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The pandemic is rewriting the rules of science. But at what cost?

question, Schafer said, is how to move science forward — and change clinicians’ behavior — in the most expeditious way. Under the traditional norms of research, “it can tend to get a little inbred,” said Irene Eckstrand, a retired evolutionary biologist who was scientific director of the federally funded Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS). Modelers who predict the course of an outbreak play a particularly important role during a pandemic by increasing understanding of infectious-disease dynamics through computational, statistical and mathematical models. The MIDAS scientists Eckstrand oversaw had a forward-looking mission — to drop everything and unite against the common threat in the event of an outbreak like today’s. “The idea was to have standing groups of modelers available . . . like a center available to the U.S. government if there is an emergency,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistics expert at the University of Florida. In recent years, funding for that visionary mission was cut. “We’ve lost that flexibility and a bridge between research and front-line public health,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a specialist in network epidemiology at the University of Texas at Austin. As a result, modelers, like other scientists, have been scrambling to fund and ramp up their operations. The upshot, said Donald S. Burke, a professor of health science and policy at the University of Pittsburgh, is a lack of agility that has always haunted public health. “Things that aren’t yet a problem don’t get attention,” he said. “Yesterday’s problem is funded for a few years.” In response to what he calls “ossified and bureaucratic” traditional funding mechanisms, Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, created Fast Grants through the school’s Mercatus Center, a free market-oriented nonprofit organization. He identified philanthropic funding and put together a panel of 20 anonymous reviewers, half women, half people of color, who promise decisions within two weeks. Out of about 5,000 applications, Fast Grants has been able to underwrite almost 200 projects, Cowen said, typically with $10,000 to $500,000. Katherine Seley-Radtke, a medicinal chemist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, was one of the recipients. Seley-Radtke, who said she discovered several years ago compounds that acted on coronaviruses, received six months of funding that helped her start new research. The grant was a boon for Seley-Radtke, who said she was stymied a few years ago when she applied for a grant from the National Institutes of

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The pandemic is rewriting the rules of science. But at what cost?

coronavirus was being recognized as an international threat. The nonprofit website uses algorithms to identify relevant studies and feed them to Twitter. “It came out of the recognition that science was too slow to be helpful during outbreaks,” Johansson said. The widespread availability of preprints has allowed some bad science to win undue attention, as evidenced by a spate of prominent retractions. Outbreak Science tackles that problem by providing a structured format for peer review, based on a dozen yes and no questions, so that experts can chime in quickly, providing assessments that allow influential papers to surface. Even traditional outlets have shown that their peer-review process is not foolproof, particularly amid the pressure of a pandemic. In June, the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine retracted papers — the Lancet’s on the much-touted drug hydroxychloroquine — after a U.S. company, Surgisphere, declined to share the raw data the studies were based on for an independent audit. Those papers struck some researchers as resulting from haste. “In true peer review, we’d scrub the data,” said Davey Smith, a virologist at the University of California at San Diego. The outcry not only increased distrust in the scientific process but sparked delays in other hydroxychloroquine research, including work Smith was conducting. “It was impossible to sign people up for trials,” he said. “We still don’t know about the effects of hydroxy on early covid,” he added, emphasizing the importance of rigor even as he appreciated the need for speed. Rubin said that large databases are often proprietary, making them inaccessible for review, and that the journal is making greater efforts to find trustworthy sources to vouch for them. “Since that time, we have rejected papers based on not being confident about underlying data,” he said. Such highly visible errors may have multiplied, but they are not new — and their costs can last for years. It took 12 years for the Lancet to retract a now-notorious 1998 paper that implied a link between autism and the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella. But the damage lingered, creating widespread distrust of vaccinations that continues — and may feed worries about the coronavirus vaccines when they become available. In today’s turmoil, some scientists send their preprints directly to reporters who in turn ask experts to evaluate the research. “I get so many peer-review requests,” said Dean, the biostatistics expert. “I hate to

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Coronavirus surge tests U.S. and European resolve

You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. On both sides of the Atlantic, the pandemic is surging In Europe, new restrictions and shutdowns are coming into place. Last week, the continent overtook the United States in cases per capita. Public health officials warned of an accelerating and possibly “exponential” rise in infections, with confirmed cases in the 53 European nations, as categorized by the World Health Organization, climbing from 6 million to 7 million in just ten days. Without effective countermeasures, the WHO warned, daily coronavirus-related deaths in Europe could rise to five times their April peak. The dramatic resurgence of the virus across the continent punctured whatever illusions Europeans had that they had weathered the worst of the pandemic. Countries like Spain and Italy, which welcomed back holiday goers over the summer, are again among the front-runners in overall cases. “Europe clamped down hard on the pandemic this spring, and the payoff was a summer that was more normal than many people had expected,” wrote my colleague Michael Birnbaum. “But by the end of August, infections were again on the rise, with more cases concentrated among younger people — who perhaps considered the virus a more remote threat. Now it is spreading to their parents and grandparents, and medical systems are beginning to feel the strain.” Increased overall testing partially explains the spike, but experts also fear a steady uptick in deaths and hospitalizations. “We are really very close to a tsunami,” Belgian health minister Frank Vandenbroucke told reporters on Sunday as his country — which has one of the world’s highest per capita infection rates — readied to impose new restrictions. “We no longer control what is happening.” East Asia is not experiencing a similarly brutal wave of infections, a sign that the efficiency and enduring vigilance of the response in countries like Vietnam, South Korea and Taiwan continue to set the standard for how to control the virus. The situation in Europe, though, further complicates the picture: Mask-wearing is perhaps more widespread in Spain than any other European country, but it still suffers one of the worst outbreaks on the continent. Nor does it seem that any society has achieved anything close to herd immunity. “One of the hopes in some quarters had been that herd immunity could provide some protection, with places hard-hit in the spring sheltered from the worst of any resurgence in

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D.C. adds eight ‘high-risk’ states to list requiring arrivals to self-quarantine

Daily caseloads rose during much of October but have plateaued at an elevated rate for about a week. Health experts have warned for months that colder weather could prompt people to spend more time indoors — increasing the potential for the virus’s spread — as outdoor social activities become less appealing. The regional rise has coincided with an outbreak in coronavirus cases at the White House, although local health officials said there is no clear connection. As the holiday season approaches, health experts are warning that small gatherings are the source for much of the virus’s recent spread. Neil J. Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, said caseload trends show that it is “less safe to travel now than it was a month ago” and that “it will be less safe in a month than it is today.” On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) announced Monday the creation of a $10 million relief fund to provide support to poultry growers and farmers affected by the pandemic. Hogan made the announcement with Delaware Gov. John Carney (D), who announced the creation of a twin program in his state. Poultry workers in both states have experienced coronavirus outbreaks, which had the ripple effect of hurting the industry. “Far too often our farmers don’t get the respect or the appreciation they deserve, but I want our entire agriculture community to know that your commitment to our state and to our agriculture industry does not go unnoticed,” Hogan said at a news conference in Hurlock after a roundtable discussion with farmers. Under the program announced Monday, the Maryland Department of Agriculture will issue direct payments of $1,000 per poultry house, up to five houses per farm. Growers who lost chickens will be eligible for an extra $1,500 per house. The program will also provide a 15 percent bonus to Maryland farmers who received federal funding in the first round of payments. Federal funding is not available to contract poultry workers. The greater Washington region recorded 1,212 additional coronavirus cases and 28 new deaths Monday. Virginia on Monday added 690 new coronavirus cases and 24 deaths, Maryland added 497 cases and four deaths, and D.C. added 25 cases and no deaths. The region’s number of new cases Monday was the lowest in a single day across the region since Oct. 7.

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CDC to passengers and workers: Wear a mask when you are on a plane, train, bus or other public transit

gives the airline industry more cover to press for mask-wearing, one CDC official said. In a statement Monday, the agency said “transmission of the virus through travel has led to — and continues to lead to — interstate and international spread of the virus.” It added: “Local transmission can grow quickly into interstate and international transmission when infected persons travel on public conveyances without wearing a mask and with others who are not wearing masks.” Traveling on airplanes, ships, ferries, trains, subways, buses, taxis, ride-shares and in locations such as airports, train stations and bus or ferry terminals increases the risk of getting and spreading covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. That can happen because people are brought into close contact with others, often for prolonged periods, and because they can be exposed to frequently touched surfaces, the CDC guidance says. “Face masks help prevent people who have COVID-19, including those who are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic, from spreading the virus to others,” the CDC guidelines say. “Masks are most likely to reduce the spread of COVID-19 when they are widely used by people in public settings.” The recommendations from the CDC come at a time when infection rates are rising in the United States and President Trump’s favored pandemic adviser, Scott Atlas, has railed against masks, falsely claiming they are ineffective. On Saturday, Atlas wrote on Twitter that masks do not work, prompting the social media site to remove the tweet for violating its safety rules for spreading misinformation. Several medical and public-health experts flagged the tweet as dangerous misinformation. Numerous studies have shown the effectiveness of masks in preventing transmission. Before a mandatory mask regimen was put in place this spring at Mass General Brigham, the largest health-care system in Massachusetts, covid-19 cases were increasing exponentially among medical workers, according to a research letter published in JAMA. After the mask rule was imposed, cases steadily declined. Trump has cast doubt on the efficacy of masks for months. Infectious-disease experts have criticized what they have described as flagrant flouting of basic public-health guidance at the White House, such as the failure to wear masks and socially distance. Trump and at least 34 White House aides and other contacts tested positive for the virus, according to an Oct. 7 internal administration document. Some of them are suspected of having become infected at the White House Rose Garden event celebrating the

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Shuttered hotel gives way to luxury homes in Alexandria, Va.

Stephen Oparka, an avid cyclist, owns five bikes and often takes long rides on the 18-mile Mount Vernon Trail in Northern Virginia. One such outing took him past the shuttered Crowne Plaza Hotel in Alexandria. A fence had gone up, and a sign announced the coming of Venue, a luxury high-rise condominium overlooking the Potomac River. A couple gazed at the old hotel and buzzed with excitement about the development plans. “They told me: ‘We just got out of the sales center. You should get in there,’ ” Oparka said. As a renter in Crystal City, Oparka had been worrying about the effect of Seattle-based Amazon’s opening a second headquarters in that Arlington, Va., neighborhood. (Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post). He later recalled thinking, “Those changes will be exciting, but in 10 years’ time, what will it be like to live here?” He had already started looking around at new residential construction. So he followed the couple’s advice, and then he purchased a one-bedroom corner unit on the ninth floor of the 13-story building. [Going from townhouse to a real dream home in Jack’s Run] Carr Cos. bought the property and has been redeveloping it, replacing the hotel with 119 condominium units, flanked on two sides by a total of 41 townhouses. The 13-story condominium project is exempted from a height limit for new construction because it is replacing the hotel. Nearly half of the condo units and townhouses have been sold. Base prices for the remaining condos range from $500,000 to $3 million; for the remaining townhouses, from $1.5 million to $2.6 million. Buyers are expected to begin moving in next fall. Floor-to-ceiling windows The entry door opens into the kitchen, which adjoins a living and dining space with a balcony outside. Flanking the open-plan living area are two bedrooms, one on each side. One bedroom has an en suite bathroom; the other has a bathroom steps away. A washer and dryer are in a closet between the bathroom and the second bedroom. The unit has floor-to-ceiling windows. Oparka described some of the choices involved in buying his one-bedroom unit. “I traded a water view for space and price,” he said. “If I want to look at the river I can go to the rooftop.” The rooftop is where there’ll be grill stations, fire pits, outdoor TVs and a lounge that residents

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Some countries that avoided initial coronavirus surge see first spike in cases

Republic had 492 new cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days, according to a Washington Post analysis, suggesting one of the fastest-escalating outbreaks in the world. Poland had 140 new cases per 100,000, more than other global hot spots such as the United States and Spain. Other nearby countries in Central and Eastern Europe were also seeing a wave of new cases for the first time, including Slovenia, one of the first countries to declare itself virus-free in May. And there are nations that appeared to have smaller or slower new waves, despite earlier periods of relative respite. In Latin America this summer, Argentina and Paraguay had been islands of stability as the virus raged in neighboring countries. But both have had a steady, recent rise in cases since late summer, prompting new worries and restrictions. This week, the South American Sports Organization confirmed that it would delay the 2022 South American Games in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, by several months, as the “evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic has become unpredictable.” Sri Lanka, a success story for South Asia earlier in the pandemic, had a spike in new cases earlier this month that led to a stricter curfew and bans on large gatherings. The virus has also spread widely for the first time over recent weeks in some countries in the Middle East. Jordan, in response to rising cases, imposed weekend curfews this month, and Lebanon shut bars and nightclubs. In Tunisia, which some experts suggested had “beaten” the coronavirus, daily case numbers have reached record highs. The country, which had ordered a countrywide lockdown earlier in the pandemic, is now using curfews to fight the virus. In some cases, the resurgence of the virus appeared to come down to political factors. Judyth Twigg, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in global health, pointed to public fatigue in the face of government restrictions in the Czech Republic and other parts of Europe. “These countries put strict lockdowns in place back in the spring precisely because they knew their health-care systems couldn’t handle a surge of moderate or severe cases,” Twigg said. “But as the months dragged on, populist leaders responded to public pressure to reopen economies and societies, and sure enough, the virus found its way in.” Similar surges have not been recorded in some countries that undertook proactive measures, such as Taiwan and Vietnam, while numerous

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Investigators find no definitive cause of California dive boat fire that killed 34 people last year

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — A 13-month investigation into a recreational dive boat that burned and sank over Labor Day weekend last year has failed to find a definitive cause of the deadly fire, which killed 34 people aboard. During a virtual hearing Tuesday in Washington, investigators told the National Transportation Safety Board that the Conception, the 75-foot dive boat, was too damaged when recovered from the sea bed to pinpoint the source of the fire. But interviews with survivors and previous passengers on the boat, along with comparisons to its sister dive boat, suggested that the fire began where people charged their cellphones — in the common salon area of the boat, a deck above where 33 passengers and one crew member slept and perished. Those chargers had caused a fire on the Vision, the Conception’s sister vessel, on a previous trip. But that fire was quickly extinguished because it was detected early. Investigators also found there were no smoke detectors in the salon; they were not required by federal regulations governing the operation of small commercial passenger vessels. One staff recommendation is to require smoke detectors in common areas in the future; had such devices been present, they probably would have prompted an earlier evacuation of Conception passengers and saved lives. Investigators also found that the Conception’s crew did not follow requirements for having someone work as an overnight roving patrol, another measure that could have led to a more rapid firefighting effort and evacuation. One investigator told the board this failure “directly led to the high number of casualties.” A relatively novice crew — one member had been with the boat for just two months — was also poorly trained in fire safety, investigators found. The dive boat passengers were not given a required briefing on arrival and were left for hours to navigate the safety procedures through a “welcome aboard” card. “I would say that complacency but also a lack of imagination by the crew and the Coast Guard played a part,” said Bruce Landsberg, the NTSB’s vice chairman. “No one could imagine this happening.” The fire aboard the Conception, an institution here among recreational divers, was among the nation’s worst sea disasters in recent history. It also was the second ­mass-casualty event in as many years in this city stretching between steep mountains and the sea, where nearly two dozen people died in devastating ­post-wildfire mudslides

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Joe Biden’s love of Amtrak tells us how he would govern

those trains in their stead. Part joint-stock company, part socialized utility, Amtrak would be responsible for patching together a new nationwide passenger network and running it at a profit — something no railroad had achieved in decades. Congress would cover operating losses temporarily until Amtrak could put trains back in the black. Amtrak was the culmination of a long debate over how to fix the passenger rail system. The hybrid solution of a government corporation that would “not be an agency or establishment of the United States government” assuaged Congressional Republicans wary of nationalizing trains and Democrats opposed to rescuing share-held enterprise. Amtrak, according to New York Times reporter Joseph Albright, was part of a “gigantic experiment in special interest socialism” that allowed the government to intervene in the rail industry to save it, then pull out whenever it chose. With its futile profit mandate, tenuous subsidy and ragtag roster of hand-me-down trains, Amtrak struck many as a joke: a bleak parody of hapless bureaucracy and sad remnant of America’s storied railroad past. Even an Amtrak customer brochure implored riders to “please be patient. It’s going to take time.” Against daunting odds (and Nixon’s own cynical belief that the railroad would collapse after he left office and was no longer on the hook), Amtrak survived. By slashing 50 percent of its inherited routes, Amtrak doubled down on a bare-bones system until passengers began returning. Amtrak purchased new locomotives, refurbished coach interiors and began slapping its jaunty American flag paint scheme on all trains. Between 1973 and 1976, Amtrak acquired most of the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington from the bankrupt Penn Central, which could no longer maintain the high-speed line’s tracks, bridges and catenary. “There has been a tremendous improvement in the service … as compared with the time railroad passenger trains were being operated by private rail companies,” Biden reflected on the Senate floor in 1985. “Morale among workers has improved, track and equipment have undergone a multibillion dollar modernization, and trains are better than ever.” For Biden, Amtrak represented the flawed but fixable handiwork of a federal government willing to rescue free enterprise when it flopped: a corporate bailout — but one designed to further the common good by sustaining an industry that deserved public investment. In keeping with the civic corporatism that characterized the Delaware Way, Amtrak would atone for capitalistic neglect to make free enterprise

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Transcript: Coronavirus: Tracking COVID-19

sequence all of those viruses pretty quickly, get a result, you know, in 48 to 72 hours, you would know if they are the same virus, the same letters are identical across, then that's likely a spreading event, and that might be support for a closure. Whereas if they're all different, that's more consistent with just three random inoculations acquisitions from the community. You would just isolate those cases and their families, and you could probably keep the facility open. MR. COSTA: What have you discovered about the virus in the United States. How many versions of COVID-19 are in this country? MR. COOPER: That's an important question. So, this gets tricky. In the end--right?--there's actually still only one virus. There's really only one SARS-CoV-2 virus, and they're basically all functionally the same, still the same bad actor that we first discovered back in January. But over time, that population of viruses affecting humans around the planet has started to accumulate subtle changes at about two changes per month. So, now that we're in month 10 of this pandemic, if you compare any two viruses at random from around the globe, they'll differ by about 20 letters. And as far as we know, none of those 20 differences are likely to affect how severe the virus is; it's still the same virus. But we can use those little fingerprints, those 20 differences on average, to determine where they came from and whether it's part of a local cluster or maybe it had been introduced from travel. MR. COSTA: Have we seen genomic sequencing help doctors in previous outbreaks with different viruses? MR. COOPER: Yeah, we certainly have, Bob. So, it's been used to great success in the fairly famous recent Ebola outbreak. And really full credit to a large international team to implement that technology and deploy it on the ground to trace the spread of epidemics clustering in the Ebola outbreak. And that was ultimately successful. It's also being used sort of episodically, maybe periodically, in hospitals around the country, including ours, for a variety of pathogens to determine whether a cluster of cases in a hospital might be due to spread within that hospital. And that's one of the major applications that we had been doing already here at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center with bacterial pathogens. So, in some sense, we were kind of primed to

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Transcript: Coronavirus: Tracking COVID-19

do this when COVID hit. MR. COSTA: At Pitt's Medical Center, Dr. Cooper, how does that work? If someone comes in, they get tested for the virus, and then do you ask them about if they will participate in genomic sequencing? Are there any privacy issues involved? MR. COOPER: Yeah, so that's a tricky question. In general, the work that my lab does is completely de-identified. But I work with a close clinical--work closely with a clinical team who has access to patient records. We do require a need to ask for, or consent, for sampling. Because my lab, which is an academic lab, can--is only working with de-identified samples, what we can do is provide kind of a neutral and unambiguous evaluation of whether the viruses are the same or are they different. To ultimately get that data back to the patients requires coordination both with their treating physician but also with the county public health. And you probably know that in managing this pandemic, that data, that handoff with the public health office, is important for managing public considerations. And so, that usually--that permission usually is granted quite quickly. MR. COSTA: Everybody wants to see this virus eradicated. But I'm a political reporter and I cover how Washington is funding things at the CDC. And I've studied a little bit about the funding of genetic sequencing, and you see the United Kingdom is putting a lot of money into this. Have you seen, in your view, enough support for your project and others like it from the federal government? And if not, what needs to be done, in your view? MR. COOPER: So, regrettably, the funding has been--really been lacking in its coordination, right? So, there's no question that the United States has allocated many dollars for research to fight COVID, particularly in some heroic efforts to support vaccine development. But this kind of epidemiolocal backbone and network was underfunded coming into this epidemic and remains underfunded as it proceeds. And this tool that we have that, you know, frankly, the United States was at the lead of developing, has been implemented incredibly well by a number of countries. So, you mentioned the United Kingdom. Actually, Australia is in the lead globally in terms of the number of virus sequences per cases. They've actually sequenced about 45 percent--they virus-sequenced from 45 percent of all cases in the country

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Transcript: Coronavirus: Tracking COVID-19

us in the community the most is how many of us were ready to go out of the gate to develop and employ technologies that we basically already had to help, and how ineffective we've been able to apply them at a nationwide scale. I would say that's been the biggest surprise. Beyond that, the virus has behaved about like what we thought and based on what we knew about other coronaviruses. It evolves slowly. It basically looks the same, with the exception of these minor changes. It's super transmissible. And I guess probably the biggest surprise, I guess, from the virus perspective, is just how transmissible it is and how much variation there is among patients in how many new cases they generate, right? So how many--it seems that, you know, 80 percent of new cases come from 20 percent of infections. And that amount of variation is a bit surprising and certainly makes it harder for all of us to understand, because no two infections are going to be the same in terms of their rate of transmission. MR. COSTA: But, Dr. Cooper, just a quick follow-up. When you talked about the failures in terms of the response to the virus, what do you mean? What were you referring to? MR. COOPER: Well, what I mean is, in terms of my area, we really had hoped we could use this sequencing technology at a broader scale like other countries had. And we were aware--you know, we're a global scientific community. We saw what UK was doing. We saw what Australia was doing. We think that we in the United States can certainly do the same thing, and we'd like to do that. That's what I mean. It's sort of a lack of communication at the--at the state and federal level to employ these technologies at broad scale. It is great that we are employing it locally to take care of our local medical communities, and I think we're doing a very good job of it in places where you have a strong academic medical center like UPMC. But there's an opportunity to share this broadly. MR. COSTA: Dr. Cooper, really appreciate your time this morning. Best of luck with all of your endeavors as you fight this virus. MR. COOPER: Thank you very much, Bob. It's been a pleasure. MR. COSTA: And please stay with us, everyone watching.

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Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancee and pro-democracy group he founded sue Saudi crown prince in his slaying

His supporters recently remobilized DAWN, a project they said was dear to him, to expose abuses by governments in the Middle East, and in particular U.S.-allied nations such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt — three of the Trump administration’s closest Arab partners. Khashoggi was killed Oct. 2, 2018, after visiting Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents that would allow him to marry. He walked into the mission despite the risk. In the months that preceded that visit, he had been writing columns for The Washington Post that were sharply critical of the crown prince, who effectively rules Saudi Arabia and has carried out a harsh crackdown on rivals and dissidents. The journalist’s death and dismemberment was first revealed by Turkey’s government. The killing set off a wave of international revulsion and calls to ostracize Saudi leadership. The kingdom prosecuted people it said were Khashoggi’s killers in a trial broadly criticized by human rights groups, which noted that court sessions were closed to the public and that no senior officials were held to account. President Trump has remained one of Mohammed’s most steadfast defenders. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone,” Trump said of Mohammed, according to a new book by journalist Bob Woodward. In the lawsuit, DAWN and Cengiz’s attorneys with the Jenner & Block and Gill law firms allege that Saudi officials banned Khashoggi from speaking and writing publicly after he criticized then president-elect Trump at a Washington think tank on Nov. 10, 2016. “Furthermore, after Mr. Khashoggi warned on Twitter that Saudis should be wary of Trump, Defendant al-Qahtani informed him that he was ‘not allowed to tweet, not allowed to write, not allowed to talk’ and added ‘You can’t do anything anymore — you’re done,’ ” the suit alleged, referring to Saud al-Qahtani, an influential media adviser to the crown prince. Khashoggi’s work in the United States is critical to the success or failure of the lawsuit, which must establish that events in any conspiracy leading to his death occurred in this country and that a U.S. judge has jurisdiction. Foreign leaders are typically immune from civil suits in U.S. courts while in office. However, the plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute and a 1991 law called the Torture Victim Protection Act, which provides recourse in U.S. courts for violations of international law and for victims of

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Diner-in-chief: How the Bidens might eat and entertain in and out of the White House

“a man of the people, and his taste in food reflects that proletarian approach,” he says. The proof could be found in the couple’s pantry and refrigerator, stocked with staples familiar to shoppers of suburban grocery stores, Freeman says, including peanut butter and grape jelly, sliced deli cheese, eggs and Haagen-Dazs ice cream. The list of foods the Bidens asked to keep on hand also indicated more health-conscious eating, including apples, red grapes, both Diet Coke and Coke Zero (the former vice president’s pick), Special K cereal and low-fat yogurt. The couple’s kitchen dynamic is traditional, too: Jill is the cook in the family, she has said. Joe’s only cooking feat is pasta with a jarred sauce, she said during an appearance on the “Rachael Ray Show.” By her account, she enjoys it, especially with her family around, music on and a glass of wine by the stove. Food has long been a powerful tool for politicians to shape their public personas. For Joe Biden, an ice cream obsession is a relatable one — and it offers chances for the candidate to connect with voters, with a side of humor. Last week, Biden’s Twitter account featured a short video of the candidate double-fisting a Dairy Queen order. In it, he playfully flips over an open-top Blizzard shake, as if to demonstrate its thickness. And ahead of the presidential debate, he took a jibe at President Trump’s baseless accusation that he was taking performance-enhancing drugs by tweeting a picture of his booster of choice: a pint of peanut butter and chocolate from Ohio-based Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream. This love for a frozen treat is genuine, says Scott Mulhauser, a Democratic consultant who was Biden’s deputy chief of staff during his 2012 vice-presidential campaign. And indulging it is an opportunity, too. “From Dairy Queens to local ice cream parlors, stopping for a scoop is not only a terrific way to cap off long days of campaigning, it’s also a great way for him to embrace iconic brands and beloved small businesses across the country,” Mulhauser says. For Washington restaurateurs, interest in the dining habits of the inhabitants of the White House isn’t abstract. The Obamas were known for visiting the city’s hottest eateries as a couple, and the former first lady frequently dined out with friends. By contrast, the Trumps’ only known foray outside the confines of the White House has been

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National Zoo’s baby panda is growing, crawling and ‘packing on the pounds’

Keepers at the National Zoo in Washington said the cutest black and white furball — their new giant panda cub — is gaining weight, crawling and, well, being playful like a baby. Michael Brown-Palsgrove, the zoo’s Asia Trail curator, said the baby cub at first was mostly tucked under his mother Mei Xiang’s armpit or between her forepaws “to help keep him warm,” but the 8-week-old cub is growing and changing. Brown-Palsgrove said the cub doesn’t nurse as much, and he’s “packing on the pounds.” With more pounds and his thick, woolly fur, the cub is able to better regulate his own body temperature. Keepers said his favorite spot for sleeping is on the floor of the den next to his mama. The two will “playfully nibble at one another.” The panda cub is reaching his milestones — crawling to exercise his muscles and improve his coordination, officials said. And when he’s about three months old, keepers expect he will take his first steps. Zoo officials said caretakers of the pandas have also noticed that Mei Xiang will go for her own snack and leave her cub in the den alone while she’s out in the large enclosure area where she eats bamboo. Last week, zookeepers said she got one of her favorite foods — leaf eater biscuits (yum!) — from a rubber tub and took it back into the den for what keepers said was a “midnight snack.” At times, mama panda takes her young cub out of the den and into the yard, which keepers call brief “field trips.” Zookeepers said that in the coming weeks they expect the field trips to explore the yard to become longer and more frequent. The cub has been called a “miracle” because his mom at 22 was the oldest giant panda to give birth in the United States. Her baby was Washington’s first giant panda cub in five years. The Asia Trail and the giant panda exhibit are temporarily closed to visitors because of scheduled repaving of walkways, officials said. The best way to see the panda is on the PandaCam.

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Trump administration and Russia near deal to freeze nuclear warheads, extend New START pact

would avoid the total collapse of the U.S.-Russian arms control system and would give Washington and Moscow time to continue to engage in further complex and lengthy talks.” A warhead freeze was a condition demanded by the Trump administration, which on Friday rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer of a one-year extension of New START, a 10-year accord that places limits on the two countries’ nuclear warheads. Putin’s proposal Friday made no mention of a mutual freeze on nuclear stockpiles, suggesting instead a simple one-year extension of the treaty with no conditions while Moscow and Washington negotiate what comes next. U.S. national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien responded in a statement that the offer was a “non-starter,” adding, “We hope that Russia will reevaluate its position before a costly arms race ensues.” Moscow seemingly acquiesced Tuesday. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the country “proposes extending New START for one year, and at the same time, it stands ready, together with the U.S., to assume a political obligation on freezing a number of the nuclear warheads possessed by the parties for this period.” “This item can be put into effect strictly and exclusively with the understanding that the freezing of warheads would not involve any extra requirements on the part of the U.S.,” the statement continued. It added that if Washington agrees, then “the time bought by extending New START can be used for conducting comprehensive bilateral negotiations on future control over nuclear missile weapons.” The 2010 treaty, which expires in February, restricts the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads and certain launch platforms. If the treaty is not extended or replaced, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers will return to an era without substantive restraints on their arsenals for the first time in decades. (START is an acronym for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.) The treaty includes a clause that allows the leaders of both nations to extend the agreement by five years without requiring ratification. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has said he would agree to the five-year extension if elected. Putin has also said he would agree to the extension, and in an interview with state television this month he said Biden’s willingness to prolong New START “is a serious signal for our possible future interaction.” The Trump administration’s envoy for arms control, Marshall Billingslea, initially insisted that China participate in talks. He wanted any

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E.U. considering ban on veggie ‘burger’ and other meaty terms for plant-based food

Veggie burgers and vegetarian sausages could face an unappetizing rebranding in the European Union as discs and fingers, with the European Parliament set to vote Wednesday on a proposal that would keep meat labels off non-meat alternatives. The potential ban on terms that suggest vegetarian alternatives to meat products has been pushed by Europe’s meat industry. Proponents have already won battles to curtail some vegetarian labels in the vast European market: Soy “milk” is illegal across the 27-nation bloc. Veggie “burgers” have been outlawed in France. The measure has drawn an outcry from European environmentalists, who say that the rebranding could dissuade veggie-curious meat eaters from substituting a plant-based patty between their hamburger buns next time they fire up the grill. Proponents of the ban say that labels’ meanings should be clear and that consumers should not be lulled into thinking that processed veggie sausages are any more healthful than the porky originals. Some of them also say that people can accidentally buy vegetarian products while meaning to buy the meat-based ones when the packaging is unclear. Similar bans have been enacted in several U.S. states “Replacing meat with a cocktail of chemicals, an ultra-processed product, this is unacceptable,” said Pekka Pesonen, secretary general of COPA-COGECA, an industry group representing European farmers. Opponents say that such a ban would actually cause more consumer confusion because the term “veggie burger” has been established for decades, and those who buy them actively seek them out. They fear that if meat alternatives are stripped of their cutlet-y labels, they could be exiled to the specialty diet sections of grocery stores, farther from the meat they aim to supplant. Further vegetarian innovation might be stifled, some say. Veggie burger labels are “for consumers who like meat, who want to eat products that they can eat on a bun, that they can put on a barbecue,” said Alex Holst, policy manager at the Good Food Institute Europe, which has been fighting the ban. “For them, it’s important to have a name that indicates how they can use the product.” The measure being considered by the European Parliament would ban terms such as “steak,” “escalope” and “hamburger” for products that aren’t made of meat. A separate measure would extend the ban to any term that likens vegetarian products such as plant-based milks, creams and cheeses to dairy ones, like “butter substitute” or “cream-style.” “I think a

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The Daily 202: Trump is ‘tired’ of talking about covid-19. But he cannot avoid the virus. And he cannot help himself.

with Mariana Alfaro President Trump’s campaign manager demanded Monday afternoon that the Commission on Presidential Debates change the topics that will be covered during the final showdown between the candidates. NBC News’s Kristen Welker announced last week that she plans to devote 15 minutes apiece to these six areas on Thursday night in Nashville: fighting the coronavirus, American families, race in America, climate change, national security and leadership. In an open letter, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien argued that this will mean there is insufficient discussion about foreign policy, which in normal times has been a focus of one of the three presidential debates. Stepien wrote, without evidence, that Joe Biden, who served eight years as vice president and chaired the Foreign Relations Committee during his 36 years in the Senate, is “desperate to avoid conversations about his own foreign policy record.” As the United States recorded more than 58,000 new coronavirus infections on Monday, and the death toll passed 220,000, S “They’re getting tired of the pandemic — aren’t they? You turn on CNN. That’s all they cover: ‘Covid, covid, pandemic. Covid, covid, covid,’” the president said. “They’re trying to talk people out of voting. People aren’t buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards.” Trump spent the weekend attacking Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) over her coronavirus lockdowns in a battleground state where she is more popular than him. The president spent Monday going after Anthony Fauci after the government’s top infectious-disease expert said during an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he was “absolutely not” surprised that the president contracted covid-19 based on the way he was behaving. During a conference call for campaign staffers that was intended to be a pep talk, which he dialed into from his hotel room in Nevada and which reporters were invited to join, Trump called Fauci a “disaster.” “People are tired of covid,” Trump said. “People are saying, ‘Whatever, just leave us alone.’ People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots. … He’s been here for, like, 500 years. … Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him.” Polls show that Fauci is far more trusted than Trump as a source of information about the coronavirus, and most Americans remain quite worried about getting it and disapprove of the president’s handling of the crisis. It seemed

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The Daily 202: Trump is ‘tired’ of talking about covid-19. But he cannot avoid the virus. And he cannot help himself.

be about the economy and what they say would be the negative effects of a Biden victory, with a campaign focus on Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Florida. They see the coronavirus — and the president’s handling of the pandemic — as their biggest political weakness, and Biden’s top advisers agree. But Trump continues to call attention to the outbreak.” Even if Trump could maintain message discipline, four polls illuminate why he cannot change the subject: A Washington Post-ABC News poll of North Carolina, released this morning, shows Biden at 49 percent and Trump at 48 percent. The head-to-head numbers are closely linked to perceptions of the president’s job performance and handling of the pandemic. Trump’s approval rating is 47 percent. “Registered voters in North Carolina disapprove of the way the president has dealt with the crisis, by 53 percent to 45 percent, with 47 percent saying they strongly disapprove. But overall, they are notably less critical of the president on this issue than the country as a whole. Among likely voters in North Carolina who approve of how Trump is handling the coronavirus outbreak, 95 percent support Trump; among those who disapprove, the same percentage support Biden,” per Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin. A large national poll released Monday by the Public Religion Research Institute asked Americans how much they trust eight potential sources of information about the pandemic. Reflecting the country’s polarization, only one is trusted “a lot” by a majority of Americans. Fauci is second on the list, trusted a lot by 49 percent of the country. Trump was last: Only 14 percent said they trust Trump a lot to provide accurate information and advice regarding the pandemic. Also reflecting polarization, only 39 percent of Republicans said they consider the coronavirus a “critical issue,” compared with 85 percent of Democrats. “Republicans and Democrats seem to be living in different countries,” said PRRI chief executive Robert Jones. A New York Times-Siena College poll out this morning shows Biden leading Trump by nine points among likely voters. Biden is favored to lead on combatting the coronavirus by 12 points. A 51 percent majority of voters said they believe that the worst of the pandemic is yet to come, compared with 37 percent who say they think the worst is over. “Among voters over 65, a bloc that has drifted away from Mr. Trump, the difference was even

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A NASA spacecraft touches an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth in agency’s first sample return attempt

solar system, which scientists believe could shed light on how the universe was formed and how water ended up on Earth. As big as the Empire State Building, Bennu looks like a giant, spinning walnut that’s more than 4.5 billion years old and believed to be laden with a trove of scientific riches, including carbon and water locked inside clay materials. “These asteroids are really relics of the earliest material that formed the planets in the solar system,” Lori Glaze, NASA’s planetary science division director, told reporters Monday. “They hold the key information to unlocking our understanding of how the solar system formed, and how it evolved over time.” The mission began in 2016, when an Atlas V rocket launched the OSIRIS-REx (which stands for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft from Cape Canaveral. It arrived at Bennu two years later, and soon scientists realized the asteroid was different in one key respect than they had anticipated: It was far rockier, making landing and sample extraction far more difficult. “It’s not the sandy beach we all hoped we would see initially,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. Instead: “Rocks on rocks on rocks.” NASA and Lockheed Martin spent two years studying the surface, hunting for the best place to touch down as well as studying the asteroid. “Exploration and surprise have a lot in common,” Zurbuchen said. “And this was no exception.” Ultimately, the team settled on a crater called Nightingale about the size of a tennis court where there is material that could be extracted by the spacecraft’s arm. While it would be a first for NASA, two Japanese spacecraft, Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, have collected asteroid samples, with the second mission to return to Earth later this year. Those were relatively small samples, compared with what NASA hopes to collect. But Glaze said the countries are working together, “exchanging portions of each other’s samples so that we can maximize the science.” Scientists are also interested in Bennu because it is one of a family of asteroids that “present a hazard to the Earth,” as Ellen Stofan, director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, put it in a NASA broadcast. Scientists estimate there is a 1 in 2,700 chance it could hit Earth sometime between the years 2175 and 2199. That could change, but NASA said it is keeping a close eye on it.

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The Daily 202: It is probably too late for Senate Republicans to distance themselves from Trump

downplayed or dismissed conservative opposition to spending trillions more on a stimulus, saying he wants to spend even more money than Pelosi’s latest $2.2 trillion proposal. Many Republicans had already balked at spending more than $1 trillion on this round of relief.” But Trump was dismissive when he was asked Tuesday about McConnell’s resistance to calling a vote on a package so big. “He’ll be onboard if something comes,” the president said on Fox News. “Not every Republican agrees with me, but they will.” “In a matter of weeks, one of the most closely watched human experiments in history will start to report early results, with data on prospective coronavirus vaccines possibly coming this month or in November from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the biotechnology company Moderna,” Carolyn Johnson reports. “Amid the turmoil, chaos and misinformation that have defined the U.S. response to the pandemic, progress toward a vaccine, or vaccines, has been steady, reassuring and scientific. Political meddling has so far been largely deflected. Drug companies, working closely with the U.S. government and fueled by an infusion of more than $10 billion of taxpayer money, have developed, tested and scaled up a half-dozen potential vaccines at unprecedented speed. And on Thursday, independent advisers to the Food and Drug Administration will convene their first full-day meeting to lay the groundwork for their coming consequential deliberations on whether to recommend specific vaccines for public use. Those votes are not binding, but the FDA typically follows the recommendations of its advisory committees.” The CDC says two-thirds of them are from covid-19 and the rest are from other causes. New federal data show the virus has taken a disproportionate toll on Latinos and Blacks, as we've written about extensively, but researchers also found, more surprisingly, that the contagion has struck 25- to 44-year-olds very hard. "Their ‘excess death’ rate is up 26.5 percent over previous years, the largest change for any age group. It is not clear whether that spike is caused by the shift in covid-19 deaths toward younger people between May and August or deaths from other causes,” Lenny Bernstein reports.“The United States is in the midst of another sharp increase in coronavirus infections, this one centered in the upper Midwest and Plains states. The seven-day rolling average of cases, considered the most accurate barometer, is near 60,000 per day. At least 220,000 people have died of covid-19 so far

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USA Wrestling will skip world championships because of coronavirus concerns

1 concern for USA Wrestling,” Bruce Baumgartner, president of USA Wrestling and a four-time Olympian, announced Tuesday night. “After reviewing updated medical, scientific and government data, and providing an opportunity for athlete and stakeholder input, the Executive Committee concluded that it would not be in the best interest of all involved to organize a delegation to travel to and participate in the senior world championships in Serbia.” The unanimous decision by the federation’s executive committee came after the committee surveyed 117 athletes. USA Wrestling last skipped the competition in 2002, when it was held in Iran. Wrestlers cannot compete outside a national federation at world championships. USA Wrestling’s national championships were held in Iowa this month, and past world champions Kyle Snyder and Adeline Gray were among the competitors. Snyder was forced out of the event with an injury; Gray won and had planned to compete in Belgrade. If Snyder recovered in time, the world championships would have given him a chance to avenge a rare finish somewhere other than the very top of the podium. Snyder, who at age 20 in 2016 became the youngest American wrestler to win an Olympic gold medal, won gold at the world championships in 2015 and 2017 but took silver in 2018 and bronze in 2019. The U.S. Olympic trials will be held in April at Penn State University, with the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics set to begin in July. No full wrestling world championships had originally been scheduled for 2020, but the pandemic ended the practice of holding worlds in the fall of an Olympic year only for non-Olympic weight classes. After the Tokyo Games were postponed this past spring, United World Wrestling announced in July that there would be a full December competition in Belgrade if the pandemic allowed. It required eight of the world’s top-10 ranked teams to agree to participate along with a minimum of 70 percent of the participating countries from 2019. Junior worlds recently were canceled, but Nedad Lalovic, UWW’s president, said the group was “cautiously optimistic about wrestling’s return in December.” Adam Kilgore contributed to this report. More sports coverage from The Post: A Japanese Olympic swimmer was caught having an affair. He’s now suspended for the rest of 2020. Negotiations with Nassar victims held up by insurers, USOPC claims in lawsuit Nike was born on the track. Scandal and the pandemic may change its running business.

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Suicide rates during the pandemic remained unchanged. Here’s what we can learn from that.

have been an uptick in patients with suicidal thoughts or attempts. Along with a team of researchers, I set out to try to find out what was happening. But we would have to wait. Death by suicide takes longer to be reported and finalized than most other causes of death. Every suicide death is investigated and its final cause directly adjudicated by a medical examiner, making the process slower but ultimately more reliable. It turns out that both I and my crosstown colleague were mistaken. Suicide rates in Massachusetts neither rose nor fell last spring. Suicide rates did not change from expected rates at all. Just to be sure, we performed what researchers call a sensitivity analysis — a fancy way of saying we asked the same question in a number of ways to make sure we were not deluding ourselves. We compared this year’s rates in March, April and May with those from last year and other years. Whether we considered the months individually or combined, year by year, there was just no change. We ran the numbers again, this time assuming that each of the few dozen deaths in 2020 that occurred during March through May in which the cause of death was yet to be determined were in fact suicides. The scenario was unlikely, but one we had to consider. No matter how we looked, we kept finding the same thing. Suicide rates did not budge during the stay-at-home advisory period (March 23 until a phased reopening began in late May) in Massachusetts, which had one of the longest such periods of any state in the nation. Studying the effects of stay-at-home advisories is still in its infancy, and what is learned will help inform the decisions of public health officials as they consider measures to address future infectious-disease outbreaks or another covid-19 spike. Some worries about stay-at-home periods will turn out to be overblown, others not. Concerns about the limitations of remote learning for children increasingly appear to be justified, for instance, and concerted efforts to address the problem are urgently needed. But government officials, the media and others need to remember that anecdotes and assumptions are not the same as robust public health data. Early in the pandemic, media reports — rumors, really — suggested that few covid-19 patients taking the drug remdesivir were dying. Earlier this month, data from actual studies showed that the

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Suicide rates during the pandemic remained unchanged. Here’s what we can learn from that.

the cause of death was yet to be determined were in fact suicides. The scenario was unlikely, but one we had to consider. No matter how we looked, we kept finding the same thing. Suicide rates did not budge during the stay-at-home advisory period (March 23 until a phased reopening began in late May) in Massachusetts, which had one of the longest such periods of any state in the nation. Studying the effects of stay-at-home advisories is still in its infancy, and what is learned will help inform the decisions of public health officials as they consider measures to address future infectious-disease outbreaks or another covid-19 spike. Some worries about stay-at-home periods will turn out to be overblown, others not. Concerns about the limitations of remote learning for children increasingly appear to be justified, for instance, and concerted efforts to address the problem are urgently needed. But government officials, the media and others need to remember that anecdotes and assumptions are not the same as robust public health data. Early in the pandemic, media reports — rumors, really — suggested that few covid-19 patients taking the drug remdesivir were dying. Earlier this month, data from actual studies showed that the drug has no effect on mortality. And then there were the president’s musings on the “miracle” drug hydroxychloroquine and other supposed solutions so deranged that they don’t warrant repeating. Many well-informed and well-meaning people fell for the cognitive trap that if something rings true, it must be true — and thus assumed that suicide deaths were destined to rise during shutdowns. Certainly, more study on this subject is needed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported, “During late June, 40% of U.S. adults reported struggling with mental health or drug use,” with 1 in 4 people between the ages of 18 and 24 saying they had “seriously considered suicide” in the previous 30 days. There are legitimate questions to be raised about the pandemic’s toll on mental health. Some of the impact may have more to do with the continuing inability to control the virus, and with the ensuing economic fallout, than with Americans’ staying home for weeks and even months in the spring. That said, a rise in suicides or other suffering resulting from temporary stay-home advisories is neither guaranteed nor inevitable. To get this right, both now and in the future, we have to keep asking

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DHS led the way on past health crises, but it has been less visible during the coronavirus outbreak

After the U.S. coronavirus death toll surpassed 200,000 people, acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf called a news conference to announce the arrests of 128 immigrants in California. Then he traveled to Philadelphia to promote billboards plastered with the mug shots of fugitive immigrants. And he repeatedly criticized social justice protesters in Portland, Ore., on Twitter as they surrounded a federal building there. He did not tweet: Wear a mask. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a history of helping to lead the U.S. response to public-health threats such as swine flu and Ebola, standing with the nation’s top medical experts to emphasize that the threat to the nation is severe. But during the months-long coronavirus pandemic that has affected much of American society, one of the country’s largest federal agencies has instead publicly promoted immigrants, anarchists and smugglers as more dangerous to the United States than a virus with a death toll that experts say could double to 410,000 by the end of the year. “I don’t know what role, if any, DHS is playing” in the coronavirus response, said Janet Napolitano, President Barack Obama’s first DHS secretary and a former governor of Arizona. “They’re kind of MIA.” Wolf, who led a news conference Tuesday to talk about human trafficking, did not take questions afterward. “We’re going to keep it focused on human trafficking today. Thank you,” he said as he left a U.S. Coast Guard building on the DHS campus in Southeast D.C. As the national agency in charge of domestic security, DHS typically plays a major role coordinating emergency supplies and amplifying urgent health messages such as the need for wearing masks and social distancing, former senior officials said. DHS can use its gravitas as an anti-terrorism agency to make clear to the public — and even to the president — that the threat is real, especially at a time when President Trump and others have played down the threat. After contracting the virus in recent weeks and recovering from a brief illness, Trump tweeted: “Don’t be afraid of covid.” DHS spokesman Chase Jennings said in a statement Tuesday that the agency “has taken unprecedented measures to combat COVID-19, including limiting foreign travel, distributing PPE, securing the supply chain for PPE, and dispersing billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief.” He said criticism of the DHS response is “shameful” and ignores “the robust number of DHS public

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DHS led the way on past health crises, but it has been less visible during the coronavirus outbreak

reports outlining DHS actions to combat COVID-19.” Napolitano said DHS led the way in 2009, mere months after Obama took office, when swine flu began to infect millions of Americans, hospitalizing more than 270,000, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The swine flu killed nearly 12,500 before a vaccine brought it under control the next year. Training and pandemic guides from the administration of President George W. Bush had helped the Obama administration prepare for the outbreak, she said. But one of the most important things she did, in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services, Napolitano said, was to appear at media briefings and on the national news to emphasize that people should stay home if they were ill, and should wash their hands and cover their sneezes to prevent spread. She said she has seen little of that from DHS this year. “It’s the third-largest department of the federal government, it’s got massive responsibilities and capabilities, and they should all have been marshaled on this pandemic,” she said. DHS took a similar role when Ebola surfaced in 2014; officials scrambled to keep the deadly pathogen out of the United States and to inform the public about the virus’s spread. Wolf did appear at White House task force briefings, when they were being held. DHS has promoted mask-wearing and other precautions on its website and has disseminated information, including through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which responds to disasters such as hurricanes. DHS also produces a weekly report outlining its efforts to combat the virus. Last week’s mentioned an updated question-and-answer list and seizures of counterfeit masks. But these have not been the attention-grabbing messages on the Twitter feeds of Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli, or on the DHS’s main Twitter account, which has 2.1 million followers. Wolf rarely mentions coronavirus on Twitter, though he sent well-wishes to Trump and first lady Melania Trump when they recently contracted the virus. Cuccinelli has pointed out the threats of the spread of the novel coronavirus at the border, which has been effectively shut down under the Trump administration’s emergency measures. He also mentioned a crowded water park in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus was first detected, saying in August: “What could go wrong?” But DHS officials have not trained that critical lens inward, such as toward Trump’s rallies or elsewhere in

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Is the government doing enough to protect air travelers?

Has the government done enough to protect air travelers during the pandemic? It depends on which numbers you look at. Here’s one the Department of Transportation (DOT) wants you to see: 62,780. That’s how many complaints from air travelers it handled from March through June of this year, a 1,103 percent increase from the same period in 2019. If you were one of the passengers who contacted the DOT after an airline canceled your flight and then balked at making a refund, thank the government if you got your money back. But other numbers also have something to tell us about how well the government has protected air travelers. Or not. This year, the DOT has fined just five airlines a total of $1.3 million. If the number holds up — and it probably will — then the DOT will have taken even fewer enforcement actions against airlines this year than last year’s record low (seven). It will also have collected the smallest amount in airline fines since 2008. The DOT’s consumer protection efforts have never been more important. From refunds to pandemic-related mask rules, the government is solely responsible for enforcing air travel consumer protections. Federal preemption protects airlines from enforcement actions by the states. The DOT’s Aviation Consumer Protection division is often passengers’ first, last and only hope for resolving a problem. But that could be changing soon. The government’s duty to protect air travelers came into sharp focus this spring when flights were canceled en masse as the covid-19 pandemic spread. The DOT deserves credit for how it responded, consumer advocates say. Many U.S. airlines didn’t want to offer refunds, as they must do under federal rules. The DOT issued a statement that airlines were obligated to provide prompt refunds and stepped up to enforce the rules in thousands of cases. “When it comes to protecting consumers who were owed refunds, the DOT has been highly effective,” says Charles Leocha, the president of Travelers United, a consumer advocacy group. But has the government done enough to protect air travelers? This month, the National Association of Attorneys General suggested that the answer is no. In a letter to Congress signed by 40 state and territory attorneys general, the association urged lawmakers to enact new consumer protections for airline passengers. Among them: authorizing state attorneys general to enforce federal airline consumer protection laws. If Congress acts, the federal government

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Torn between safety and environmental concerns, restaurants stick with disposable serveware

In pre-pandemic restaurant dining rooms, you probably sat at a table replete with ceramic plates, stainless steel cutlery, glassware and cloth napkins. What a difference a global health crisis makes. As restaurants across the United States desperately pivoted to takeout service as a means to stay afloat, disposable packaging became the only option. But even now, as some of those restaurants begin to serve customers indoors, plastic-sealed paper napkins and plastic utensils, takeout boxes and compostable cups continue to anchor the table. Why use disposable products instead of traditional reusable plates and cups when restaurant kitchens are created with hygiene in mind? Recommendations handed down by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are the first clue. “Because CDC is still learning about this virus,” says press officer Jason McDonald, “we recommend the use of disposable food service items, because it minimizes the risk of transmission through food-service items. It may be possible that a person can get covid-19 by touching a surface or object — such as a food service item — that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes. This is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still learning more about how this virus spreads.” While CDC recommendations do advise that reusable items are okay as long as they are properly handled and sanitized, restaurateurs lean toward disposable options when faced with a wary clientele, even when they already have excellent sanitization procedures in place. It can be a tough decision on many levels, from the environmental impact of disposables to the increased cost. “Part of our restaurant’s ethos and identity is that we focus on sustainability,” says Evan Chismark, general manager of Ranch Camp in Stowe, Vt., a restaurant and bicycle shop combo that caters to mountain bikers frequenting the area. “Now we’ve pivoted to items that are prepackaged and plastic, because it’s what the customer demands. But putting all that stuff into the waste stream is super painful.” Ranch Camp is serving customers at 50 percent capacity on its outdoor patio and in its dining room — and using the same single-use disposable plates, cups and cutlery in both settings. “It hurts in terms of the presentation of the food,” says Chismark, “but it’s what the health inspector and customer wants to see.” Because some of those disposable items are

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The Technology 202: The Google lawsuit launches a new phase of tech regulation in Washington

companies that promote extremist content cited in civil actions lose their immunity. It's just the latest in a long list of proposals by Congress to overhaul the law, which protects tech companies from liability for user content. The bill, introduced by Reps. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), responds to growing concerns about how tech companies Facebook and other tech companies have cracked down on violent content including the QAnon conspiracy theory in the weeks leading up the election. But the pair of representatives say that this bill would put legal pressure on the companies to act more swiftly. “Social media companies have been playing whack-a-mole trying to take down QAnon conspiracies and other extremist content, but they aren't changing the design of a social network that is built to amplify extremism, Correction: This item has been updated to accurately reflect Malinowski's party He's one of the Silicon Valley donors backing a little-known super PAC, Future Forward, Theordore Schleifer at Recode reports. Other donors include Twilio founder Jeff Lawson, former Google CEO Eric Schmid and cryptocurrency trader Sam Bankman Fried. The group has spent the most money on television ads of any organization outside the Biden campaign itself. It's also helping push a $28 million ad campaign in Texas to back Democratic Senate candidate MJ Hegar. They worry a no-bid contract is being fast-tracked to benefit Rivada Networks, a company that counts prominent Republicans as investors, Jake Tapper at CNN reports. Pentagon leaders and members of Congress have also pushed back on the plan because of concerns that sharing the spectrum could harm military operations. The potential auction of the spectrum comes as telecommunications companies are vying for new spectrum to launch 5G networks. The Pentagon's spectrum is potentially worth tens of billions of dollars. The company added fewer than 2,2 million global subscribers in its third quarter, a dip from 10 million in its second, Steven Zeitchik reports. The numbers also fail to meet subscriber levels from last summer, a typical period of growth for the company. Netflix's stock price dipped 6 percent after the company released the new numbers. Snap stock rockets up after surprise earnings beat (CNBC) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played ‘Among Us’ in a bid to get out the vote (Noah Smith) Pope memes are taking over Twitter, showing Pope Francis holding Baby Yoda and Glossier makeup (Business Insider) The power of the mute button.

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How much does a hotel’s ventilation system matter right now? We asked the experts.

As the world continues to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic, “ventilation” has become a buzzword in the travel industry. Early in the year, on coronavirus-plagued cruise ships, ventilation systems became a point of fear for passengers and crew alike. The effectiveness of air filtration and ventilation on airplanes is still not totally clear: While some studies suggest the chances of contracting coronavirus on a flight are low, some risk remains. For hotels, however, good ventilation has become a feature to promote to bring customers back. Major chains, including MGM Resorts International and the Four Seasons, have advertised that they are enhancing ventilation systems, and smaller companies have gotten in on the movement, too: A-Lodge Adventure Hotel in Boulder, Colo., says one of its selling points, besides perks like access to hiking trails, is that its rooms and suites have no shared ventilation between them. But health experts’ opinions vary as to whether — and how much — travelers should be concerned about ventilation in their hotel rooms. Here’s what four of them told The Washington Post. Adalja, who has been contacted by hotel chains to help them come up with coronavirus safety protocols, says most transmission is occurring as a result of close interpersonal contact. “The key question when going to hotels is not so much the ventilation, but who you’re interacting with there and where you’re interacting with people,” he said. While a lot has been written about ventilation systems, Adalja does not think there is strong evidence that ventilation systems are driving coronavirus cases. “There are many people who are advocating rehauling HVAC systems, but there’s not strong data that that actually is going to have any kind of major impact,” he said, “although you might see some hotels advertising they did that in order to attract customers.” Even so, Adalja believes being in an area that is well ventilated is better than being in one that isn’t. “I think that the risk is more from other individuals rather than it is from the environment itself,” he said. “Your room is probably not that big of an issue, but it’s when you’re in the common areas — so if you’re in the lobby or if you’re in the restaurant — those types of areas where you want to be much more mindful.” Adalja said his best advice for travelers is to use common-sense precautions: Wear face coverings, wash

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Divorce is down, despite covid-19

as they scrambled to forge a new schedule to cover their two jobs and child care for their toddler. But once they rearranged their schedule, things got better — in part because her husband took on a greater share of child care than he had prior to the pandemic and in part because they began taking walks and talking more in covid time. “It may sound strange, but the stay-at-home order and pandemic truly strengthened our marriage,” Katie observed. Distress about the state of our unions certainly seems warranted. The tensions arising from being with your partner all day, every day; the disagreements about how to handle sanitation, socializing and schooling; and the stresses occasioned by lost lives, lost jobs and political tempests seem to never end. A major new survey of American families, the American Family Survey (AFS), found that 34 percent of married men and women ages 18 to 55 report the pandemic has increased stress in their marriage. Yet Katie is not alone. Most married people in America report their unions have gotten stronger, not weaker, in the wake of covid-19. The AFS found that 58 percent of married men and women 18 to 55 said the pandemic has made them appreciate their spouse more, while 51 percent said their commitment to marriage had deepened. Only 8 percent said that the pandemic had weakened their commitment to one another. Other research has found “increases in fathers’ time spent on housework and child care,” a pattern that comports with Katie’s experience. Given all this, it is probably no surprise that the AFS also found the share of married people reporting their marriage is in trouble fell from 40 percent in 2019 to 29 percent in 2020. In spite of breathless media reports of a surge, divorce appears to be down in 2020. The initial data we have from the five states that report divorce statistics in real time indicates a decline in divorce filings for 2020, with year-to-date filings down 19 percent in Florida, 13 percent in Rhode Island, 12 percent in Oregon and 9 percent in Missouri. While divorces are up 9 percent in Arizona, that increase began in late 2019, before the pandemic. Though states are returning to pre-pandemic levels of divorce, most haven’t gotten there yet. Divorces also fell during the Great Recession, then went up a bit as the economy recovered and couples got

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U.S. agencies mount major effort to prevent Russian interference in the election even though Trump downplays threat

The U.S. government is mounting a major effort to prevent a repeat of 2016 — when federal agencies were slow to address Russia’s attempts to manipulate the presidential election — and is taking a range of actions despite the disinterest of President Trump, who questions intelligence that the Kremlin is intent on undermining American democracy. Top security agencies are coordinating actions to thwart foreign hackers, prevent Russia-linked individuals from entering the United States and freeze any of their assets subject to U.S. jurisdiction. They are also passing intelligence to social media firms, and helping state and local election officials shore up their defenses. For months American military cyber-operators, aided by intelligence from the National Security Agency (NSA), have been targeting Russian spies to disrupt their plans by repeatedly knocking them off the Internet, confusing their planners and depriving them of their hacking tools. The goal is to prevent them from attacking U.S. voting systems, according to security officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. The State Department this year has revoked the visas of two Ukrainians deemed to be engaged in activities designed to influence the election and advance Russia’s interests. The Treasury Department imposed sanctions last month on four Russia-linked individuals — including one of the Ukrainians, who was labeled an “active Russian agent” — to prevent them from interfering in the electoral process, the first time that the U.S. government has taken such an action before an election. A vital missing ingredient, however, has been messaging from the top, such as a declaration from the president that the United States will not tolerate efforts — in particular from the Kremlin — to interfere in the election. And disinformation experts say that Trump has reinforced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to stoke American social divisions with Trump’s inflammatory and unfounded remarks about racial and cultural issues, the novel coronavirus and the security of voting by mail. “We get better at exposing Russia’s activity, and when the president denies it or calls it into question, that gives Putin the space and opportunity he doesn’t deserve,” H.R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser, said in an interview. He wrote about Putin’s “playbook” in his new book, “Battlegrounds.” But officials say even if Trump is not publicly voicing support for agencies’ efforts, he is not impeding them, and the NSA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

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Youth sports take a punch from the pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has changed a lot of things, including kids’ sports. Recently the Aspen Institute, an organization that studies sports as well as other important subjects, issued its State of Play 2020 report. One part of the report examined the effects of the pandemic on kids’ sports and how kids play. Researchers at the Aspen Institute and two universities (Utah State and North Carolina State) asked more than 1,000 parents of youth sports participants (ages 6 to 18) from across the country what their kids were doing during the pandemic. Interesting things the study found out include: ●Even though kids are going back to playing organized sports, kids were only half as physically active in September as they were before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic in March by the World Health Organization. ●On average, kids spent about 6 1/2 hours a week less on playing sports during the pandemic than before. ●The study looked at 21 sports and physical activities, including flag football, field hockey, skateboarding and swimming. The number of hours kids spent playing each of those sports fell from March to September. ●However, that is beginning to change. Parents reported kids playing more in 10 of the sports since June. For example, kids were spending 29 percent more time playing baseball in September than in June. ●One activity that dropped less than others during the pandemic was bike-riding. In fact, bicycling went from being kids’ 16th favorite activity before the pandemic to the third-favorite during the pandemic. ●Another sign that bike-riding is getting more popular is that sales of regular bikes and mountain bikes are way up from last year. ●Experts say the popularity of bike-riding may be part of a move — a small move — toward individual sports and more unstructured play during the pandemic. ●One big problem the study uncovered is that 29 percent of kids say they are no longer interested in playing sports. These aren’t kids who sat on the couch all day: They are kids who used to play sports before the pandemic. That’s higher than the 18 percent who said they didn’t want to go back to sports at the beginning of the pandemic. So the bad news is that kids are playing less, and some kids are thinking of staying on the sidelines. The good news is that people at the Aspen Institute and other places are working

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The coronavirus pandemic has caused nearly 300,000 more deaths than expected in a typical year

The coronavirus pandemic has left about 299,000 more people dead in the United States than would be expected in a typical year, two-thirds of them from covid-19 and the rest from other causes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. The CDC said the novel coronavirus, which causes covid-19, has taken a disproportionate toll on Latinos and Blacks, as previous analyses have noted. But the CDC also found, surprisingly, that it has struck 25- to 44-year-olds very hard: Their “excess death” rate is up 26.5 percent over previous years, the largest change for any age group. It is not clear whether that spike is caused by the shift in covid-19 deaths toward younger people between May and August or deaths from other causes, the CDC said. The report comes with just two weeks left in a presidential campaign whose central issue is President Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Trump has sought at every turn, including in remarks Monday, to minimize the virus’s impact, despite a covid-19 death toll that is likely to be the third-leading cause of mortality in the United States this year, behind heart disease and cancer. That stance has proved to be the president’s enduring weakness as the election looms Nov. 3. His Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, has made his plans to tackle the pandemic the major focus of his bid to capture the White House. “The number of people dying from this pandemic is higher than we think,” said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has conducted independent analyses of excess mortality. “This study shows it. Others have, as well.” The United States is in the midst of another sharp increase in coronavirus infections, this one centered in the upper Midwest and Plains states. The seven-day rolling average of cases, considered the most accurate barometer, is near 60,000 per day. At least 220,000 people have died of covid-19 so far, according to data kept by The Washington Post. The new CDC data covers Feb. 1 to Oct. 3. Woolf said the total is likely to reach 400,000 by the end of the year. The numbers were assembled by the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the CDC. Outside analyses, including some by The Washington Post and researchers at Yale University, have found two main causes for excess deaths. Many

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The coronavirus pandemic has caused nearly 300,000 more deaths than expected in a typical year

weakness as the election looms Nov. 3. His Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, has made his plans to tackle the pandemic the major focus of his bid to capture the White House. “The number of people dying from this pandemic is higher than we think,” said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has conducted independent analyses of excess mortality. “This study shows it. Others have, as well.” The United States is in the midst of another sharp increase in coronavirus infections, this one centered in the upper Midwest and Plains states. The seven-day rolling average of cases, considered the most accurate barometer, is near 60,000 per day. At least 220,000 people have died of covid-19 so far, according to data kept by The Washington Post. The new CDC data covers Feb. 1 to Oct. 3. Woolf said the total is likely to reach 400,000 by the end of the year. The numbers were assembled by the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the CDC. Outside analyses, including some by The Washington Post and researchers at Yale University, have found two main causes for excess deaths. Many probably were the result of covid-19, although they were not recorded that way on death certificates. Others are probably the result of deaths at home or in nursing homes from heart attacks, diabetes, strokes and Alzheimer’s disease, among people afraid to seek care in hospitals or unable to get it. Overall, the CDC found that “excess deaths have occurred every week since March, 2020,” with a peak during the week of April 11 and another during the week ending Aug. 8. Those dates roughly coincide with the virus’s surge into the New York metro area near the start of the outbreak and a second major rise across the Sun Belt when many states reopened too soon in an effort to revive flagging economies. All told, an estimated 299,028 more people died than would be expected in a typical year, which was defined as the average annual deaths from 2015 to 2019, the CDC reported. It said 198,081 of those fatalities were caused by covid-19, with the remainder attributable to other causes. While the virus continues to prey mainly on older people and, disproportionately, African Americans and Latinos, the rate of excess mortality among 25- to 44-year-olds was less expected. Among

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New results from a once-promising therapy show the difficulty of treating covid-19

but at Day 28, the researchers observed no difference in mortality. Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician David Leaf, an author of the observational study, said timing and disease severity may explain some of the inconsistency in the results. Leaf, Gupta and their co-authors focused on patients who received the drug relatively early. “You want to give it before irreversible organ injury has occurred,” said Leaf, also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. The patient population was also more severely ill in that study than in the two randomized trials. The reports from France and Italy provide the first available peer-reviewed results for randomized trials involving tocilizumab, said Jonathan Parr, an infectious-diseases physician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved with the studies. Parr said the observational study was rigorous, but he gave more weight to the randomized trials. “We have been eagerly awaiting studies like those coming out today,” he said. Drugmaker Roche, which manufactures the drug as Actemra, had announced via a news release in July that a Phase 3 trial showed tocilizumab did not help patients with severe covid-19 pneumonia. Mortality at four weeks was not improved, either. Another randomized trial by Roche appeared to show positive results, suggesting that patients with covid-19 who took the drug were less likely to die or require mechanical ventilation than patients given a placebo. But because the peer-reviewed results from the Roche trials aren’t yet available, “it’s difficult to assess those studies,” Parr said. Early in the pandemic, Parr and his colleagues treated a handful of very sick covid-19 patients with tocilizumab. The doctors stopped once they began to see “different patterns than what had been described in initial case reports,” Parr said. Parr said he does not yet plan to resume using the drug. “My conclusion was that the results were mixed and not convincing enough for me to change my practice,” he said. “I’m going to wait until more compelling results are available.” He should not have to wait long to judge whether new evidence is compelling. Several other clinical trials are investigating tocilizumab and related anti-inflammatory drugs. Read more: Steroids can save lives of patients with severe covid-19, earning WHO endorsement These laboratory-made antibodies are a best bet for a coronavirus treatment, but there won’t be enough ‘Nobody has very clear answers for them’: Doctors search for treatments for covid-19 long-haulers

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Metro tampered with evidence from Red Line decoupling incident, safety commission says

from Metro’s safety department and the safety commission, as Metro’s operating procedures require. He cited other examples of Metro workers manipulating evidence. After an Aug. 15, 2019, collision of trains stored at Largo Town Center, the commission said in its findings that a train operator tried to “decouple” the wreck without permission, “thereby disturbing the scene.” A safety commission audit released last month found 21 major safety issues or violations including how Metro handled evidence after incidents. The audit said Metro had no guidelines or policies barring the editing or deleting of raw data from audio or video files before they are sent to investigators. There also was no independent chain of custody for evidence, allowing access to those who might be involved or connected to actual incidents. The audit also called on Metro to record and preserve phone calls, ambient conversations and other communications during emergencies. In the case of the torqued bolt, Mayer said, a manager directed employees to conduct testing without regard to Metro’s standard operating procedures for investigations. “This concern crosses all aspects of Metrorail,” he said. During a briefing about a Feb. 4 fire that took place near one of the tracks, Hart said it appeared that Metro was not using the word “smoke” in describing events as he thought officials should. “I noticed the place where it looked like the word smoke was not used when it should have been, and I just wonder, did you have any sense that the word smoke generates a need to follow different specific procedures that they wanted to avoid so they didn’t use the word smoke? Did you get any sense of that?” Hart asked a commission staff member. “There has been a habit of either leaving out smoke or using other phrases that we have addressed our concerns with [Metro] and the safety department,” Adam Quigley, a program specialist, responded. Metro was given 30 days to start “initial and ongoing refresher training” on following proper chain-of-custody procedures, keeping control of evidence and being forthright in providing investigators with direct access to recordings and other potentially relevant information, according to the commission’s findings. “These examples demonstrate that from the front line worker involved in a safety event up to the level of department leaders, Metrorail employees are not properly trained on and familiarized with their basic responsibilities related to safety event investigations,” the safety commission report said.

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We saved our economy in Sweden. But too many people died.

When the coronavirus pandemic gained momentum in the spring, Sweden chose a less restrictive containment strategy than most other countries did, including its Nordic neighbors. Some medical experts and economists, in and out of Sweden, have criticized its policy for being too lenient. Others, from Elon Musk to National Review columnists, have hailed it as a role model for allegedly keeping the economy open, staving off the consequences of a harsher lockdown. President Trump’s medical adviser Scott Atlas has advocated that the United States adopt the Swedish approach to the pandemic. Sweden’s strategy indeed likely helped the economy — but this came at too high a cost, in terms of lives lost. Taking a similar approach in the United States would, in all probability, be even more costly, because unlike Sweden and other European countries, the United States does not have a centralized, publicly funded health-care system with universal coverage. Observers outside of Sweden have often misunderstood its handling of the pandemic. It is true that the government never imposed a formal lockdown and that day-care centers and elementary schools remained open. But the Public Health Agency has strongly recommended social distancing, working from home and avoiding unnecessary travel, among other precautions; compliance was high. The agency instructed people above 70 years of age to avoid socializing with others, and visits to old-age homes were banned. The government prohibited public gatherings of more than 50 people. The Swedish summer holidays, when many people leave the cities and towns for their summer houses in the countryside, may have worked as an informal lockdown, slowing the spread of the virus. Even for observers within Sweden, it has been difficult to ascertain the rationale behind its pandemic strategy. Throughout, the Swedish Public Health Agency remained reticent about the motives behind its policy approach. Officials did not explain how they weighed economic considerations and wider public health concerns, and whether they drew up policies with an objective of achieving herd immunity or based on a worry that rigorous restrictions would be unsustainable. It might be most accurate to characterize the Swedish “strategy” as one that began with misjudgments of the risk of large-scale spread and the extent of asymptomatic contagion. The health agency did not try to dissuade families from going skiing in the Alps during the winter holidays in late February, though reports regarding an outbreak in northern Italy soon surfaced. A recommendation

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The arrest of a Mexican general should be a turning point for AMLO and the war on drugs

he told me. “I thought it was very offensive to the Mexican armed forces, but maybe that’s what they had to do.” Even though MCaffrey acknowledged the unprecedented amounts of money that stem from the drug trade in Mexico and its potential for corrupting law enforcement, he seemed surprised that a figure like Cienfuegos could have actively operated against the interest of the Mexican state for years. He shouldn’t be. In 1997, McCaffrey learned of the arrest of Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, his Mexican anti-narcotics counterpart, who was found to be under the thumb of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords. “We thought he was the most amazing crime fighter in Mexico, and he was — but on behalf of one of the cartels,” McCaffrey told me. Still, McCaffrey insisted, the Mexican military should not be considered a rotten institution. “I don’t think the Mexican armed forces are impenetrable,” he told me. “But they are highly effective, well-organized and largely high-integrity organizations.” McCaffrey may be right, but Cienfuegos’s arrest will put Mexican president López Obrador in an uncomfortable bind. Perhaps operating under the assumption of their supposed incorruptibility, López Obrador has granted the Mexican military more responsibilities, including duties far beyond their purview, such as the construction of Mexico City’s new airport. Even under normal circumstances, such dependence on the armed forces seems inadvisable. This is even more the case in Mexico today. Led not by a civilian but by a military officer, Mexico’s armed forces operate largely unchecked. The DEA investigation might soon uncover a deeper rot. “The defense minister himself can’t accept bags of money and personally go to a Swiss bank,” McCaffrey told me. “So, you’ve got to believe there’s a network of people who are facilitating that. And they are all getting paid off.” If that’s the case, then “El Padrino” might be about to send the country he swore to protect into further despair. Read more: León Krauze: A high-profile corruption case could be a major victory for Mexico. Politics must not derail it. Peter Andreas: Trump’s plan to label Mexico’s cartels as terrorists ignores U.S. role in drug trade León Krauze: With coronavirus hurting the drug business, there’s an opportunity to corner cartels Leer en español: Omar Sánchez de Tagle: Hay más generales investigados por la DEA Julio Astillero: El riesgo de que Estados Unidos detenga a un alto militar mexicano

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Why countries are resorting to pandemic lockdowns again

You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. The lockdowns are back. Ireland is not alone in moving toward drastic action, although the extent of measures varies. The Czech Republic, only months ago considered a rare pandemic success story, announced similar plans on Wednesday. Britain, France, Germany and Spain have set regional restrictions this month, prompting demands for nationwide action. “We are going to a partial lockdown. That hurts, but it’s the only way,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said at a news conference last week. He announced measures including the closure of bars and restaurants for at least a month. No governments take these steps lightly. Even limited shutdowns have consequences. National lockdowns like the one seen in Ireland can take a brutal toll on the economy. When he announced the six-week lockdown Monday, Varadkar said that 150,000 people could lose their jobs and the cost to the economy could reach $1.78 billion. The return of lockdowns highlights an uncomfortable reality: Despite significant medical advances in the treatment of covid-19 and an unprecedented race to find a vaccine to beat the virus, the only proven measures to stop its rampant spread as of yet are crude, perhaps draconian limits on human interaction. The tactic is deeply unpopular in many places. As the economic turmoil of the spring and summer continues, lockdown is a dirty word for many governments. Officials in Sweden and Belgium emphasized that new restrictions, reported as lockdowns in the media, were recommendations, not rules. “In the end, [a lockdown] is a failure of the recommendation of restricting people’s contacts,” Belgian state virologist Steven Van Gucht told the Brussels Times on Friday. “If that system fails, a lockdown is the only thing left.” The return to lockdowns is a sign of desperation. Ireland’s decision to reimpose its lockdown came as the country buckled under a second wave of coronavirus infections. In fact, its outbreak remains smaller than that of many of its neighbors in Europe: Belgium, the Netherlands and France are seeing some of fasting-growing outbreaks in the world, adjusted for population size. The global surge appears to be hitting countries that successfully avoided the initial wave of cases in the spring. The Czech Republic has the fastest-growing outbreak in the world, according to a Washington Post analysis, after Prague residents held a “farewell” party for the virus over the summer. A similar trend can be

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The Energy 202: Climate change isn't the only environmental crisis Biden wants to confront

with Alexandra Ellerbeck One of the biggest parts of Democratic nominee Joe Biden “We need to hit the ground running undoing the damage of the Trump administration, Udall and Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) introduced a resolution laying out the objective last year. But the idea of protecting a certain percentage of the planet was planted by the biologist and writer E.O. Wilson in his 2016 book “Half Earth.” Restricting human intrusion into nature is necessary, conservation proponents say, not only to curtail climate change, but also to stave off the loss of even more plants and animals to extinction as Yet politicians here and abroad have made bold conservation promises in the past, only to fall short. And while the idea of protecting nature is broadly popular in the abstract, actually carrying out that goal can face stiff resistance from those who live and work near protected areas. His platform calls on the United States to set aside 30 percent of its lands and water for conservation by the end of the decade. “We should be taking the plan where we allow significant[ly] more land to be put in conservation, plant a deep root of plants, which absorb carbon from the air,” Biden said during a town hall event on ABC. According to one estimate, around a football field’s worth of green area is lost to human development on average every 30 seconds in the Lower 48 states. That is playing a part in an unparalleled potential loss of 1 million species, which U.N. scientists say may have profound implications for human survival. The loss of coral reefs worldwide to acidifying oceans, for example, could cause a collapse in populations of edible fish. Farmers increasing reliance on pesticides could kill off bees and other insects those same growers rely on to pollinate their crops. The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity — to which every U.N. member has signed onto except for the United States — had pledged to protect 17 percent of terrestrial and inland waters and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas by this year. The United Nations says that goal has been “partially achieved." Stateside, Biden has called out President Trump for opening the vast swath of caribou and polar bear habitat in the Alaskan Arctic to oil and gas drilling and eyeing more uranium mining in the West. Only 12 percent of the nation One

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How tour companies are changing to address travelers’ safety concerns

Before the pandemic, Joey Parrott, an inveterate traveler, had plans to visit Norway, India and Italy. But when these borders closed to Americans, his trips were all canceled. After staying at home for five months, the retired banker from Dalton, Ga., was eager to travel again. He and his sister Cathy Barker signed up for a Collette tour to South Dakota. “It had to be domestic because no other country wants us,” Parrott said. His friends questioned his decision to travel before there was a coronavirus vaccine, but Parrott assured them he would be cautious. His travel pod was impressed by Collette’s safety measures — regular temperature checks, stringent sanitizing and social distancing. Their bus held only 15 passengers, with plenty of room to spread out. Everyone was required to wear a mask on the bus, during guided tours, at attractions and at restaurants, unless they were eating. “Nobody complained about it,” Parrott reports. “At Mount Rushmore, it was fairly crowded since we got there on July Fourth, but we tried to keep our distance, and most people had a mask on.” Collette is one of many tour operators that have reinvented themselves for pandemic travel. After stopping all tours for months, the company has responded to the changed landscape by developing new protocols and offering new services. For those seeking a way to resume travel despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, small group tours offer an alternative to going it alone. Tour operators have always handled the logistics of travel for their customers. In the pandemic era, those services have expanded to include coronavirus testing and precautions, as well. Nearly every tour operator interviewed prioritizes getting over the first hurdle — adhering to coronavirus testing requirements. Most can arrange for testing throughout the world, and they can provide medical care and a place to quarantine if needed. Among the other services now being offered by tour operators are scheduling visits to museums during off-hours, disinfecting communal spaces and arranging private dining at restaurants vetted for safety and sanitation. Most important, tour companies typically have a network of local guides who can respond quickly to the needs of the group and individual travelers. Many are taking more-granular proactive steps, too, such as booking hotel rooms on the first floor so guests don’t have to use the elevator. A few months after stay-at-home orders were lifted, Edward Piegza, founder of

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Covid-19 and child care: What the latest research says

Although sending their offspring back to day care would provide a welcome respite to parents who are both working and caring for young children, many have been hesitant — fearful of exposing their children and themselves to the novel coronavirus. Questions remain about how the coronavirus affects children, how safe the programs are for children and their families, and which procedures work best to mitigate the spread of the virus and its disease, covid-19. But seven months after child-care centers across the country closed for the first wave of the pandemic, research is providing some answers. Here’s what we know at this point. Children can contract the novel coronavirus, but their outcomes generally aren’t as severe as those of adults. Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 741,000 children in the United States have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to recently updated data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. As of October, about 100 children and teenagers had died of the disease — a small portion of the country’s total death toll, which has now exceeded 221,000. Like adults, children with certain underlying conditions, including obesity, severe genetic or neurological disorders, diabetes, asthma and other chronic lung diseases, might be at greater risk of severe complications. There have also been cases in which children and teens have developed what doctors are calling multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C. In infants and preschoolers, the symptoms are similar to Kawasaki disease, a rare illness with an unknown cause that typically affects those younger than 5 and can lead to inflammation of blood vessels. MIS-C has caused at least 20 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Throughout the pandemic, concerns have persisted that coronavirus-infected children, who are often asymptomatic or have mild symptoms, may be silent spreaders. A small study published in August in the Journal of Pediatrics found that some children have high levels of virus in their airways during the first three days of infection, despite showing few, if any, symptoms. Another recent study in JAMA Pediatrics reported that children younger than 5 with mild or moderate cases of covid-19 had similar or larger viral loads in their upper respiratory tract, compared with older children and adults. But experts say the amount of virus in young children doesn’t necessarily mean they are major sources of infection, and data on their risk of transmission has been scarce.

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Covid-19 and child care: What the latest research says

might be at greater risk of severe complications. There have also been cases in which children and teens have developed what doctors are calling multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C. In infants and preschoolers, the symptoms are similar to Kawasaki disease, a rare illness with an unknown cause that typically affects those younger than 5 and can lead to inflammation of blood vessels. MIS-C has caused at least 20 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Throughout the pandemic, concerns have persisted that coronavirus-infected children, who are often asymptomatic or have mild symptoms, may be silent spreaders. A small study published in August in the Journal of Pediatrics found that some children have high levels of virus in their airways during the first three days of infection, despite showing few, if any, symptoms. Another recent study in JAMA Pediatrics reported that children younger than 5 with mild or moderate cases of covid-19 had similar or larger viral loads in their upper respiratory tract, compared with older children and adults. But experts say the amount of virus in young children doesn’t necessarily mean they are major sources of infection, and data on their risk of transmission has been scarce. “There is definite evidence that kids can and do have higher viral loads, but less evidence epidemiologically that this translates into the ‘super spreaders’ situation that was feared months ago,” John O’Horo, an infectious-disease specialist with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., wrote in an email. Young children may have differences in their immune systems, or their smaller lungs could make it harder for them to breathe out infectious particles as far, O’Horo said in a phone interview. Whatever the case may be, it appears that “very small kids are not very efficient at transmitting virus the way that older kids and adults are,” he said. The results of studies examining the impact of child-care programs on community spread in the United States have been mixed. In September, the CDC published a small study of contact-tracing data collected from three child-care centers in Salt Lake City from April to July and found that a dozen children probably contracted the novel coronavirus at the facilities and went on to infect their family members. Transmission was also linked to two children who had confirmed asymptomatic cases. Outbreaks at two of the centers were traced to staff members who were exposed to the

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Covid-19 and child care: What the latest research says

coronavirus through their family members, but the source of the outbreak at the third facility was not identified, the researchers wrote. According to the report, all the programs had varying safety measures in place at the time. But a more recent study from researchers at Yale University, who surveyed more than 57,000 child-care workers in May and June, presented evidence that experts say can provide reassurance that risk-mitigation efforts could be effective in such environments. The national survey, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, found that child-care workers who continued to go to work during the early months of the pandemic, exposing themselves regularly to young children, did not have an increased risk of contracting the virus compared with those who stayed home — provided that safety measures were being strictly followed. More than 90 percent of survey respondents who worked in facilities that stayed open reported practicing good hand hygiene among staff members and children, and frequently disinfecting indoor surfaces and fixtures. Other safety protocols included keeping group sizes small (an average of six children in home-based programs and cohorts of eight in centers), symptom screening and social distancing. “These child-care programs were doing herculean efforts to keep children safe,” said Walter Gilliam, the paper’s lead author and a professor of child psychiatry and psychology at the Yale University Child Study Center. He added: “Could you imagine cleaning and disinfecting every surface and fixture in your house three times a day? It is incredible the amount of effort that they were going through.” The study’s findings appear to align with another CDC report from August that suggested child-care facilities could reopen safely if community spread was low and strict protocols were enforced. Yvonne Maldonado, chief of the infectious diseases division in the department of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine, said the Yale study contributes important information to what is known about child-care programs and covid-19. “Studies like this really do help understand, on a large scale, what do we think is happening,” said Maldonado, who was not part of the research. But, she added, the study does have limitations, namely that it relied on self-reported survey responses. “We don’t have testing data, and we certainly don’t know if all asymptomatics were identified,” she said. Gilliam also noted that his team focused on whether children posed risks to adults in child-care facilities and did not examine transmission from adult to

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The Daily 202: Obama’s 10 deepest cuts against Trump in Philadelphia

feet of an infected individual for a total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period,” Lena Sun reports. “The update comes as the United States is ‘unfortunately seeing a distressing trend, with cases increasing in nearly 75 percent of the country,’ Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, said Wednesday at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, in the first news conference administration officials permitted in more than eight weeks. People may be tired of the advice, Butler said, but mask-wearing is more important than ever this fall and winter as Americans head indoors, where transmission risks are greater. … "The guidance about transmission of the coronavirus … had been discussed by CDC scientists for several weeks, according to a CDC official … Then came unsettling new evidence in a report published Wednesday. CDC and Vermont health officials discovered the virus was contracted by a 20-year-old prison employee who in an eight-hour shift had 22 interactions — for a total of over 17 minutes — with individuals who later tested positive for the virus. ‘Available data suggests that at least one of the asymptomatic [detainees] transmitted’ the virus during these brief encounters, the report said.” “Mayor Tim Kabat was already on edge as thousands of students returned to La Crosse, Wis., to resume classes this fall at the city’s three colleges. When he saw young people packing downtown bars and restaurants in September, crowded closely and often unmasked, the longtime mayor’s worry turned to dread,” Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney report. “Now, more than a month later, La Crosse has endured a devastating spike in coronavirus cases — a wildfire of infection that first appeared predominantly in the student-age population, spread throughout the community and ultimately ravaged elderly residents who had previously managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic. For most of 2020, La Crosse’s nursing homes had lost no one to covid-19. In recent weeks, the county has recorded 19 deaths, most of them in long-term care facilities. Everyone who died was over 60." With new cases surging across the continent, Ireland's six-week lockdown includes a raft of new restrictions. But schools will remain open. (Karla Adam) “The Justice Department announced a historic $8.3 billion settlement Wednesday with OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, capping a long-running federal investigation into the company that, for critics, became a leading symbol of corporations profiting from America’s deadly addiction to

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Target shoppers can now make reservations to avoid holiday crowds

At a time when the thought of holiday crowds might be more frightening than festive, Target is introducing a new safety measure: reservations. Retailers have adopted a range of protocols to minimize crowds, long lines and repeat shopping trips during the pandemic. Most large retailers offer curbside pickup and contactless checkout to accommodate social distancing, and many have scrapped such Black Friday traditions as Thanksgiving Day openings and “doorbuster” deals to fill their stores. But shopping by appointment is uncommon among retailers. “Given that Target is a very popular holiday destination, the new system makes sense in terms of both keeping people safe and giving customers a convenient tool that prevents them having to wait ages outside the store,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail in New York, said in an email to The Washington Post. “During the pandemic Target has been a savvy operator and has used both online and its stores to drive sales. This is another example of how Target is using digital technology to improve the store experience.” Some national chains, including Best Buy, Williams Sonoma and West Elm, instituted mandatory store appointments early in the pandemic, though most have since lifted those requirements. Others such as Suitsupply and Chico’s now offer appointments to interested shoppers. Shoppers can also reserve time slots at local grocery stores and farmers markets using OpenTable, the restaurant reservation site. Target chief executive Brian Cornell said during a media call Wednesday that the reservation system “could be very important during the holiday season” but that he does not anticipate using it on a regular basis. “But some measures, like contact-free shopping, are here to stay.” During the holidays, shoppers can visit Target.com/line to see if there is a line outside their local store and reserve a spot. They’ll be notified when it’s their turn to shop. Other new safety measures include contactless self-checkout anywhere in-store through Target’s Wallet app, double the parking for Target’s popular Drive Up services, and expanded same-day delivery and pickup offerings, the company said. This holiday season, Target has said it plans to keep seasonal hiring in line with last year — about 130,000 positions at its nearly 1,000 stores around the country. But it’s doubling the number of employees helping with curbside and in-store pickup and hiring more full-time and seasonal warehouse employees to meet growing demand. The Minneapolis-based retailer has seen a windfall in

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Cows rejoice: Impossible Foods beefs up plant-based milk investment

and 2015. The challenge now is how to satisfy the demand for milk while working toward a lower-carbon future. The plant-based milk category has seen consistent double-digit increases in sales even as cow’s milk consumption has declined, according to a Nielsen study in June 2018. But, Brown said: “The plant-based milks out there are inadequate. [Our goal] is to make something that for a dairy milk lover is better than anything that comes from a cow.” Alan Bjerga, senior vice president of communications for the National Milk Producers Federation, an industry organization, said that Impossible’s attempted incursion is more likely to affect other plant-based beverage producers. “These beverages have been on the market for 30 years, and they tend to cannibalize each other’s market share,” he said. “For example, oat’s big gains have come much more at the expense of soy-beverage consumption than it has at dairy. If people who like plant-beverages can find a plant-based beverage that is more like real milk — a superior product — than what’s currently being offered, that could cause some concerns for people who are currently grinding up almonds, soy, or oats or whatever else they can mix with sugar water and artificial coloring so they can sell it for twice the price of real milk.” Kliman said the Impossible Foods product will taste like cow’s milk, froth like it, cook like it and, she demonstrated, integrate with a cup of hot coffee without precipitating out (soy and nut milk drinkers are familiar with the gritty texture imparted by adding the products to hot beverages). Tuesday’s demonstration was of a not-yet-finalized recipe, made of plant-based ingredients including a special de-flavored and deodorized soy protein created in-house, and will probably continue to be evaluated in terms of taste, nutrition, versatility and sustainability. The animal dairy industry has pushed back vigorously against the proliferation of plant-based milks, advocating for state legislation to change labeling laws by arguing that consumers are confused by ambiguous labeling and nomenclature that equates soy-, oat- or nut-based milks with animal dairy. The dairy industry has urged states to append qualifiers like “fake” or “artificial” to plant-based milk. “In fact, there is no ‘consumer confusion’ about Impossible Burger’s ingredients,” said Rachel Konrad, chief communications officer for Impossible Foods. “The skyrocketing growth of Impossible Burger is testimony to the fact that consumers are crystal clear that they are getting a product without

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Ireland is first European country to reimpose a lockdown amid a coronavirus resurgence

LONDON — Ireland became the first European country to reimpose a nationwide lockdown following a surge in coronavirus cases, with its government urging ­everyone who can to "stay at home." At 12:01 Thursday morning, Ireland entered a six-week lockdown that includes a raft of new restrictions. Schools, however, remain open. A number of European countries have experienced a resurgence in coronavirus cases and hospital admissions. On Wednesday alone, at least 10 European nations announced record numbers of daily cases. Ireland, which has a population of about 5 million, has recorded more than 53,400 confirmed cases and 1,868 deaths. As Europe braces for the second wave of the pandemic, many countries have opted for targeted, regional restrictions. Ireland has gone a step further with its national lockdown. Under the new restrictions, set to last until Dec. 1, people in Ireland are being asked to stay at home and to exercise within only a three-mile radius of their homes. Restaurants, cafes and bars can stay open for takeaway and deliveries, but most nonessential retail establishments will close, including hairdressers and barbers. Only 10 people will be allowed at funerals. Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said at a news conference that Ireland “will be the first country in Europe to go back into a national lockdown.” Varadkar said the move could result in 150,000 people losing their jobs and cost the government 1.5 billion euros. But he said the country needed to take a “preemptive strike” against the virus “before it is too late.” Varadkar drew comparisons to the pandemic of 1918, noting that the second wave was worse than the first. “That’s not inevitable this time,” he said. “We can make sure the second wave is only a ripple, but that depends on all of us.” Some commentators noted that there is a sense of exhaustion this time around. Tanya Sweeney, a columnist for Ireland’s Independent newspaper, wrote that “when lockdown was announced in March, we banded together in a sort of Blitz spirit, often keen to do our bit in the ‘war’ against Covid-19. But now, as we enter into a second wave of lockdowns, the nights are getting longer and many of us, while keen to do the right thing are just a bit . . . well, depleted.” Gail Mc Elroy, a professor of politics at Trinity College Dublin, said there is a “weary acceptance that it’s necessary.” Both

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The Energy 202: Biden draws GOP attacks with call to 'transition' from oil

Deal — well before Biden rolled out his own plan. “He kept referring back to plans of the Dem primary candidates Biden defeated (and we criticized) but didn't touch Biden's actual plan,” Josh Freed, head of the climate and energy program at the center-left think tank Third Way, said by email. Trump also said Biden supports a ban on fracking — a claim his Democratic opponent has repeatedly knocked down, including on Thursday evening. “I never said I oppose fracking,” Biden said. Biden has sometimes fumbled over his words when describing his position on fracking on the campaign trail. He supports ending new permits for fracking and other oil and gas drilling only on federal lands out West — but not on state or private lands such as those in Pennsylvania. The technique is controversial both for the risk it poses to drinking water and for the greenhouse gas emissions it causes. His stance has helped him win the support of labor groups in the energy sector. Still, during the debate, Biden emphasized he wants to reduce fracking's environmental footprint. During a meeting with California leaders last month, the president appeared to dismiss the role of climate change in exacerbating a record-breaking series of wildfires that have devastated the state. “It will start getting cooler. You just watch,” the president said. When a participant objected, pointing out that the science predicted the opposite, Trump responded, “I don’t think science knows, actually.” A few minutes later, however, the president changed his tune while out of view of the television cameras. Several witnesses described what happened when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) approached Trump after the event and said he hoped the president understood why California leaders thought it was so important to highlight the role of climate change, the New York Times reports. “Gavin, I totally get it, and really it’s probably like 50-50,” Trump replied, referring to the role of poor forest management and the role of climate change in fueling the fires. “I know that a price on carbon is one that makes Republicans more than a little bit nervous,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said on Wednesday during an event with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) that was sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “But I do think that can be and that should be one of the options that is on the table for discussion, in terms

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Trump family friend charged in stalking case in New York

board member of the National Endowment for the Humanities, but he withdrew from consideration during his background check, the New York Times reported at the time. In 2016, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, Kurson became the subject of controversy when it was revealed that, while he edited Kushner’s newspaper, the New York Observer, the two friends consulted with then-candidate Trump on a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Kushner has sought Kurson’s input in this election cycle as well. The White House had no comment. Kurson also has ties to Trump’s attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, with whom he has co-written a book. — Shayna Jacobs Washington State Scientists have discovered the first nest of so-called murder hornets in the United States and plan to wipe it out Saturday to protect native honeybees, officials in Washington state said. After weeks of searching, the agency said it found the nest of Asian giant hornets in Blaine, a city north of Seattle near the Canadian border. Bad weather delayed plans to destroy the nest Friday. The world’s largest hornet at 2 inches long, the invasive insects can decimate entire hives of honeybees and deliver painful stings to people. Farmers in the northwestern United States depend on those honeybees to pollinate many crops, including raspberries and blueberries. Despite their nickname and the hype around the insect that has stirred fears in an already bleak year, the hornets kill at most a few dozen people a year in Asian countries, and experts say it is probably far less. — Associated Press Alabama A 115-year-old Confederate monument that was the subject of protests in Alabama this year was removed from outside a county courthouse early Friday. News outlets reported that a small group of onlookers cheered at the Madison County Courthouse in Huntsville as crews took away the stone memorial, which was topped by the likeness of a soldier, in pieces. Madison County Commissioner JesHenry Malone, in a statement, said the county finally took action after a state commission created in 2017 to protect historic monuments failed to respond in a timely way to the commission’s request to remove the memorial. The monument was reassembled at its new home in the Confederate burial section of a city-owned cemetery. It’s unclear whether the county will have to pay a $25,000 state fine imposed in 2017 to discourage the removal of Confederate memorials. — Associated Press

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Coronavirus surge closes schools on Eastern Shore

were fully authorized to begin safely reopening for in-person classes, based on improving health metrics. Nineteen of the state’s 24 school systems have opened school buildings to students to some extent this fall, state officials said Friday. Hogan’s office issued a statement Friday saying Dorchester’s approach is consistent with data-driven health metrics provided by the state. “The recent rise in the county’s positivity rate is connected to a small number of family clusters, which is in line with trends we are seeing statewide,” spokesman Mike Ricci said. Salmon called the changes in Dorchester “an example of the metrics being utilized to inform health-based decisions at the local level,” according to a statement provided by the Maryland Department of Health. Dorchester opened Sept. 8 and soon brought back seniors in career programs and later students with special needs. More recently, it embarked on a hybrid approach that combined online and in-person learning for students in pre-K, kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade. Since schools opened, nine people related to schools in Dorchester have tested positive: four students, all teenagers, and five employees, only some of whom worked in school buildings. The announcement about closing school buildings was made Wednesday night following a decision by the superintendent and county health officer. Students had remote learning Thursday and Friday, and will be in all-virtual learning in the days ahead. Katie Holbrook, president of Dorchester Educators, the county’s union for teachers and support staff, said many were disappointed that classroom learning was being postponed but also glad the safety of students and staff was prioritized. “It’s being proactive instead of waiting for a large outbreak in the schools to take action,” she said. Linda Barnes, a parent and educator, said she appreciated the difficulty of Bromwell’s decision, which was causing some buzz on social media but was best for health and safety. Still, she said, “it’s sad” thinking of her seventh-grade daughter. “She was really looking forward to going back, and she really missed her teachers and her classmates.” Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease transmission modeler at University of Maryland School of Medicine, said school and health leaders acted wisely in changing course when the numbers shifted. “When we open school districts, we should have protocols to close like this,” she said. Dorchester is not the only county school system to face changes in its in-person learning plans because of the coronavirus. Elsewhere on the

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A travel group report says flying is safe. The doctor whose research it cited says not so fast.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), a global airline trade group representing 290 carriers in 120 countries, published a report this month aiming to reassure grounded travelers about the future of flying. The group collected medical journal data on in-flight coronavirus cases and used it to declare that commercial flights have a “low incidence of inflight COVID-19 transmission” when masks are worn. Following an abundance of new research, the report says, only 44 cases of coronavirus have been linked to a flight, during a period when 1.2 billion passengers traveled. But a doctor whose work was cited in the report says that the group is misrepresenting his findings by only counting proven flight-linked cases that were published in medical journals. “IATA is taking it to an extreme saying there’s ‘little’ risk in flying,” says David Freedman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Alabama whose study is cited in the IATA report. “What they want is to throw this number on the risk of flying … and we don’t know what that risk is yet. I’m not saying the risk is high, but there is some risk. It just looks like masks help a lot.” The bottom line, Freedman says, is that cases linked to air travel are very difficult to scientifically prove because passengers are not usually monitored after flying and therefore are not tallied if they become sick. It’s also nearly impossible to determine whether sick passengers picked up the virus on a plane as opposed to in an airport or on the way there, he says. “And if you can’t prove it, it doesn’t end up in a journal." Freedman’s cited study, published in September 2020, says that “the absence of large numbers of published in-flight transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 is not definitive evidence of safety.” While an abundance of in-flight research on covid-19 has recently come to light, Freedman is not alone in his assessment that it’s unclear if flying is a low-risk endeavor amid the pandemic. Brad Pollock, the associate dean of public health sciences at the University of California at Davis, agrees with Freedman’s assessment of IATA’s report, calling it an “overreach.” Studies do not account for unpredictable passengers who board planes every day, he says. “There’s movement in the cabin to consider, but also so many people improperly wear a mask below their nostrils,” Pollock says. “That’s more of an issue than what kind

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A travel group report says flying is safe. The doctor whose research it cited says not so fast.

is that cases linked to air travel are very difficult to scientifically prove because passengers are not usually monitored after flying and therefore are not tallied if they become sick. It’s also nearly impossible to determine whether sick passengers picked up the virus on a plane as opposed to in an airport or on the way there, he says. “And if you can’t prove it, it doesn’t end up in a journal." Freedman’s cited study, published in September 2020, says that “the absence of large numbers of published in-flight transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 is not definitive evidence of safety.” While an abundance of in-flight research on covid-19 has recently come to light, Freedman is not alone in his assessment that it’s unclear if flying is a low-risk endeavor amid the pandemic. Brad Pollock, the associate dean of public health sciences at the University of California at Davis, agrees with Freedman’s assessment of IATA’s report, calling it an “overreach.” Studies do not account for unpredictable passengers who board planes every day, he says. “There’s movement in the cabin to consider, but also so many people improperly wear a mask below their nostrils,” Pollock says. “That’s more of an issue than what kind of mask they’re wearing. If everyone wears their mask properly on the plane, we’re going to be much better off.” In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that nearly 11,000 people have been potentially exposed to the coronavirus on flights. The CDC told The Washington Post that of those in-flight exposures, “an absence of cases identified or reported is not evidence that there were no cases.” On Monday, it updated its guidance to “strongly recommend” all passengers and crew members wear masks. When asked for comment, IATA spokesperson Perry Flint told The Post over email: “It is possible that the actual number of transmissions is greater than the 44 cases we have been able to identify. And if we were able to determine how many passengers have flown internationally while infectious, this would be tremendously useful. However, these numbers are not available.” Flint also maintains that “it is true that the documented, published transmissions in flight are very low, and those that have occurred with onboard mask wearing are lower still — and it is true that well over a billion people have travelled by air during the pandemic.” Experts say there is reason to be optimistic

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How many coronavirus deaths are truly attributable to Trump?

tricky for three reasons. First, the actual number of deaths so far is a bit murky. Second, the number of deaths the country might have seen involves a fair amount of speculation. And, third, people are still dying at the rate of 1,000 a day, meaning that we're nowhere near knowing what the final toll from the virus will be. How many have died? As noted above, there are at least 222,000 confirmed deaths to date. Many of those came at the outset of the pandemic, when undetected infections spread from person-to-person before containment measures were implemented. Because of how the virus works — infections are identified a week or two before patients succumb — surges in new cases have preceded surges in deaths. You can see that in the recent data: cases began to increase at the end of last month; deaths began to increase over the past week. What isn't captured is any unconfirmed deaths, deaths which followed undiagnosed infections or which preceded America's slow rollout of testing. To estimate that total, we look at excess deaths, how many people died in 2020 compared to preceding years. Deaths follow seasonal patterns, and exceptional mortality events therefore stand out statistically. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released earlier this week estimates that “an estimated 299,028 excess deaths have occurred in the United States from late January through October 3, 2020, with two thirds of these attributed to COVID-19,” the disease caused by the virus. That's roughly in line with the confirmed total through the same date, but this estimate, too, has limitations. More recent deaths might not yet have been counted, for one, and because “deaths from other causes might represent misclassified COVID-19 — related deaths,” as the report notes. Nonetheless, it seems fair to assume that the number of deaths is around the 222,000 total. How many This is a trickier question to answer. One way to look at it is to compare the death toll in the United States with outcomes in other, similar countries. That's the approach taken by researchers with Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness. This week, they released a report estimating that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths from covid-19 didn't need to occur, had the country's response been as effective as those of other nations. In South Korea, where the first infection was detected on the same day

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E.U. rejects proposal to ban labeling plant-based foods as veggie ‘burgers’

as burger, steak and sausage — off non-meat substitutes in the 27-nation European Union. Europe’s meat industry backed the ban, arguing that consumers could be confused by the messaging and mistakenly buy a vegan rather than animal-based box of burgers. The E.U. has already banned labeling as “milk” or “butter” nondairy products based on alternatives such as soy. COPA-COGECA But European environmentalists pushed back, arguing that using terms such as veggie “discs” or “fingers” could deter would-be consumers looking to reduce their meat consumption. “Consumers are in no way confused by a soy steak or chickpea-based sausage, so long as it is clearly labeled as vegetarian or vegan,” Camille Perrin, senior food policy officer at the Brussels-based European Consumer Organization, said in a statement. “Terms such as ‘burger’ or ‘steak’ on plant-based items simply make it much easier for consumers to know how to integrate these products within a meal.” She continued: “There is no doubt Europeans need to shift to more plant-based diets, both for their health and the planet. The best would be for consumers to cook more with legumes such as beans and peas instead of meat, but not all have the time and skills to do so.” The proposal was one amendment within a package of agricultural measures. Another that did pass bans terms such as “yogurt-style” or “cheese-style” for nondairy imitation replacements. The larger farm bill was to be voted on later Friday. Elena Walden, Europe’s policy manager for the Good Food Institute, a U.S.-based organization that promotes plant-based alternatives, criticized the latter ban in a statement as “further undermining the E.U.’s sustainability commitments.” The European Parliament has issued an array of regulations around food labels, from Parmesan cheese to champagne, that European producers must follow. ING Think, a global research firm, published a report Thursday estimating that sales of meat and dairy alternatives in Europe grew by nearly 10 percent over the past decade. The study estimated the market’s share would rise to 7.5 billion euros ($8.8 billion) by 2025, up from 4.4 billion euros ($5.2 billion) in 2019. “The sheer size of the meat and dairy market and the small base for plant-based alternatives mean that, even at the current growth rate, it would take until the mid-2050s before sales of ‘plant-based meat and dairy’ could surpass sales of meat and dairy,” the report concluded. Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report.

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U.S. sanctions Russian lab that built what experts say is potentially the world’s deadliest hacking tool

The United States on Friday sanctioned a Russian government lab that built what experts say is potentially the world’s deadliest hacking tool — malware designed to disrupt industrial control safety systems that protect human life. The Treasury Department’s designation of an institute of the State Research Center of the Russian Federation marks the first time the United States has sanctioned hackers for targeting industrial control systems, analysts said. “The Russian Government continues to engage in dangerous cyber activities aimed at the United States and our allies,” Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said in a statement. “This Administration will continue to aggressively defend the critical infrastructure of the United States from anyone attempting to disrupt it.” The lab — the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics in Moscow — created the Triton malware, also known as Trisis and HatMan, used in an attack on a Saudi petrochemical facility in 2017 that resulted in tens of millions of dollars in lost production. Dozens of people could have been killed, but a coding error prevented the malware from working as intended, and a potential catastrophe was averted, experts said. The lab is thought to have links to Russia’s GRU military spy agency. The hackers who attacked the Saudi plant also have scanned and probed U.S. energy facilities, as well as oil and gas companies in Europe and the Persian Gulf, experts said. The Saudi plant was identified by E & E News in 2017 as Petro Rabigh. The malware at Petro Rabigh was found almost by accident, said John Hultquist, senior director of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity company Mandiant, which was among the firms called in to investigate the incident. The hackers tripped a safety system, causing the plant to shut down, which led to the cyber investigation, he said. “This malware is a threat to human life,” Hultquist said. Mandiant in 2018 linked the malware to the Russian lab. The sanctions are “a very significant move by the U.S. government,” said Robert M. Lee, a co-founder of Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that, like Mandiant, identified the malware. “It’s a good norm-setting moment. It’s a signal to say, ‘Hands off’ of industrial control equipment.” The sanctions freeze any assets the institute holds in the United States, and Americans are barred from engaging in transactions with the lab. It remains unclear why Russia would have targeted the Saudi plant. The Treasury

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‘The enemy’ in the covid ward: Some Israelis oppose treating a Palestinian leader

avowed plans to annex settlements in the West Bank. The freeze continues even though annexation was shelved as part of Israel’s diplomatic accord with the United Arab Emirates. Both Israel and the Palestinian territories are also suffering a second wave of coronavirus infections, leading some to assert that Erekat is taking up a bed needed by an Israeli patient. His doctors disputed that charge. “No one is being disadvantaged by his care,” said Vernon Van Heerden, the physician in charge of the seven-bed coronavirus ICU ward where Erekat is being treated. Among the doctors attending Erekat is his daughter, Salam Erekat, who also managed his care at his home in Jericho before his condition worsened. Some Palestinians, too, have criticized Erekat’s decision to seek medical care in Israel, saying a facility in another Arab country would have been better. Soon after Erekat reported testing positive in early October, Jordan’s foreign minister said his government was ready to have Erekat transferred to Amman. But Erekat’s history of respiratory disease — he received a lung transplant in the United States three years ago — meant that he needed equipment and expertise not widely available in the region, Van Heerden said. “It’s very specialized therapy,” he said. “Last-line therapy. If this doesn’t work, there’s nothing else.” Hadassah, which has multicultural staff and a history of providing care to all parties in the conflict, had no hesitation accepting Erekat, Van Heereden said. “We have Arab doctors and Jewish doctors, Arab nurses and Jewish nurses taking care of all patients without fear or favor,” Van Heereden said. “We were delighted to provide any care that he needed.” But Erekat’s presence was met with protests Monday and a hospital staff member noted signs and chants of “Let him die.” Erekat’s arrival had to be approved by the Israeli government, and some politicians said it should have wrung concessions from the Palestinians in exchange for treating one of their leaders. One member of parliament for Netanyahu’s Likud party called the move “a sign of weakness.” But Benny Gantz, the former army chief of staff who serves as defense minister and alternate prime minister in the coalition government, defended his decision to permit Erekat’s care unconditionally. “The minister of defense, who is the authority on these issues, is personally committed to humanitarian aid, particularly when it is life-saving,” his office said in response to a request for comment.

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Donors rescind $50 million in gifts over Baltimore museum’s planned sale of Warhol painting

This story has been updated. The Baltimore Museum of Art continues to be hit by criticism and turmoil — including the resignations of artists Amy Sherald and Adam Pendleton from the board of trustees — since announcing earlier this month that it would sell three paintings by Andy Warhol, Clyfford Still and Brice Marden to generate $65 million for diversity and equity programs. Now, two former museum board chairmen say they’ve rescinded planned gifts totaling $50 million. Former board chairman Charles Newhall III said Friday that he and another former chairman, Stiles Colwill, made verbal pledges of $30 million and $20 million, respectively, in gifts to the “In a New Light” campaign that was tied to the museum’s 100th anniversary in 2014. In a letter in which he resigned as an honorary trustee, Newhall said he and Colwill are rescinding those promises because of the museum’s intention to sell the three artworks, which include Warhol’s “The Last Supper.” Other donors Newhall has spoken to are considering canceling gifts, too, he said, while Colwill warned that the museum may lose out on gifts of art from local collectors. However, Clair Zamoiski Segal, chairwoman of the board of trustees, said in an email that the museum has no record of a $50 million pledge or any pledges totaling that amount. “While we appreciate that Charles Newhall is expressing that he had intended on making such a pledge, this was not negotiated or recorded with the museum,” Segal wrote. Newhall rejected Segal’s statement and characterized it as part of a pattern. “We never put anything in writing, but I ran that campaign for five years. I’m sure it’s in the minutes of the various board meetings,” he said. “That’s what they are doing about everything. They are denying everything. They lie.” The canceled donations are the latest evidence of growing opposition to the deaccessioning that the board approved earlier this month. Museum officials plan to auction Still’s “1957-G” and Marden’s “3” on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s. A private sale of the Warhol work is said to be imminent. The controversy led to the resignations of artists Pendleton and Sherald, whose resignation letter revealed strife on the board. Both artists said they could not devote the time required to participate fully on the board. Neither stated outright that they objected to the sale. “I have my opinions about the recent and ongoing proceedings but

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Transcript: Coronavirus: Leadership During Crisis

what this phenomenon of climate change looks like and feels like to you living in Iceland? How do you see it with your own eyes? PM JAKOBSDÓTTIR: Well, we had actually a memorial here last year when one of our glaciers was officially declared that he had disappeared, a glacier called Ok. And we had a lot of environmental activists that walked on top of the mountain that used to be a glacier, and one of our great artists and poets actually wrote scripture where he remembered this glacier. So, we are actually seeing this happen. We are seeing the glaciers receding in Iceland. And obviously, it's a known fact that climate change is happening at a faster pace here close to the Arctic and we are seeing also the melting of the Greenland glacier with really--which can have disastrous consequences. So, this is a core issue for us. It's a core issue, fighting climate change, fighting the climate crisis, as I call it. So, we have actually--my government has actually implemented an action plan to fight the climate crisis where we are focusing on not just reducing carbon emissions but also in binding more carbon. We are focusing really now on reducing emissions from transport but also other factor--other sectors of society, and then we are focused on binding more carbon with old, traditional methods like growing forests and restoring methods, but also with new and innovative methods. And I can now tell you that this earthquake was quite big. It was 5.7 Richter. So, it was quite big. MR. IGNATIUS: Well, I must say, your reaction was as close to unflappable as I think most of us can imagine. So, we are glad that you weren't damaged and we hope the damage in Reykjavik is minimal. Prime Minister, we have, as you may have heard, a presidential election coming in two weeks. And I'm not going to ask you to take sides in that, but I do want to ask you what Americans can learn about leadership from your experience and your country's experience in Iceland that might be useful for us as we think about our own country. PM JAKOBSDÓTTIR: Well, it's always difficult to take one's own experience and try to teach others. But for me, living in society which is very dear to me, and I think what's most important for leaders in a society

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Why the NBA is considering a condensed offseason and a December start date

This is an excerpt from NBA players, fans and media members still catching their breath after a marathon 2019-20 season should begin preparing for a 100-meter dash of an offseason. On a board of governors call last week, the NBA’s decision-makers discussed the possibility of condensing the 2020 offseason and shortening the 2020-21 season to 72 games in an effort to return the league’s calendar to its typical cycle, people with knowledge of the conversation confirmed. These plans — as reported by the Athletic, ESPN and the Associated Press — could see regular season games begin before Christmas, rather than the mid-January target previously discussed by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Michele Roberts. Moving up the start date and trimming 10 games could allow the NBA to complete its season before the Tokyo Olympics, which are slated to open in July. Make no mistake, the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to force the league, which reportedly fell $1.5 billion short of its original revenue projections for last season, to weigh painful compromises. Reopening in December would be a tough ask for players on top playoff teams, especially those who competed in the Finals. Last season, 132 days passed between the last game of the 2019 Finals and the first game of the 2019-20 campaign. Because of this year’s four-month coronavirus hiatus and the Disney World restart, that period would be trimmed nearly in half to 73 days if the league started Dec. 22. Of course, not every team would feel the squeeze evenly: Eight of the NBA’s 30 teams haven’t played since the March 11 shutdown, and 22 teams have been idle since the first round of the playoffs ended Sept. 2. Even so, the next two months would be a blur: The NBA must finalize its schedule and financial agreement with the players’ union, hold its draft virtually Nov. 18, conduct free agency and open training camps. To understand why the NBA might prefer to rush back to the court, one must remember that the chief argument for delaying was to allow more time to reopen with fans in attendance. The wishful thinking went that a February start could theoretically create a path for team owners to generate money through ticket sales and other game-day-related sources, which typically account for 40 percent of the league’s $8 billion annual revenue. The coronavirus has had other

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A Virginia state senator found headstones on his property. It brought to light a historic injustice in D.C.

acres were the city’s busiest Black burial ground between 1880 and 1920, the D.C. planning office said in a report on the city’s cemeteries. Owned by several families, the burial society had fallen on hard financial times by the 1950s. A developer named Louis Bell tried for years to buy the acreage. By 1960 he finally succeeded, promising to relocate all the graves to a new cemetery in Prince George’s County, Md. Headstones, though, were hauled off as scrap. A former owner of Stuart’s farm in Virginia bought several truckloads to build up his shoreline. Apparently some of the burials didn’t make the move, either. The city bought the property from Bell in 1967, according to news accounts of the era, and when Metro began construction in the early 1970s, the work unearthed human remains. Newspaper articles described at least five coffins at the site, piles of dirt containing bones, and — during work on a parking lot in 1979 — “pieces of dark cloth, fragments of coffin and bones.” Today, a small metal plaque at the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station is the last reminder of the lost cemetery. Commuters rush past toward buses and parking lots or head to the upscale shops nearby. On the pedestrian bridge that swoops over the train tracks, someone has spray-painted “Black Lives Matter.” The graves were relocated to what is now National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, where many remain unidentified. National Harmony’s current owners — a national network based in Texas with more than 2,000 locations — say the original handwritten records can pinpoint the location of some bodies, but not all. National Harmony covers more than 100 hilly acres in the shadow of FedEx Field, a manicured oasis barely visible from suburban roadways. Atop the cemetery’s highest point, the dome of the U.S. Capitol and its statue of Freedom mark the distant skyline. Violetta Sharps Jones, 72, has been coming to National Harmony for much of her life to pay respects to her deceased family members, though she has no idea where the earliest ones lie. Until she learned the truth late last month, Jones said she always assumed her ancestors were too poor to afford headstones. “You see how devastating that is?” she said. Stuart’s farm is an unlikely solution to the mystery of the missing headstones. A former plantation, the property had been in Stuart’s family for generations

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The Trump administration is investigating Google. Good luck pinning the giant down.

for them to slip through the cracks in the regulatory system. Monopoly and antitrust laws work best when they can identify the precise market that a company is operating in. But these laws can’t easily target technology platforms that work across many markets. My research shows how Google has depicted itself simultaneously as a search company, an advertising company, a media company and a telecommunications company. This makes tech giants look less powerful than they are. If you look at them market by market, rather than as a whole, they can look like small fish in big ponds. This isn’t Big Tech’s only advantage. While these companies have users all over the world and often depict themselves as democratizing global media, they are typically headquartered in just two countries, the United States and China. This means other governments that might be concerned about the impact of Facebook on their elections, say, have limited jurisdiction to do anything. Furthermore, even though social media platforms play a central role in public debate and sometimes claim regulating them would erode free speech, they have limited legal liability, if any, for images and content that appear on their sites. These platforms often host marketplaces for others, while also selling their own products, generating powerful lock-in effects. It’s Google’s lock-in effects that caught the attention of the Justice Department. Facebook took a similar approach, using data from its external advertising service for news websites to secure exclusive distribution contracts with media companies. Columbia law professor Lina Khan argues that Amazon uses consumer purchase data on other brands on its site to precision engineer its own products to outsell them. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of The Washington Post.) This has led some policymakers and scholars to call for “structural separation,” or a ban on companies operating as players in their own marketplaces. India recently introduced legislation to this effect for online retail, forcing Amazon and local competitor Flipkart to pull their own products from their websites. The new U.S. investigation doesn’t propose any remedies, but separation is one possible outcome. Antitrust law is changing The new investigation may signal more active antitrust enforcement in the United States and not just toward the technology sector. Scholars have documented how U.S. monopoly regulators have moved away from challenging existing monopolies and prioritized preemptive scrutiny of mergers that might bring monopolies into

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The Trump administration is investigating Google. Good luck pinning the giant down.

for others, while also selling their own products, generating powerful lock-in effects. It’s Google’s lock-in effects that caught the attention of the Justice Department. Facebook took a similar approach, using data from its external advertising service for news websites to secure exclusive distribution contracts with media companies. Columbia law professor Lina Khan argues that Amazon uses consumer purchase data on other brands on its site to precision engineer its own products to outsell them. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of The Washington Post.) This has led some policymakers and scholars to call for “structural separation,” or a ban on companies operating as players in their own marketplaces. India recently introduced legislation to this effect for online retail, forcing Amazon and local competitor Flipkart to pull their own products from their websites. The new U.S. investigation doesn’t propose any remedies, but separation is one possible outcome. Antitrust law is changing The new investigation may signal more active antitrust enforcement in the United States and not just toward the technology sector. Scholars have documented how U.S. monopoly regulators have moved away from challenging existing monopolies and prioritized preemptive scrutiny of mergers that might bring monopolies into being. Influenced by the work of conservative legal scholars such as onetime Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, American courts and regulatory officials have focused on how proposed mergers would affect prices for consumers, rather than broader public interest issues such as fairness, which antitrust law previously considered. However, it’s hard to apply these price standards to technology companies. Very often, tech platforms are free for users. Prices for advertisers are set in individual markets according to secret algorithms. And, research shows, tech platform companies are better able to resist pressure from government because they can combine their market influence with other forms of political influence to push back. This has led some scholars to argue that a new era means it’s time for a different approach, harking back to Theodore Roosevelt’s claim in 1910 that the railroad and oil trusts of the Gilded Age posed a threat to democracy, not just to the economy. Returning to that approach, as some scholars call for, would reverse the changes wrought by Bork and others, making it possible to regulate for a wider range of public interest goals. However, such calls are not yet shaping antitrust enforcement in practice. While the new lawsuit

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What do ordinary Arabs think about normalizing relations with Israel?

conducted face-to-face polling in Kuwait, plus phone surveys in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Here’s what we found. Few gulf citizens support recognizing Israel In Saudi Arabia, only 6 percent of the sample supported diplomatic recognition of Israel. In Kuwait, 88 percent of the sample rejected such recognition, with 10 percent in favor. In Qatar, 88 percent also rejected recognition. When asked whether the Palestinian cause was a concern for all Arabs or the Palestinians alone, 89 percent of the Saudi sample answered that it was a cause for all Arabs. This was comparable to the Qatari sample, at 88 percent. In Kuwait, 69 percent of the sample agreed with this sentiment. But a large Saudi segment — 29 percent of our sample — refused to answer the diplomatic recognition question, similar to what we saw in the 2017-2018 survey. This high rate of nonresponse is probably due to the “sensitive” nature of the question, reflecting the Saudi government’s recent rhetoric on the Israel-Palestine issue, as well its continued crackdown on activists. Following the normalization announcement, official Saudi media outlets praised the deal, making a clear statement that the UAE, an allied country, had made a “sovereign decision.” Accounts on social media known for promoting regime discourse also criticized the hypocrisy of those in opposition, noting many voices from Qatar and Turkey were covering up their own country’s normalization. In previous survey waves, we conducted an experimental analysis to determine how people really felt about sensitive issues. We asked respondents to list the number of items in the question that were important to them, without identifying which ones. We showed them either a list of four or five items — the fifth item was the “sensitive” topic, the importance of Palestine to them. We discovered statistically significant differences between the two groups, suggesting that the fifth item — the Palestinian cause — was an important issue, even if respondents were reluctant to answer direct questions. These findings suggest many Saudi respondents reject the idea of normalization with Israel but remain afraid to say so. Repression and public sentiment Kuwait The UAE and Bahrain were not included in our survey, but we can get a sense of public opinion from how civil society reacted to the news of normalization, as well as in the measures regimes took in the lead-up to the announcement. Emirati phone numbers, for instance, received government WhatsApp messages

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Transcript: A Conversation with John O. Brennan

personal enemy. There has been a campaign on Saudi Twitter claiming that you, John Brennan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, others were conspiring to place his predecessor, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, as king. That doesn't make it easy for a rapprochement. But do you think there's a path back to a better U.S.-Saudi relationship? And describe what that path would require. MR. BRENNAN: Well, first of all, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef was the crown prince, and he was displaced by Mohammed bin Salman. And so, Mohammed bin Salman is the one who changed the order of succession in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman is a quintessential authoritarian leader. Yes, there have been some reforms in Saudi Arabia under his leadership that have been positive, you know, the increased mixing of the genders and reducing some of these social morays in Saudi Arabia, but also, he has very aggressively tried to suppress people who speak out against a lot of his authoritarian practices. People have been incarcerated, and people have been maltreated, including women activists in Saudi Arabia. So, yes, I will continue to speak out against Mohammed bin Salman who, according to reports, the CIA has determined with moderate confidence, was responsible for the horrific killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, one of your colleagues at The Washington Post. And so, I do believe that we need to have a good relationship with Saudi Arabia. That is in our strategic interest, but Mohammed bin Salman really needs to be held to account for what he has done inside of Saudi Arabia, what he did to Jamal. And I do believe that a Biden administration is going to make it clear to the Saudi leadership that as long as Mohammed bin Salman continues along this path, it's going to be very difficult to repair the relationship to the point that we need to. And I do think that we need to curtail the support for the Saudi military adventurism in Yemen that has led to thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths. I do think that there are things that we need to do in order to show our displeasure, even curtailing some of the support to Saudi Arabia's military, but the fact that the Trump administration has given Mohammed bin Salman a pass for these human rights atrocities is just unconscionable. And I do think Vice President Biden, when he

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Transcript: Race in America: Athletes & Activism

MR. CAPEHART: Good afternoon. I'm Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live. Basketball player Renee Montgomery is a star athlete, a point guard for the Atlanta Dream. She is a two-time WNBA champion. But in June, Montgomery decided to take a time-out. Less than a month after the killing of George Floyd, Montgomery announced that she would sit out the 2020 WNBA season to focus on social justice reforms. "Moments equal momentum," she said in a tweet revealing her decision. So, what's her perspective, four months later? Well, let's find out. Renee Montgomery, welcome to Washington Post Life. MS. MONTGOMERY: Well, thank you for having me. My parents are super excited for me to be here with you. So, I had to get that in there early. MR. CAPEHART: Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad. Renee, your decision was momentous. We've been used to seeing professional athletes take stands or take a knee for racial justice reform or for social justice. But talk us through your decision to sit out the season and focus on social justice reform. MS. MONTGOMERY: Yeah. You know, it was difficult, and that, to me, missing basketball was the hardest part. You know, I knew that this was what I wanted to do, but it's just something that basketball has been what I've done since I was 10, and so it just made the decision that much more difficult. But I just thought about it. You know, I've talked to my parents and they told me to pray on it and just to sit on it. And so, it wasn't like I made the decision overnight. You know, and it wasn't as if things stopped. So even as I was starting to make the decision then Ahmaud Arbery got killed, and I'm sitting here in Georgia, living here. So, it just was thing after thing that kept happening, and then I just knew I was like, yeah, this is what I want to do this year. MR. CAPEHART: I love how your parents said, you know, to pray on it, because that's what my mother says as well. But, you know, this isn't just a decision to, "Oh, I'm not going to play basketball." This is your job, and your livelihood. So how much did that factor into your decision? MS. MONTGOMERY: Oh, it was huge. You know, it was even

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Transcript: Free to State: The New Free Speech

you look in the other key committee in the House of Representatives, which is Engineering and Commerce, the Consumer Protection Subcommittee, headed by Jan Schakowsky, doing fantastic work both in privacy and now in safety. Because one of the issues here is these tech products, the tech engineers are not held to any standard. If you think about in any other area of engineering, you're responsible for the work you create, except here. Here they're allowed to do massive damage without any liability, and that's going to change, thanks to the House of Representatives. On the Senate side, you have Senator Warren, you have Senator Markey, you have Senator Blumenthal. There's just lots and lots of Senators who work on this. Obviously, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, just yesterday filed an antitrust case against Google. State attorneys general across all 50 states are doing the same thing. The Europeans are doing the same thing. The great thing is you don't need to have harm to have what we love about the internet. In fact, it should be very easy to engineer out. It will not be as profitable as stealing people's data and using it to manipulate them. That's the most attractive business model ever created. But as Shoshana likes to say, like slavery we may well conclude that this is a business model that violates our most basic values as Americans. And I look forward to a future where we return to capitalism from a monopoly, and that we let 1,000 new flowers bloom in the tech industry, addressing all the needs that cannot be met in a world where surveillance capitalists have the ability to control everything that everyone does. So, I'm super, super bullish, much more so than I would have been just a few months ago. MR. DUFFY: I'm so glad I tuned in. You guys have been informative and provocative, and it's great to hear the optimism as well. But, unfortunately, we're out of time. Shoshana, Roger, thank you for joining us. MS. ZUBOFF: Thank you, Michael. MR. DUFFY: Thank you both. All right. And thank you all for tuning in. You can head to WashingtonPostLive.com for more information about upcoming guests, including former CIA Director John Brennan tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., Eastern time. Once again, I'm Michael Duffy for The Washington Post. Thank you for watching Washington Post Live. [End recorded session.]

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Trump should be mediating the dispute over the Nile dam. Instead he is inciting war.

ETHIOPIA, EGYPT and Sudan have been locked in an increasingly tense standoff over an enormous dam Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile river, upstream from its neighbors. Nearing completion, the $5 billion project is crucial to Ethiopia’s development plans. It would more than double electricity output, transforming the lives of 65 million people who now lack it. But Egypt and Sudan, which also depend on the Nile, fear they will be starved of water as the giant reservoir behind the dam is filled. This is a dispute that the United States ought to be helping to solve. Egypt and Ethiopia are long-standing U.S. allies and aid recipients, and relations between Washington and Khartoum are rapidly improving. Instead, President Trump is inciting war. Egypt, he proclaimed last week during a phone call with Sudanese officials, “will end up blowing up the dam . . . they have to do something.” Probably, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, whom Mr. Trump has called “my favorite dictator,” won’t heed Mr. Trump. But Mr. Trump’s rash and ignorant remarks underlined how his administration has squandered U.S. leverage and abdicated leadership in Africa and around the world while alienating important allies. The latest example is Ethiopia, a country of 100 million people whose prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for making peace with neighboring Eritrea. The United States initially tried to mediate among Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan earlier this year. Most experts believe a solution is possible: The countries must agree on how quickly the reservoir behind the dam is filled and how water supplies will be managed during future droughts. But rather than play honest broker, Mr. Trump sided with Mr. Sissi, a brutal but inept dictator whose regime blames Ethiopia for water shortages that are largely of Egypt’s own making. When Ethiopia walked away from the talks and began filling the reservoir, Mr. Trump ordered that $264 million in U.S. security and development assistance be withheld — which only hardened Mr. Abiy’s resistance to U.S. pressure. Now Mr. Trump is suggesting that Egypt go to war with a country that has been an important ally in fighting al-Qaeda and its east African affiliates. The Ethiopian foreign ministry diplomatically responded that “the incitement of war between Ethiopia and Egypt from a sitting U.S. president” does not reflect “the long-standing partnership and strategic alliance between Ethiopia and the United States.” Former

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Japan, world’s third largest economy, vows to become carbon neutral by 2050

percent by 2030, and nuclear power to between 20 and 22 percent, although it is expected to unveil new targets next year. “If Japan and the rest of the world are to avoid the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis, it is precisely this kind of action that the world needs,” said Sam Annesley, executive director of Greenpeace Japan. But Annesley said Japan needs to back up the announcement with a major shift toward renewable energy in its upcoming energy plan “if this rhetoric is to be made reality.” Arguing that the Fukushima disaster shows that nuclear energy “has no place in a green, sustainable future,” Annesley said Japan should aim to produce 50 percent of its electricity via renewable sources by 2030. “Anything less than 50 percent and Japan risks falling short of net zero, and, more importantly, risks driving the world above 1.5 degrees as per the Paris agreement,” he said, referring to the 2016 global pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate change. Economy Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said the target would not be easy to meet. He vowed to bring together all the country’s resources, including industry, government and academia, to achieve the goal while creating growth and business opportunities. “We will work with the business world so a virtuous cycle with the economy can be created,” he said at a news conference after Suga’s speech. The government sees hydrogen as a new source of energy, Kajiyama said, while also having high expectations for offshore wind power. Coal would be a feasible source of power only to the extent it could be offset by carbon capture, utilization and storage technology. In the past, his ministry has been a strong backer of coal and nuclear power, but observers say it may hold less influence in the Suga administration than it did under his immediate predecessor, Shinzo Abe. Still, a shift was already underway toward the end of the Abe administration in response to international pressure and gradually changing public opinion. Japan’s banks were scaling back financing for coal power abroad, and the government said it would “in principle” no longer subsidize the construction of coal-power thermal plants overseas. Fitch Solutions, a financial market-risk analysis company, said the announcement will significantly boost Japan’s electric and hydrogen-powered vehicle sector, which has been lagging behind those of Asian peers such as China, Hong Kong and South Korea. “For that

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How to fix our covid-19 testing debacle? Create a Biomedical National Guard.

around 1 million extra tests per day. That’s more tests lost than the total administered in the United States since the start of the pandemic. Let’s put this into perspective: There are hundreds of labs at MSU and Cornell that run the sort of molecular tests needed for covid-19 diagnosis on a daily basis. We have each deployed just one lab and are able to test at a capacity of 4,000 people per day at MSU and 7,000 at Cornell. But this is only a fraction of what could have been achieved from the beginning. Our country has the largest and most sophisticated concentration of biomedical labs in the world. The capacity of this network to rapidly develop testing tests and deliver highly accurate results is enormous. If a crisis-response regulating body — federally appointed and with representatives from all major government agencies — had had the ability to activate these scientists into emergency service early in the pandemic, we believe that we could have stopped the uncontrolled spread of the virus. A Biomedical National Guard, as we envision it, would create a corps of federally directed academic research institutions and scientists that volunteer to supply biomedical expertise and laboratory infrastructure, drastically decreasing our nation’s response time and exponentially supplementing our knowledge and resources during a disaster — not just the one we’re in, but the myriad biomedical crises we will undoubtedly face in our future. This capability will be needed again. Epidemics, bioterrorism, natural disasters, resource pollution, and biological, chemical, radiation, and nuclear emergencies account for nearly all of the roughly 45,000 federally declared disasters since 1953. The federal government also reports that 2010 to 2019 was a “landmark decade for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters,” all of which result in substantial biomedical needs. Beyond the headlines we most remember, the United States has consistent biomedical needs that frequently dwarf the nation’s available resources. Let’s play to our strengths. Let’s engage the highly skilled scientists, the cutting-edge equipment and the intellectual assets within our federally funded university research community to give our nation better tools in a crisis. Let’s start now. Read more Leana S. Wen: We finally know the Trump administration’s pandemic strategy: Surrender The Post’s View: Our leadership is hapless. But individuals can outsmart the virus. Eugene Robinson: Trump isn’t even trying to slow the virus’s spread David Moscrop: Canada is trying to secure millions of covid-19

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Kansas nursing home faces severe federal penalties after deadly coronavirus outbreak

The first hint that the novel coronavirus was tearing through the nursing home in rural Kansas arrived in a Facebook post this month. The Andbe Home was in the grips of “a full COVID outbreak,” administrator Megan Mapes wrote, “despite the precautions we have been taking since March.” But behind the walls of the facility, nursing home officials had failed to take the most basic measures to prevent the spread of the highly contagious virus after learning two residents were infected, according to a blistering report released Tuesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which resulted in severe penalties. By the time the viral firestorm had finished sweeping through the nursing home, all 63 residents were infected and at least 10 had died. Medicare moved Monday to terminate the Andbe Home from its program, cutting it off from federal dollars and imposing thousands of dollars in fines. Government inspectors found that infected residents were separated from their healthy roommates by little more than a privacy sheet. Communal dining continued for two days. Multiple staff members failed to wear masks — even after the outbreak took hold. In an email Tuesday to The Washington Post, the nursing home administrator disputed some of the findings outlined in the report and stood by the response to the outbreak, saying the facility had immediately quarantined infected residents and that staff wore full personal protective equipment, including goggles, masks and gloves. “This is a terrible virus, but I am proud of how our staff has battled COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic, coming to work every day under extenuating circumstances, and caring for all of our residents,” Mapes wrote. “I am also proud of and thankful for the mutual support between Andbe Home and our community during trying times for everyone.” The Medicare report, however, said the facility’s failures had “placed all residents in immediate jeopardy by the spread of Covid-19 to all residents.” The virus’s rampage through the nursing home came amid a surge of infections in Kansas’s Norton County, which led the nation in per capita case increases between Oct. 12 and Oct. 19 and ranked second this week, according to a Post analysis. Before Oct. 13, the county near the Nebraska border had been spared virus-related deaths. Now, there are clusters of cases at the nursing home, where 55 of 70 staff members tested positive for the virus, as

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Instead of learning from South Korea’s coronavirus example, Trump is lying about it

stereotype-laden misrepresentation of South Korea’s response. “They had an explosion of cases at one megachurch and then they used their military and police powers to lock down that church, arrest everybody who was in contact with individuals in that church,” Azar told CNN on Oct. 23, responding to a Columbia University study that estimated that 215,000 U.S. deaths might have been avoided if the United States had followed South Korea’s approach. South Korea was successful, Azar said, due to “their significant lockdown efforts, things that fit them within their cultural and legal context but would likely not fly here in the United States.” Azar was wrong in two ways. First of all, as South Korea’s largest newspaper pointed out, the country’s military has provided only medical staff support. South Korea’s success has nothing to do with some sort of despotic Asian behavior and everything to do with sensible policies. These include, as the Wall Street Journal noted, aggressive early testing, contact tracing and mask-wearing programs aided by clear government direction and community mobilization. Azar is “simply inventing an alternate reality about how the South Korean government responded to the outbreak,” Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me. He added that lawmakers repeatedly urged Azar to pursue precisely the same policies during a series of meetings in January and February. “While President Trump was denying the problem and praising what a great job Xi Jinping had done, the South Korean government was prioritizing the health and safety of its people by instituting widespread testing and tracing, something that should be commended.” It’s true that South Korea’s outbreak was exacerbated by the irresponsible actions of one megachurch, but it’s not true that everyone connected to church members was arrested. One leader was arrested in August after flagrant violations of public health restrictions. And while some contact tracing programs in South Korea were more invasive than what Americans are used to, that’s not due to their “cultural” context. “South Koreans don’t comply with invasive contact tracing because they are Asian, they comply with it because they have been through pandemics before and they understand the severity of the danger,” said Jenny Town, a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan policy research organization. Trump and Azar’s maligning of South Korea is just one aspect of this administration’s overall mistreatment of South Korea and mismanagement of

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Hospitals in nearly every region report a flood of covid-19 patients

The goal was to prod the public to follow practices such as mask-wearing to limit viral spread, according to Jake Henry Jr., president and chief executive of Saint Francis. “What we’re seeing is not sustainable,” Henry said Monday. He said exhausted medical workers get discouraged when they see people in public who are not wearing masks. The city of Tulsa has a mask ordinance — signs are posted outside businesses reminding customers — but suburban jurisdictions do not, nor does the state. “We’d just like to get everybody going in the same direction,” Henry said. The pandemic, and President Trump’s handling of it, have emerged as the defining issues of the presidential race, and polling suggests that the crisis is a major drag on the president’s prospects for a second term. Hospitalizations are rising sharply in three electoral battleground states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Milwaukee, a field hospital has been established at the state fairgrounds to treat overflow covid-19 patients. Ohio, a traditional bellwether state in presidential elections, joins the other three battlegrounds on a list of the 10 states with the greatest increases in covid-19 hospitalizations since Sept. 30, according to The Post’s data. Ohio set a new high Monday for hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic. Seven other states Monday also set records: Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Montana tied its record. In West Virginia, Clay Marsh, an intensive-care physician who serves as the state’s coronavirus czar, said many people who postponed elective surgeries in the spring, during the initial outbreak, are now taking up some of the hospital capacity. Officials are closely watching the high rate of new infections and know that at some point it might be necessary to stop doing elective surgeries and other procedures that are not urgent, Marsh said. A midsummer spike in infections affected mainly younger adults, but much of the recent surge has been in older people, Marsh said. He said he believes there has been a gradual spread from younger people to their elders, including community spread in houses of worship and in nursing homes. “We’re seeing that covid positivity is moving toward an older population, and we have a very vulnerable older population,” Marsh said. “That’s the population we’ve always been very nervous about.” In Michigan, hospitalizations have jumped 80 percent in recent weeks, causing particular concern in the more rural

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Hospitals in nearly every region report a flood of covid-19 patients

high Monday for hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic. Seven other states Monday also set records: Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Montana tied its record. In West Virginia, Clay Marsh, an intensive-care physician who serves as the state’s coronavirus czar, said many people who postponed elective surgeries in the spring, during the initial outbreak, are now taking up some of the hospital capacity. Officials are closely watching the high rate of new infections and know that at some point it might be necessary to stop doing elective surgeries and other procedures that are not urgent, Marsh said. A midsummer spike in infections affected mainly younger adults, but much of the recent surge has been in older people, Marsh said. He said he believes there has been a gradual spread from younger people to their elders, including community spread in houses of worship and in nursing homes. “We’re seeing that covid positivity is moving toward an older population, and we have a very vulnerable older population,” Marsh said. “That’s the population we’ve always been very nervous about.” In Michigan, hospitalizations have jumped 80 percent in recent weeks, causing particular concern in the more rural parts of the state, where some hospitals “are being inundated with patients,” said Gary Roth, chief medical officer for the Michigan Health and Hospital Association. “Are we getting concerned regarding the increasing numbers, the surging of patients coming into the hospitals? Absolutely,” he said. At hospitals across the state, the greatest worry is about health-care workers who have only just begun to recover from the stress of the first coronavirus surge. “One thing that we’ve noticed, particularly in the areas that got hit hard by covid, is it caused a lot of scar tissue for our health-care workers,” said David Wood, chief medical officer at Beaumont Health in southeast Michigan, where hospitals neared capacity during the spring. “Seeing the amount of death in such a short period of time, by what seemed like an entity that we had no defenses against, has made it more difficult to get the health-care workers necessary to want to come back and be back in that same position.” At University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City, the hospital had about 20 covid-19 patients at the end of August. The numbers started rising three to four weeks ago, with 52 covid-19 patients Monday, said

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President Trump falsely declares coronavirus is ‘ending’ as virus rates spike and financial markets dip

line is, Donald Trump is the worst possible president, the worst possible person, to try to lead us through this pandemic,” Biden said. “Either he just doesn’t have any idea what to do or just doesn’t care.” Biden condemned Trump’s recent claim that medical professionals are inflating the number of covid-19 cases to “get more money.” “What in the hell is the matter with this man?” Biden exclaimed, noting what he said were the deaths of more than 1,000 health-care workers due to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. “Mr. President, you have to have a little bit of shame. Just a little bit of shame. Because people are dying.” Biden said he plans travel in the coming week to Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Georgia and possibly other states. “I am not overconfident about anything,” he said, when asked about his campaign schedule. “But the big difference about us, the reason it doesn’t look like we are traveling, is we are not putting on superspreaders. We are doing what we are doing here — everybody is wearing a mask and trying as best we can to be socially distanced.” Biden’s latest attacks on Trump’s handling of the virus stemmed from a television interview Sunday in which White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said, “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” Meadows expanded on his remarks Monday by mocking Biden’s purposeful efforts to wear a mask in public, a measure public health experts say could save more than 100,000 American lives in coming months. “The only person waving the white flag along with his white mask is Joe Biden,” Meadows told reporters traveling with the president. “We’re going to defeat the virus. We’re not going to control it. We will try to contain it as best we can.” That argument was rejected Monday by Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brett Giroir, a political appointee, who contradicted Meadows in a call with reporters. “I think we can control the pandemic,” he said. “I want to be clear that what we have done, what the American people have done, has been able to put out very significant outbreaks.” He encouraged Americans to keep their distance from each other, wear masks when they can’t stay more than six feet apart and frequently wash their hands. Trump has been inconsistent in his embrace of that advice. At an event in the Oval Office on

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Americans’ debts are mounting, putting new focus on Biden’s role opposing bankruptcy protections

27 percent fewer filings in the first 10 years after the law took effect than the decade before it, even despite a wave of bankruptcies triggered by the Great Recession. Researchers attribute the decline to a drop in filings from low-income households and worry they will not seek protections now because of the difficulty of filing. “Too few people file for bankruptcy compared with the number of people who are in debt or [facing] collection or struggling with debt,” said Jialan Wang, assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who co-authored a recent paper looking at the decrease in bankruptcy filings so far during the pandemic. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 mandated a mountain of new paperwork, including a means test and a credit counseling course. As a result, attorney fees shot up. The cost of an average Chapter 7 bankruptcy rose from about $600 in 2004 to about $1,000 in 2008, researchers at the University of Maine found. Now, bankruptcy experts say, the cost approaches $2,000. Without the ability to rid themselves of debt that bankruptcy affords, low-income debtors suffer larger drops in credit and become more vulnerable to litigation. A 2015 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that people who file for bankruptcy achieve credit scores 40 to 80 points higher than those in a similar financial position who don’t seek bankruptcy. Todd J. Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University who advocated for the 2005 bill, said the decline in filings after the legislation suggests it succeeded in stopping people from taking advantage of the system. “Prior to the reform, bankruptcy filings went up and up regardless of the business cycle,” Zywicki said. “After bankruptcy reform, bankruptcy filings followed the business cycle.” However, University of Pittsburgh economics professor Stefania Albanesi estimates that a large number of indebted Americans who should have filed for bankruptcy during the Great Recession didn’t because the law created new barriers to doing so, exacerbating the financial distress facing some of the country’s poorest households. Albanesi, who co-authored the New York Fed study, expects another wave of “missing bankruptcies” over the coming months and years. Beginning in the 1990s, business sectors including banks, credit card issuers, department stores and mortgage lenders had been pushing for changes to bankruptcy laws, arguing that the rules allowed individuals to recklessly run up

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Paralympian Blake Leeper, ruled ineligible for Olympics, says he’s ‘baffled’ by the decision

runners.” “The problem is, the population that created this formula, when you input my numbers, if you throw that into a formula that was only Caucasians and Asians, I’m going to come out on the back end,” Leeper said. “There are too many variables they didn’t consider.” In theory, after the ruling Leeper could still compete against able-bodied runners with shorter prosthetics. Athletically, Leeper said, it is not a feasible possibility. “If you switched a couple inches — a couple centimeters — it would throw you off,” Leeper said. “I’ve had hours and hours of muscle memory and configurations of running at this height. I’ve been running at this height for 10 years.” Leeper’s height, Kessler said, would have fit World Athletics’ MASH standard before a 2018 rule change. “To suddenly ask him to learn how to re-run at an elite level, it’s not a realistic ask,” Kessler said. “And they know that.” Even in losing the right to compete with his current prosthetics, Leeper landed a legal triumph for other double-amputee runners. At the time Pistorius competed at the Olympics, World Athletics (then known as IAAF) had to prove a disabled runner’s prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage against able-bodied runners. In 2015, it made a small but crucial rule change that shifted the burden: A disabled runner had to prove his prosthetics did not grant an advantage. Leeper’s lawyers argued before CAS that the burden should be on World Athletics. CAS upheld that portion of Leeper’s appeal, which will make it easier for double-amputee runners who want to compete against able-bodied runners in the future. In a statement, Leeper’s lawyers called it “a very important victory for all disabled athletes.” But it did not help Leeper win his appeal. Kessler hopes to take Leeper’s case to the Supreme Court of Switzerland, which can override a CAS arbitration ruling because CAS is based in the country. He believes a decision could come in time for Leeper to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, rescheduled for July 2021. Leeper has not given up. If his final challenge loses in court, he will still compete in the Tokyo Paralympics. He is clinging to hope that it will not come to that. When he speaks to coaches and other acquaintances about his situation, he finds inspiration. “Hearing the irritation in their voices and how crazy they think the situation is, it gives me

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The Health 202: President Trump's predecessors have a mixed record of prepping for a pandemic

amid an outbreak of covid-19 among his staff. While Pence declined to come to the confirmation vote, he has rejected calls to quarantine, visiting Minneapolis on Monday to campaign for Trump. “Months after it raced in successive waves along the nation’s coasts and through the Sun Belt, it is reaching deep into its final frontier — the most sparsely populated states and counties, where distance from others has long been part of the appeal and this year had appeared to be a buffer against a deadly communicable disease,” The Post’s Karin Brulliard writes. Hospitalization rates are straining rural health care in Montana, where active cases have doubled since the beginning of the month. Meanwhile, the National Guard has been deployed to Wyoming to help with contact tracing. Even rural villages in Alaska are seeing unprecedented increases. Some of these areas dodged the early waves of infection, giving them time to stock up on protective equipment and testing supplies. “But with that delay came another risk, others say. As the virus rolls through regions that for months felt relatively sheltered from the disease but not the broader effects of shutdowns and shortages, there is concern that weariness will stymie efforts to stunt the spread,” Brulliard reports. Coronavirus cases are surging across the United States, with new infections nationwide surpassing 80,000 for the first time ever on Friday. Around 40,000 Americans are hospitalized, straining local health systems and renewing talks about rationing care. “At least 27 political appointees have exited the embattled Health and Human Services department since the start of the Covid-19 crisis in February, according to a POLITICO review, and senior leaders are bracing for dozens more officials to depart swiftly if President Donald Trump loses re-election,” Politico’s Dan Diamond reports. An uptick in departures among political staff is common in the lead up to an election, but the people who have left the agency in recent months have been unusually prominent, including the Centers for Disease Control’s chief of staff and the Food and Drug Administration’s top policy official. Staffers are vying for jobs across Washington, and more may leave if Trump loses. “Such a wave of departures would leave only a shell staff shepherding the department through a uniquely challenging winter of coronavirus outbreaks and drug and vaccine authorizations until Inauguration Day on Jan. 20,” Dan writes. Many officials report low morale at HHS and its agencies, the

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World champion sprinter Christian Coleman is banned from Tokyo Olympics for missed drug tests

competition pending a hearing. Coleman did not contest that he missed a test in January 2019. He argued that a filing failure in April 2019 and a missed test in December were unfair and owed to mistakes by the AIU. An arbiter heard the case Oct. 9. When AIU announced its suspension in June, Coleman posted a lengthy note on Twitter claiming he had been wronged by the system. He said he was five minutes away from his apartment while Christmas shopping when a tester showed up to his house Dec. 9. Coleman claimed the tester made no attempt to reach him, and he was unaware the tester had come to his house until the next day. But an AIU spokesman at the time said athletes must be prepared for a drug tester to arrive randomly and that testers are instructed not to call athletes. In the arbiter’s report, two testers said they arrived at Coleman’s home in Lexington, Ky., at 7:15 p.m. Dec. 9. Coleman had indicated he would be home that evening, and by rule he had a one-hour window to be tested. The testers said they knocked loudly every 10 minutes for an hour. Coleman insisted that could not be true, because he could remember watching the 8:15 kickoff of a “Monday Night Football” game between the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles. The report, though, cited receipts that disputed Coleman having been at his house during the one-hour window. Coleman made a purchase at Chipotle at 7:53 p.m. and bought 16 items at Walmart at 8:22, according to the AIU report. “It would have been simply impossible for him to purchase a chipotle [sic] at 7:53 (the store being 5-9 minutes from his residence), drive home, park the car, go into his residence, eat the chipotle [sic], then watch the kick-off of the football game which only started at 8:15, and thereafter go out again in his car, drive to the store, and pick up 16 items at the Walmart Supercenter so as to be able to pay for them by 8:22 p.m.,” the report reads. While Coleman complained that the testers never called him, AIU rules do not stipulate athletes must be called if not home. Raphaël Roux, an AIU manager for out-of-competition testing, told the arbiter that the AIU instructed testers not to call Coleman because he had missed four tests previously and that

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Baltimore museum halts sales of three paintings, including Warhol’s ‘Last Supper,’ just hours before auction

Future was developed to take action — right now, in this moment. Our vision and our goals have not changed. It will take us longer to achieve them, but we will do so through all means at our disposal. That is our mission and we stand behind it.” The museum’s board of trustees approved the action Wednesday after emergency meetings requested by six trustees who worried that the “long-standing community of the BMA support is being irreparably harmed” as opposition to the plan mounted. Since the sales were announced Oct. 2, the BMA has faced growing criticism and community activism, including the call for a state investigation, the resignation of high-profile trustees and the rescinding of $50 million in planned gifts. The museum stood by its decision until hours before the Sotheby’s auction was to begin. The move came after a statement from the Association of Art Museum Directors, a national oversight organization, that clarified the intent of an April move that loosened deaccessioning rules. That temporary measure was “intended to assist museums facing a financial crisis due to the impacts of the pandemic, between April 2020 and April 2022,” the AAMD said Tuesday. The statement did not mention the BMA. “The resolutions were not put in place to incentivize deaccessioning, nor to permit museums to achieve other, non-collection-specific, goals,” wrote Brent Benjamin, president of the AAMD board of trustees and director of the St. Louis Art Museum. “I recognize that many of our institutions have long-term needs — or ambitious goals — that could be supported, in part, by taking advantage of these resolutions to sell art. But however serious those long-term needs or meritorious those goals, the current position of AAMD is that the funds for those must not come from the sale of deaccessioned art.” Fifteen past presidents of the AAMD sent a letter Wednesday to the BMA board in support of Benjamin’s statement, and urged the museum to reconsider the sale. BMA Director Christopher Bedford has repeatedly stated that his museum is not in financial difficulty but faces a moral imperative to address systemic racism and injustice. The museum planned to spend $10 million to acquire art by women and artists of color and $500,000 for immediate equity measures. The remaining $54.4 million would go into an endowment, and the $2 million to $2.5 million in annual interest would support programs to improve equity, diversity and

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Man fatally shot in Northwest Washington

A man was fatally shot Tuesday night in Northwest Washington, police said. The incident unfolded around 8:51 p.m. in the 2800 block of Georgia Avenue NW near Columbia Road in the Columbia Heights area, according to D.C. police. Authorities said officers responded to a report of an aggravated assault, and when they arrived they found a man inside a home, suffering from a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead on the scene. The victim was later identified as Glenn Wright, 25, of Northeast Washington. Police said they are looking for a suspect or suspects and are trying to figure out a motive. The shooting comes as homicides in the District are up more than 15 percent compared with the same time last year. There have been more than 280 homicides this year in the District, Maryland and Virginia, according to a tracking done by The Washington Post. Of those, more than 160 have been in the District, mostly in the Southeast and Northeast parts.

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What’s missing from pandemic-era travel? Plenty.

temporarily. The all-you-can-eat hotel breakfast bar — often a showcase of low-quality, unhealthy food — is largely gone. But some travel companies have taken advantage of reduced customer expectations to cut amenities and services unnecessarily, customers say. Ben Julius is unhappy with the service cutbacks. He understands why a hotel might close its buffet, but he believes that companies are using the pandemic as an excuse to reduce service and save money. “I hope that travel brands don’t take too much advantage of this situation,” says Julius, who lives in Tel Aviv and founded a website about travel to Israel. “We need to keep the standards high and provide an even higher level of service to make people comfortable traveling again.” Of course, some of the elements missing from the travel equation are less tangible than all-you-can-eat waffles. “The freedom to go anywhere,” says Shaun Taylor, owner of Moriti Safaris, a specialty safari company based in South Africa. He is not talking about the obvious — the country-by-country restrictions that are keeping many of his visitors home. Even if you could get to Africa, you can’t just wing it once you are on the ground. “People have to carefully choose which attractions to visit,” he says. “The more popular ones are crowded and will have strict attendance limits in place.” Another thing that’s gone: spontaneity. “It’s nonexistent,” says Chloe Gosiewski, a marketing executive from Camberley, England. “Everything has to be planned in advance.” She loves staying in hostels, where she can share a room and get to know the other guests. But the pandemic has removed opportunities to meet random travelers. What was once free-form is now structured and compartmentalized. Perhaps the most important thing we have lost is the ability to connect. “I miss people,” says Thomas Swick, the Fort Lauderdale-based author of “The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them.” “Now, after traveling thousands of miles, we’re still supposed to keep our distance. Gone is the handshake, the touch on the arm — the small gestures that make a traveler feel welcome. Not to mention the smiles lost behind face masks.” Michael Brein, a Bainbridge Island, Wash., psychologist who specializes in travel issues, agrees. Brein says travelers are missing the nonverbal cues that allow them to connect. It is these small interactions, he says, that make travel memorable. “Our biggest loss,” Brein says, “is the human connection.”

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Local Digest: Man fatally shot in Northwest Washington

THE DISTRICT A man was fatally shot Tuesday night in Northwest Washington, police said. The incident unfolded around 8:51 p.m. in the 2800 block of Georgia Avenue NW near Columbia Road in the Columbia Heights area, D.C. police said. Authorities said officers responded to a report of an aggravated assault, and when they arrived they found a man inside a home, suffering from a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead on the scene. The victim was later identified as Glenn Wright, 25, of Northeast Washington. Police said they are looking for a suspect or suspects and are trying to figure out a motive. The shooting comes as homicides in the District are up more than 15 percent compared with the same time last year. There have been more than 280 homicides this year in the District, Maryland and Virginia, according to tracking done by The Washington Post. Of those, more than 160 have been in the District, mostly in the Southeast and Northeast parts. — Dana Hedgpath MARYLAND With the combination of a Dec. 30 deadline and a pandemic likely to extend into 2021, county leaders in the state are asking for additional time to spend federal coronavirus relief money. Executives said they are thinking about a covid-19 resurgence and the regular flu season as well as the continuing health and economic problems that constituents and businesses could face in 2021, the Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday. But with additional relief stalled in Congress, counties acknowledge time is running out to spend the roughly $240 million left from the federal Cares Act passed in March. After announcing a $250 million disbursement from the state’s Rainy Day account to fund relief programs meant to bolster the economy during the pandemic, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said last week that counties should consider using some of their federal money to match state efforts. Hogan said about two-thirds of the money distributed to 19 of Maryland’s 24 counties remains unspent. He said that unspent money must be returned to the U.S. Treasury. Federal legislation has been introduced that would push the spending deadline back one year to Dec. 31, 2021. — Associated Press VIRGINIA A judge ruled Wednesday that Virginia elections officials cannot count absentee ballots with missing or illegible postmarks unless they can confirm the date of mailing through a bar code, granting an injunction requested by a conservative legal group. The Public Interest

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How investors are coming up with the green to save the ocean blue

is an effort to trace the reproductive routes of coral to better inform future rehabilitation efforts. Researcher Jazzy Taberer led a $30,000 study tracking the habits of sicklefin lemon sharks, a vulnerable species in the Indo-Pacific that lives near coral reefs and within mangrove forests. The latter is crucial since mangroves have more resilience against a changing climate than corals do. Identifying the sharks’ preferred habitat during their life cycle boosts the odds of saving the species. “They have a chance,” explained Taberer, a science coordinator with conservation group GVI. “They have a fighting chance.” On the small, rock-strewn island of Curieuse, the grant helped her team catch 20 shark pups, affix acoustic trackers and collect mountains of data on this little-studied species. Securing such funding from other sources “would be exceptionally hard,” she noted. Other investors have gotten involved since the initial deal. In 2018, the World Bank helped the Seychelles issue the world’s first “sovereign blue bond” — a slightly different instrument that serves as a new loan — for $15 million. Prudential Financial, Nuveen and Calvert Impact Capital, which each manage billions of dollars globally, provided $5 million apiece. “The belief is that having a healthier ocean is going to make the government of Seychelles a healthier economy,” said Jenn Pryce, Calvert’s chief executive. “If it succeeds, the impact is huge. The Seychelles has a sustainable economy forever, in theory.” The Nature Conservancy’s effort is only expanding, ambitiously so. Though Weary departed in October — after 22 years, he says he wanted to explore new opportunities for his expertise — he left behind blueprints for a massive scale-up. This winter, the organization hopes to ink the first deals toward its target of generating $1.6 billion for ocean protection around the world. It aspires to negotiate debt-restructuring arrangements, funded by blue bonds, in 20 coastal and island nations within the next five years. It has hired Credit Suisse as its conduit to Wall Street. And to try to reassure those who haven’t previously viewed reefs or sharks as investable assets, the Conservancy plans to combine each bond with an insurance policy provided by the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., a new federal agency created to help U.S. investors compete with Chinese banks abroad. The combination will transform the bonds into a “super safe” opportunity with real impact, Weary said. “There shouldn’t be any difficulty finding investors.” Read more:

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The Daily 202: Amid coronavirus, Democrats look for new ways to juice turnout among irregular voters

that says an election should be delayed if a major-party candidate dies, a designation the Pot Party earned by getting more than 5 percent in a state auditor's race. Republicans have sued to postpone the election until next year. Democrats have said it's unconstitutional to do that in a federal election. Three federal judges last week sided with Democrats, allowing the election to go on as scheduled. The Supreme Court opted last night not to take up an appeal by the GOP. “As the Dodgers celebrated their championship on the field, many of them wearing masks, one key figure was missing: Third baseman Justin Turner, the longest-tenured Dodgers position player, had been pulled before the seventh inning after his latest coronavirus test came back positive, a result that arrived midgame. He was immediately put in isolation but was later spotted on the field celebrating with his teammates,” Dave Sheinin and Scott Allen report.“It was the first positive test for a player in more than six weeks, and coming in the middle of the final game of the World Series — it was perhaps a fitting conclusion to a season that at times seemed endangered by the spread of the virus. It also appears baseball barely avoided a messy outcome had the series been extended to a seventh game. And for a while Tuesday night, Game 7 seemed to be a strong possibility. The fact the series never got there was due in large part to the stunning and highly questionable pitching move the Rays made in the bottom of the sixth inning, when they pulled ace Blake Snell from a magnificent performance — a move that backfired immediately when the next two Dodgers hitters, Mookie Betts and Corey Seager, gave Los Angeles the lead." “Peter Berkowitz, the director of policy planning at the State Department, met with senior officials at 10 Downing Street and the Foreign Office in London, and with officials in Budapest and Paris earlier this month. One official said that Berkowitz’s mask-wearing and social distancing practices were lax during the trip and that U.S. embassy staff in Europe expressed some concerns before the trip about him traveling during the pandemic,” John Hudson reports. “Following Berkowitz’s visit to London, British officials have started being more selective about approval of American delegations, officials said. They have postponed an upcoming trip by Elliott Abrams, the U.S. special envoy for Iran

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Study abroad programs are letting U.S. students travel again. But it’s not without challenges.

good [coronavirus] guidance, whether they have good testing capability.” Liability issues and logistical concerns may outweigh the positive elements of studying abroad. University of Montana professor Stephen Yoshimura says there is no way he could promise students a fruitful educational experience if he took them overseas at this time. However, when students ask him for advice on studying abroad or request letters of recommendations for study abroad programs, he doesn’t discourage them. “I think everybody should be able to make their own decisions,” he says. “I don’t think that the pandemic situation alone is a reason to not travel, but it is a reason to be exceptionally cautious and mindful of the probable complications of it.” On a recent webinar Yoshimura tuned in to for teachers hosted by EF Tours, a company that runs study abroad programs, the audience was told that travel insurance can be a way to account for coronavirus worries. Students may feel more comfortable having travel insurance to cover things like getting sick abroad, having travel plans canceled or needing to be flown home for care. Jeremy Murchland, the president of the travel insurance and benefit management company Seven Corners, says that while business has been down during the pandemic, study-abroad-related business is doing better than that of general leisure travel. His company created an insurance plan called Liaison Student Plus that covers coronavirus concerns for students and faculty who are traveling abroad to study or work. Before buying any travel insurance, Murchland says travel abroad customers should call a company to discuss what plan they need and exactly what is covered, as policies can be lengthy and intricate. One thing that will not be covered: travel guilt. Ferrari says that even though the experience has been a dream realized, having such incredible happiness during a dark time in history can be conflicting. “2020 has been so challenging and so awful in so many ways for so many people that it almost feels not right to be having that kind of joyful moment,” Ferrari says. “I’m trying to share it with people back home and contribute back to this community in some way.” Read more: A travel group report says flying is safe. The doctor whose research it cited says not so fast. Southwest will start filling middle seats on flights beginning Dec. 1 Owed a refund on an international flight? Here’s how to get it.

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Afghan man arrested in 2008 kidnapping of American journalist David Rohde

defender in the case, Najibullah reported that he works as an importer and has homes in Afghanistan and Dubai. He also said he is married with seven children. At one point, Najibullah spoke out of turn asking the judge through a Pashto interpreter if he could be released “by bond,” prompting the judge to call a recess so he could present the question to Mark Gombiner, his Federal Defenders attorney. Gombiner declined to make a bid for bail but said he may consider doing so later. Rohde, now an editor with the New Yorker magazine, made a daring escape from the compound along with another of the hostages, Afghan journalist Tahir Ludin. The third captive, Asadullah Mangal, stayed behind. Rohde wrote a detailed account of their time in captivity months after he returned home. The two other suspects, Zada and Timor Shah, are named in the indictment, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan did not say whether their whereabouts are known. Authorities say the suspects forced Rohde and the other captives to make videos in which they begged for help. In one video, Rohde pleaded for his life while Najibullah aimed a machine gun at his face, officials said. The abductors asked Rohde’s family for money in exchange for their release, and pushed the U.S. government to release Taliban prisoners, according to the indictment. Rohde, who in the 1990s was briefly held captive while on a reporting assignment in the Balkans, did not respond to a request for comment. In a 2010 interview, he said the videos were intended to make his family feel responsible for his abduction. “I was never beaten or physically abused,” he said. “. . . But my captors terrorized my family. . . . I told my captors about my reporting in Bosnia, which helped expose the mass executions of thousands of Muslims. I hoped they would see me as an independent journalist and release me. Instead, they thought, ‘You must be worth a lot of money.’ ” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said in a statement that the Justice Department was committed to seeking justice for Rohde and other journalists facing the dangers of covering conflict internationally. “Journalists risk their lives bringing us news from conflict zones, and no matter how much time may pass, our resolve to find and hold accountable those who target and harm them and

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SpaceX swapping out a pair of rocket engines weeks ahead of next astronaut launch

SpaceX said Wednesday that it is swapping out two engines on the rocket scheduled to fly a cadre of astronauts to the International Space Station next month after clogged valves caused a last-second abort on a different Falcon 9 rocket earlier in October. The abort of the mission for the U.S. Space Force prompted SpaceX to inspect its fleet of rockets and led to the discovery of a similar problem in two of the engines of the rocket now scheduled to take three NASA astronauts and one from Japan to the space station Nov. 14. SpaceX had delayed the launch to find the problem. NASA said it is confident that the problem has been fixed, but that there are still several data reviews to come before the launch. The agency said it would authorize SpaceX to fly the mission only if officials were confident the rocket is safe. “I think we see a pretty good path to get to flight, and we’ll fly when we’re ready,” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, told reporters in a news conference Wednesday. “We’re certainly taking the time, and the SpaceX team is committed to flying when we’re ready as well.” The mission for the Space Force was aborted just two seconds before launch after sensors detected an over pressurization inside a couple of engine nozzles. SpaceX crews could find nothing wrong with the engines on the pad, so they took them to a testing facility in Texas, where they discovered that two tiny valve lines were clogged with a lacquer-like substance used to prevent corrosion, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability. The problem forced the engines to start prematurely, but the rocket’s computers detected the problem and forced the shutdown autonomously. SpaceX had to delay a couple of other launches recently because of mechanical issues, and Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, said on Twitter he was going to Cape Canaveral to conduct a “broad review” of operations there. “No question, rocketry is tough and requires a lot of attention to detail,” Koenigsmann said. “Rockets are humbling. Every day I work with them, it’s always a challenge and it’s always difficult. And you have to be super diligent and on your toes to get this right.” If the rocket had fired, he said, it would have been what’s called a “hard start,” which he

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A Maryland family battled covid-19 at the same time as Trump. It devastated them.

“I’ve been teaching for 16 years,” said her co-teacher, Alan Konlande. “She had different tricks that I had never seen before.” Carol was careful to wear a mask and sanitize her hands, Wilson said. But one day in mid-September she called him to say she wasn’t feeling well and was going to get tested for the coronavirus. She was shocked when it came back positive, he said. Carol told Konlande she had the virus but kept teaching, even as she coughed and sniffled through class. “Our last day working together on Zoom, I just noticed when she turned her head, she didn’t look well,” Konlande recalled. After he repeatedly urged her to take time off, she reluctantly agreed. On Sept. 24, her students emailed her get-well cards. “Dear Ms. Coates, I hope you feel better!” one girl wrote next to a cartoon drawing of a teacher in front of a chalkboard. “We miss you and hope to see you next monday.” “I am so glad i took your advice and took off,” she wrote Konlande that night. “I slept for like 3 days straight. Fever, aches and chills no appetite.” “Keep resting,” he replied. “This is no joke.” “I realize now how serious it is,” she answered, adding that she felt “a little better” and was hoping to return the next week. Friends and family members left food at the top of the basement stairs, including bottles of her favorite orange juice, Florida’s Natural. Two floors up, Dale was also struggling. She had long suffered from arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, her son said. But now she was so exhausted she could hardly get out of bed. She, too, had tested positive and stayed home from work. Her fiance, Ernest Davis, brought her food and slept on the floor next to her bed. On Sunday, Sept. 27, Dale was so weak that Davis called 911. Her family watched from a distance as she was loaded into an ambulance and taken to Anne Arundel Medical Center. Stuck in the basement, Carol couldn’t even say goodbye. “Is mom back yet?” she texted her brother a few hours later. Doctors were going to keep her at the hospital on fluids and oxygen before releasing her, he replied. “Wow,” she wrote. When Wilson chatted with Carol on FaceTime that evening, she looked as healthy as she had in a couple of days. She was

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What school looks like now — in striking pictures from around the world

The hope last spring was that the massive disruption to schooling around the world caused by the coronavirus pandemic would not last long — and by fall 2020 classrooms would be packed with children again, like they have been in the past. That didn’t happen. Virtually nowhere are things back to normal, meaning before covid-19. The pandemic has persisted, and, so in the United States and around the globe, students are going to school in ways they never did before until this year — in their homes; outside; in classrooms wearing masks or not wearing masks, and sitting apart from each other or very close; and sometimes behind plexiglass barriers. Some kids are in school a few hours or a few days a week and spend the rest of the time home, while others never go in, or go in five days a week. Teachers sometimes work from otherwise empty classrooms, giving remote lessons to students not allowed back in school buildings because of covid-19 rates. The statistics are grim: There have been more than 43 million cases of covid-19 worldwide with more than 1.1 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, there have been more than 8.5 million cases of covid-19 — more than half a million in the last week — and more than 225,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fears of learning loss are high. Millions of children in the world’s poorest countries have not been back to school since the pandemic started and aren’t expected to ever return, especially girls. In the United States, concerns are highest for the neediest students, those who live in poverty, have special needs and are English Language Learners — but month after month of disrupted education will affect every child. As coronavirus cases are rising in most U.S. states and many countries, educators are still trying to find ways to teach kids. Here are some pictures from around the world that show what school looks like in October 2020 in the grip of the worst pandemic in more than 100 years.

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Can Google searches predict where coronavirus cases will soon emerge?

or “loss of taste” right before the first surge in confirmed cases. The peak in searches came about 12 days before the peak in case totals. An important note: Loss of taste and smell weren’t added to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s list of likely symptoms until the end of April. In New Jersey, which was also among the hardest-hit early states, the pattern is the same. You can also see that the recent uptick in the state was matched by a slight increase in searches. The first state in which community spread of the virus was confirmed was California. That state has seen two surges, a small one in the spring and another as part of the summer’s surge focused on Sun Belt states. Again, there’s an increase in searches for loss of taste and smell shortly before the increase in cases. The Google data even seems to reflect the double-peak the state went through, though that may be an artifact of the data. One of the states hit hardest over the summer was Arizona. The state hit its peak in searches for loss of taste and smell shortly before the state hit its peak in new cases. More recently, an increase in new cases was preceded by an increase in searches for those terms. Notice that Arizona had a spike in searches for sensory loss in the spring, mirroring the national data. (States that were harder hit at the outset of the pandemic were also ones where more testing was deployed, helping to explain why there’s less difference between Google searches and cases in New York and New Jersey.) So did Florida, where the summer’s surge was also preceded by a spike in Google searches. In Texas, both the summer surge and its more recent increase in new cases trails increases in searches for losses of taste and smell. This pattern doesn’t hold universally, it’s important to note. In Wisconsin, the recent surge in cases actually preceded an uptick in searches about sensory loss. In other states, the Google search data are too spotty to pick out any trends. In larger states and nationally, though, the correlation is striking. We’ve repeatedly seen increases in searches for information about losing one’s sense of taste or smell shortly before states saw surges in new coronavirus cases. It’s not necessarily causation, but it’s hard to believe that it isn’t.

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Why booze matters: Fixing alcohol laws during covid-19

C. Jarrett Dieterle is a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and the author of “Give Me Liberty and Give Me a Drink!” In the age of quarantines and social distancing, most Americans can order a car, a weekly allotment of groceries and a Michelin-star meal to their door. But while all these modern conveniences can be expected to continue well beyond the current pandemic, Maryland and Virginia have so far refused to allow alcohol to join the party. In fact, both are so unwilling to loosen their antiquated booze laws that they risk hamstringing recovering bars and restaurants and keeping employment down in their respective states. Other states and local governments around the country are permanently changing their alcohol laws to help businesses grow and reap more tax revenue during the pandemic — and yes, giving their residents a little liquid relief in these stressful times — but Maryland and Virginia are falling behind. Although both states are allowing to-go cocktails during the pandemic, they have not made these reforms permanent as have numerous other states. Doing so would help badly struggling restaurants and bars stay afloat and allow them to rehire furloughed staff at a higher rate. It’s also a freedom that feels distinctly American in a pandemic occurring simultaneously with the 100th anniversary of Prohibition. But these issues run deeper than just to-go booze. Modernizing alcohol laws can have economy-wide effects. The drinks sector has shown promising job growth in recent years, including producing some of the most manufacturing job gains of any industry. These jobs will be at a particular premium in the months ahead as increasing numbers of Americans find themselves displaced from work. Allowing craft producers additional opportunities to sell their products will grow their businesses and enable them to hire new employees. The craft alcohol boom has also generated record amounts of tax revenue for state and local government coffers over the past decade, and the more the drinks sector grows, the more tax revenue it is able to produce. Updating burdensome alcohol laws could help states plug impending budget gaps caused by the recent economic downturn. Something even simpler is at play for consumers here, too: Maryland is one of only a handful of states that effectively forbids grocery stores from selling beer and wine. Under state law, alcohol retailing licenses are limited to Maryland residents and are not obtainable by

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Why booze matters: Fixing alcohol laws during covid-19

Maryland residents and are not obtainable by chain grocery stores. The result is that things that are an everyday occurrence in D.C. — such as purchasing a six-pack or even sipping a beer while shopping — are unheard of in Maryland. Prohibiting grocery stores from selling alcohol mostly hurts customers, who are forced to add an extra stop to their weekly shopping routines. And unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds of Marylanders would prefer that their state allow grocery stores alcohol sales. Permitting these alcohol sales is also good public policy during the pandemic. When we should be encouraging residents to stay at home, grocery stores are often the entities best equipped to deliver alcohol to our doors — if legally permitted to do so — given that they already have procedures in place for delivering food. Maryland’s alcohol system is also convoluted because it devolves substantial regulatory power to counties. This has allowed locales such as Montgomery County to permit liquor sales only at county-operated stores. Not only are government-run stores a Prohibition-era relic totally at odds with the 21st century, but also the Montgomery County network of liquor stores has become notorious for mishandling orders and losing money. For its part, Virginia maintains its own system of government-run ABC stores that operate in a similar fashion to Montgomery County’s network but on a statewide level. Also similar to Montgomery County’s operation, Virginia ABC stores have remained stubbornly insulated from reform. At a time when consumers can order virtually anything online, it makes little sense that private retailers are not allowed to sell distilled spirits alongside these government stores. Again, private retailers are more likely to be adept at delivering alcohol during a pandemic than government-operated agencies, which usually take much longer to develop new protocols and procedures. Virginia ABC could also pursue other helpful reforms in the short term. During the pandemic, the state has granted craft distilleries the temporary ability to ship to consumers’ homes, but it has refused to make this reform permanent — despite the fact that liquor delivery has long been allowed in nearby D.C. To be sure, Virginia and Maryland lawmakers will have a lot on their plates when they return to session in 2021, but they would be wise to add alcohol reform to the agenda. If they don’t, both states risk missing a rare opportunity to help small businesses and make people happy.

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Nebraska football is airing its grievances against the Big Ten, over and over and over

With no room for maneuvering and novel coronavirus cases spiking throughout the country (especially in its Midwest stronghold), it was inevitable that the Big Ten’s compressed 2020 football schedule would encounter some bumps. The conference got in all of one weekend of games before that inevitability became reality: On Wednesday, Wisconsin canceled Saturday’s game at Nebraska amid a spike in positive coronavirus tests among team personnel, including Coach Paul Chryst and, reportedly, quarterbacks Graham Mertz and Chase Wolf. Also inevitable: Nebraska officials and fans would gripe about it. The most prominent airing of recent grievances took the form of a Twitter poll posted Wednesday night by the account of Nebraska’s official radio network. The poll, which was deleted after hours of online existence, asked “if the roles were reversed and the #Huskers had 6 players and 6 staff members sitting out with positive tests, would the game be played Saturday?” The question suggested the Big Ten has it out for Nebraska and was allowing Wisconsin, a member of the conference’s old guard, to duck out of Saturday’s matchup even though Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez admitted Wednesday that the Badgers’ positive-test rate did not meet Big Ten metrics for cancellation. (The conference requires teams to pause football activities for seven days if 5 percent of its player tests come back positive and more than 7.5 percent of essential personnel test positive, based on seven-day averages.) Instead, Alvarez and Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank decided themselves to cancel the game, without consulting anyone in the Big Ten. Alvarez said Wednesday that he “had the prerogative to make the decision.” The Nebraska radio network’s poll was extremely on brand for the Cornhuskers and their supporters, who have been nurturing a persecution complex for months now. They griped in August, when the Big Ten initially announced it was postponing its football season. Coach Scott Frost said the program was “prepared to look for other options” if the Big Ten wasn’t going to be playing, and eight Cornhuskers players filed a lawsuit against the conference over its decision to postpone. They griped one month later, when the Big Ten reversed course and decided to play and Nebraska had to open the season against conference powerhouses Ohio State and Wisconsin. Athletic Director Bill Moos told the Omaha World-Herald that he didn’t “want to come across as the champion complainer” while also saying: “Nebraska is playing five

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Thanksgiving vs. ‘pandemic fatigue.’ Experts warn against letting your guard down against covid-19 during the holiday.

probably more than any other holiday, typically produces large multigenerational gatherings — parents, grandparents, children grandchildren, college kids on break — many traveling by air — and with everyone kissing and hugging everyone else. “It’s the most Norman Rockwell of all the holidays,” says William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. “It is the one holiday that is totally family oriented.” And it’s enough to make public health experts shudder. “It’s a perfect storm,” Schooley says. “You have multiple generations of families, young people who have been out and about and exposed, and older people who have been sequestered. You have little kids. You have people traveling extensively to be together for a prolonged period of time in a packed dining room having a meal. It’s a feast for the virus.” This year, the Faucis will not be hosting their three grown daughters, who live in different parts of the country, and who decided to stay away to safeguard their father. Fauci’s age — he will be 80 in December — puts him in danger of severe covid-19 disease. Instead, the family will get together for an hour on Zoom, Fauci says. “They are very careful, but they would have to fly to get here,” says Fauci, who has become the nation’s most recognized authority on the pandemic. “How would they know if they got infected on the plane? They thought it best this way. This was a decision driven by my children. They are very protective of me.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a public warning Think carefully about family members — their ages and any underlying medical conditions — and the potential risk of mixing them with young adults or children who haven’t been sequestering, experts say. And be cautious when it comes to little children. “They can hug their grandparents only around the waist, but no kissing,” Schaffner says. “And don’t stay close.” Keep the group as small as possible. “I don’t think people should have as large a gathering as they might otherwise have had,” says Andrew Badley, an immunovirologist and head of the Mayo Clinic’s covid-19 task force. “It should not be a broad invite list. It should only be people you know and trust, and who you believe are taking responsible measures to reduce risk.” And forget about Black Friday. “This isn’t the right time to stampede through

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As the novelty of Zoom wears off, classical music reluctantly embraces its new virtual reality

to hear this music was a way of completing it — and ensuring that the only observers weren’t ones mounted to tripods. Hi-def cameras and high-speed connections are crucial elements of keeping audiences and performers engaged as the pandemic drags on (and picks up), but Kendall, like many other artists, fears that distance-listening may become the norm. “I’m very interested in alternative forms, and the kinds of creative work that a lot of young musicians are doing with new forms,” he says. “On the other hand, I have a real sense of foreboding about the erosion of stable arts institutions in our culture. It feels like there’s a sort of a parallel transformation happening in these different domains.” If the response to first seven months of the pandemic was a wave of Zoom choruses and stopgap measures, the next stage seems to be about a reluctant acceptance of the virtual, and a reexamination of what that means for the actual. Look around at other local institutions and you’ll see this transformation underway, as orchestras and ensembles undergo a mass pivot to video, with a wide variety of approaches. The National Philharmonic recently announced an entirely virtual 2020-2021 season of Sunday afternoon concerts broadcast from Strathmore Music Center and AMP by Strathmore. The Washington Chorus first surfaced after the lockdown with a Zoom-based talk show on YouTube, and on Nov. 14 it will premiere “Cantata for a More Hopeful Tomorrow,” a short music film from composer Damien Geter and Emmy-winning filmmaker Bob Berg. And this week, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced 27 more episodes of its BSO Sessions docuseries, which mixes high-def performance footage with an intriguing backstage view of how the orchestra is navigating, well, everything. This is a tricky time to be a listener: Are you hearing the music or the media that brought it to you? It’s also a tricky time to be a critic: What am I experiencing by watching what I’m missing? And it’s well beyond a tricky time to be an artist: What are you making when what you make must be made into something else? Composer David T. Little is addressing the problem of how people see his work by changing how he sees it himself. Since the pandemic hit, he has been revisiting operas he composed years ago and adapting them into short films. Little recently retrofitted his 2010 comic opera, “Vinkensport, or

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Galileo’s famous gravity experiment holds up, even with individual atoms

tube under vacuum. As the atoms rose and fell, both varieties accelerated at essentially the same rate, the researchers found. In confirming Galileo’s gravity experiment yet again, the result upholds the equivalence principle, a foundation of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. That principle states that an object’s inertial mass, which determines how much it accelerates when force is applied, is equivalent to its gravitational mass, which determines how strong a gravitational force it feels. The upshot: An object’s acceleration under gravity doesn’t depend on its mass or composition. So far, the equivalence principle has withstood all tests. But atoms, which are subject to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, could reveal its weak points. “When you do the test with atoms . . . you’re testing the equivalence principle and stressing it in new ways,” physicist Mark Kasevich of Stanford University says. Kasevich and colleagues studied the tiny particles using atom interferometry, which takes advantage of quantum mechanics to make extremely precise measurements. During the atoms’ flight, the scientists put the atoms in a state called a quantum superposition, in which particles don’t have one definite location. Instead, each atom existed in a superposition of two locations, separated by up to seven centimeters. When the atoms’ two locations were brought back together, the atoms interfered with themselves in a way that precisely revealed their relative acceleration. Many scientists think that the equivalence principle will eventually falter. “We have reasonable expectations that our current theories . . . are not the end of the story,” says physicist Magdalena Zych of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved with the research. That’s because quantum mechanics — the branch of physics that describes the counterintuitive physics of the very small — doesn’t mesh well with general relativity, leading scientists on a hunt for a theory of quantum gravity that could unite these ideas. Many scientists suspect that the new theory will violate the equivalence principle by an amount too small to have been detected with tests performed thus far. But physicists hope to improve such atom-based tests in the future, for example by performing them in space, where objects can free-fall for extended periods of time. An equivalence principle test in space has already been performed with metal cylinders, but not yet with atoms. So there’s still a chance to prove Galileo wrong. — Science News magazine

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A youth-led climate group is campaigning for Biden. If he wins, the honeymoon will be short.

a ban on the controversial oil and gas extraction technique, as many left-leaning climate activists do. “That kind of rhetoric is really disappointing,” Sedall said. "It’s frustrating. It’s infuriating. All those feelings.” Yet Biden has moved to the left. In July, he bolstered his plan to fight climate change by setting a new goal of completely cutting emissions from power plants by 2035. The timeline matched one proposed by a climate task force that was convened by the campaign and included Sunrise’s executive director, Varshini Prakash. “I’ve been really happy to see the ways that he and his campaign have, at least on paper, listened to activists," said Robby Phillips, a 19-year-old sophomore at Duke University who is working for Sunrise, before adding: "It’s still not fully enough.” Biden, at times, has also adopted Green New Deal backers’ rhetoric about solving climate change being a buoy, not an anchor, on the economy. “When I think about climate change,” he said when unveiling this climate plan, “the word I think of is ‘jobs.’ ” In an acknowledgement that it needs to do more to reach young people, the Biden campaign put together a committee specifically to motivate voting-age teens and 20-somethings to go to the polls for a candidate three or four times their age. “This is a turnout election,” said billionaire activist Tom Steyer during an Oct. 8 meeting of the campaign’s Climate Engagement Advisory Council. “When young people vote, when you vote, you change everything for the better.” In the week leading up to Election Day, the campaign is airing a 30-second spot on Comedy Central and Adult Swim, both of which cater to 18-to-34-year-olds. The animated ad mocks some of Trump’s more ridiculous claims about the climate. (“It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch.”) Biden’s favorability has crept up by 22 percentage points among likely young voters since March, when he locked down the nomination, according to the Harvard survey. Sunrise says its goal is bigger than Biden. It is to reorient the entire project of government around climate change — and make solving it an electoral winner, as the New Deal was for Franklin D. Roosevelt. To that end, Sunrise’s ranks have swelled, nearly doubling since July as it recruits new supporters while campaigning for Biden. But working for Sunrise is just not the same as it was at the beginning of the year, when Sanders still