and the opaqueness of their algorithms and data handling practices, on the lives of citizens. For a variety of reasons — from fears of upsetting Chinese investors to concerns that democracies should not easily take recourse to bans and restrictions — there has been limited political will on the part of governments to exercise appropriate checks and balances. The platforms have exploited and gamed this dilemma. This has led to them consolidating a grip on information consumption and decision-making that is quite frankly denied to global platforms in China itself. It is in this regard that the Indian decision to ban 59 suspect apps crosses the digital Rubicon and in doing so protects the democratic rights and values of India’s constitution. India is marking its presence on the Internet with platforms and products that digitally empower a billion citizens. In the past six years, about 500 million Indians have in some manner adapted to a digital way of life. Smartphones are the epicenter of this revolution, and apps are their gateway to the digital world. Cheap Chinese-origin smartphones account for nearly 60 percent of the Indian market, and many of the banned apps come pre-embedded. India appreciates the importance of presenting its citizens with varied options for digital participation and has enthusiastically embraced digital globalization. But the gains of the digital revolution cannot distract us from the underlying threats of disinformation, information warfare, influence ops and collaboration of national tech platforms and patron state


China’s covid-19 stimulus plan isn’t as green as it looks

constructing power plants in 2018. Post-covid-19, the Chinese government has further shortened this list from eight provinces to just three, reducing the obstacles to building more power plants. The Chinese government is encouraging regional governments to increase coal production as the economy begins to recover from the covid-19 recession. Greenpeace reports while China added about 30 gigawatts of coal-fired power projects in 2019, China had about 46 gigawatts of coal capacity under construction as of May 2020, with another 48 gigawatts under development. Nationwide, more coal power plants have been approved. By April, at least 15 coal plants were in the planning stages and 14 coal projects were under construction. As of June 15, China had approved 17 gigawatts of coal capacity, more than the total of newly installed coal capacity in 2018 and 2019. Why is the Chinese government continuing to add new capacity, when the utilization of existing coal power plants is below 50 percent? Given their massive scale, new coal-fired power plants require large amounts of local labor, which boosts the local economy. This growth is important for local party leaders — their performance is evaluated on the basis of the province’s economic growth. Guangxi province alone in March announced investment of $4.7 billion in five new coal power plants from 2020 to 2022. China, like countries across the globe, has energy policies shaped by political lobbies — even climate leaders such as the European Union are not immune from pressures from coal-dependent member countries like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. In China, provinces with large coal industries support the coal industry. Although the renewable energy sector also creates jobs, many local governments back coal projects because they are larger in scale and have an immediate employment impact. Renewables, however, do not have such concentrated local support. One recent paper finds when the central government shifted approval authority to the local government level in 2014, the approval rate for coal power projects increased threefold, and provinces with larger coal industries (such as Shanxi, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia) approved more coal power than other provinces. In the May 2020 Report on the Work of the Government, Premier Li Keqiang stressed the government has been actively helping to relieve unemployment. From a climate perspective, however, prioritizing coal production may leave fewer political incentives to decarbonize in the future. Some analysts point out the decline in momentum on climate


The most dangerous false positive: Trump’s ongoing insistence that the pandemic is under control

Ed Yong’s lengthy exegesis of the coronavirus pandemic in The Atlantic lays much of the blame for its spread in the United States at the feet of President Trump. While the pandemic leveraged a number of systemic flaws, Trump’s pre-pandemic attacks on federal infrastructure, his failure to prepare for the virus’s arrival and his dishonest assessments of its expansion indisputably resulted in a hobbled and partisan response. At times, Trump has treated the situation with the seriousness it obviously demands. In March, he advocated a broad closure of the economy to limit its spread. More recently, he warned of the expansion of the virus in a number of Sun Belt states, weeks after that expansion was underway. These, though, are the exceptions. Even as health advisers like Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah L. Birx are raising louder alarms about the virus’s current course, Trump has returned to his default position: all is well — or, at least, all is as well as it could be. It isn't. Consider the president’s recent public pronouncements about how things are going. There was his tweet over the weekend undercutting congressional testimony from Fauci in which the country’s leading infectious-disease expert attributed the surge in new cases to a failure to robustly shut down the economy — or, really, to keep things shuttered. “Wrong!" Trump replied. “We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country, 60,000,000. If we tested less, there would be less cases. How did Italy, France & Spain do? Now Europe sadly has flare ups." That pairs with other tweets, including one Monday morning, claiming that things are as bad in other countries as they are in the United States. “With the exception of New York & a few other locations, we’ve done MUCH better than most other Countries in dealing with the China Virus," he wrote. “Many of these countries are now having a major second wave." All of this is deceptive. The number of cases is independent of the number of tests, of course, just as the number of speeding cars is independent of the number of speeding tickets. How did Italy, France and Spain do? After seeing initial surges in cases (and, sadly, in deaths), they managed to get the virus under control. That’s the same pattern that was seen in New York, but not in the United States broadly or in a


How the pandemic left America behind

How some countries got their response to the coronavirus right -- and how some got it terribly wrong.


How the pandemic left America behind

Post Reports is the daily podcast from The Washington Post. Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear analysis. Everything you’ve come to expect from the newsroom of The Post. For your ears. Martine Powers is your host, asking the questions you didn’t know you wanted answered. Listen online. As countries around the world are emerging from lockdowns and cautiously returning to life as normal, it’s beginning to feel like most of the world is showing up to a post-pandemic celebration party where Americans are not invited. On today’s “Post Reports,” we ask the question: Where did the U.S. go wrong? What’s it like in places where the curve has successfully been flattened? Which countries are still struggling with covid-19? And how has the American failure in pandemic response shifted the way that the U.S. is viewed on the global stage? The crisis that shocked the world: America’s response to the coronavirus Beijing’s summer is more oppressive than usual With American tourists banned from Italy, Amalfi Coast workers are sliding into poverty Brazil ignored the warnings Coronavirus has weakened the West’s nationalists


Maryland postpones high school sports until January at the earliest

Maryland postponed fall and winter sports in the first academic semester because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association announced Monday, meaning high school sports won’t be played in the state until January at the earliest. The association said it hopes to release a plan in the coming weeks to condense the fall, winter and spring sports seasons into the second semester, a method other states and leagues in the area are embracing. The decision came weeks after Maryland’s largest counties, Montgomery and Prince George’s, ruled to forgo sports during the fall semester while students partake in virtual learning. Montgomery County originally canceled fall and winter sports, but it said in a news release last week it is considering “re-envisioned sports seasons” for the second semester. Anne Arundel County and Howard County had postponed fall sports until September at the earliest. “This decision comes in light of the recent announcements of local school systems to begin education virtually,” the MPSSAA wrote in a news release, “and provides each school system with options for the gradual increase of student engagement for the physical and social-emotional health of students.” The District of Columbia’s and Virginia’s high school athletic associations have postponed fall sports and implemented plans to play three condensed seasons beginning in December. Many of the area’s private school leagues, including the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference and the Interstate Athletic Conference, aim to follow a similar schedule beginning in January. Read more: For top prep football players, a canceled season costs more than just memories WCAC will be ‘rescheduling’ fall sports, including football, until after Jan. 1


When fascist aggression in Ethiopia sparked a movement of Black solidarity

of origin — most Italian immigrants had arrived only between 1880 and the 1920s. They recruited combatants and raised funds for the madrepatria by donating wedding rings that would be sent to Italy and melted down for armaments. At a December rally in Madison Square Garden attended by 20,000, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia presented the Italian consul general with a $100,000 check. Admiration for Benito Mussolini fueled much of this support. A celebrity in the United States, Mussolini had had a monthly column in the newspapers owned by his supporter William Randolph Hearst since the late 1920s. A month into the war, as airplanes unleashed tons of poison gas, killing thousands of Ethiopians, a TIME magazine cover depicted Il Duce with his sons, ever the family man. When Italy declared victory on May 9, 1936, hundreds of African Americans marched once again down Lenox Avenue, smashing the windows of Italian American businesses. In midtown, the American League against War and Fascism picketed the Italian Consulate, with Black and White protesters disrupting an elegant stretch of Fifth Avenue with denunciations of the ongoing slaughter. Exiled Emperor Haile Selassie made news when he spoke to the League of Nations in June 1936, denouncing “the deadly rain” that killed his people. But the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War one month later, and Hitler’s increasing expansion within Europe, soon made Ethiopia’s plight of marginal concern for most Whites. Many in the African diaspora knew better. Ethiopia, not Munich, was the first example of appeasement of fascist aggression. As Ethiopian deaths mounted — an estimated 250,000 perished before the Allies drove the Italians out of the country in 1941 — Black people continued to call out Italian oppression from West Africa and the Caribbean. In Lagos, Nigeria, the West African Pilot newspaper published an editorial in March 1938 denouncing the fascists’ use of forced labor. The Italo-Ethiopian War may remain an obscure historical event to many Americans. Yet it shocked millions into action and fueled a reckoning with institutionalized racism and fascism — propelling many activists, Black and White, to take to the streets of New York and other cities across the world. Much like today, these activists boldly proclaimed that Black lives mattered. Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece stated that Italy had occupied Somalia, Eritrea and Libya in Africa since the late 19th century, but Italy occupied Libya in 1911.