Tag: Times

Health

Cryonics In the course of the Pandemic – The New York Instances

Post author By
Post date June 26, 2021

When an 87-year-old Californian man was wheeled into an operating room just outside Phoenix last year, the pandemic was at its height and medical protocols were being upended across the country.

A case like his would normally have required 14 or more bags of fluids to be pumped into him, but now that posed a problem.

Had he been infected with the coronavirus, tiny aerosol droplets could have escaped and infected staff, so the operating team had adopted new procedures that reduced the effectiveness of the treatment but used fewer liquids.

It was an elaborate workaround, especially considering the patient had been declared legally dead more than a day earlier.

He had arrived in the operating room of Alcor Life Extension Foundation — located in an industrial park near the airport in Scottsdale, Ariz. — packed in dry ice and ready to be “cryopreserved,” or stored at deep-freeze temperatures, in the hope that one day, perhaps decades or centuries from now, he could be brought back to life.

As it turns out, the pandemic that has affected billions of lives around the world has also had an impact on the nonliving.

From Moscow to Phoenix and from China to rural Australia, the major players in the business of preserving bodies at extremely low temperatures say the pandemic has brought new stresses to an industry that has long faced skepticism or outright hostility from medical and legal establishments that have dismissed it as quack science or fraud.

In some cases, Covid-19 precautions have limited the parts of the body that can be pumped full of protective chemicals to curb the damage caused by freezing.

Alcor, which has been in business since 1972, adopted new rules in its operating room last year that restricted the application of its medical-grade antifreeze solution to only the patient’s brain, leaving everything below the neck unprotected.

In the case of the Californian man, things were even worse because he had died without completing the normal legal and financial arrangements with Alcor, so no standby team had been on hand for his death. By the time he arrived at Alcor’s facility, too much time had elapsed for the team to be able to successfully circulate the protective chemicals, even to the brain.

That meant that when the patient was eventually sealed into a sleeping bag and stored in a large thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen that cooled it to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 Celsius), ice crystals formed between the cells of his body, poking countless holes in cell membranes.

Max More, the 57-year-old former president of Alcor, said that the damage caused by this patient’s “straight freeze” could probably still be repaired by future scientists, especially if there was only limited damage to the brain, which is often removed and stored alone in what is known in the trade as a “neuro” preservation.

“I have always been signed up for a neuro myself,” Mr. More said. “I don’t really understand why people want to take their broken-down old body with them. In the future it’ll probably be easier to start from scratch and just regenerate the body anyway.”

“The important stuff is up here as far as I am concerned,” he said, pointing to his sandy-blond crop of hair in a Zoom call. “That is where my personality lives and my memories are … all the rest is replaceable.”

Cryopreserving in a Pandemic

Supporters of cryonics insist that death is a process of deterioration rather than simply the moment when the heart stops, and that rapid intervention can act as a “freeze frame” on life, allowing super-chilled preservation to serve as an ambulance to the future.

They usually concede there is no guarantee that future science will ever be able to repair and reanimate the body but even a long shot, they argue, is better than the odds of revival — zero — if the body is turned to dust or ashes. If you are starting out dead, they say, you have nothing to lose.

During the pandemic, a heightened awareness of mortality seems to have led to more interest in signing up for cryopreservation procedures that can cost north of $200,000.

“Perhaps the coronavirus made them realize their life is the most important thing they have and made them want to invest in their own future,” said Valeriya Udalova, 61, the chief executive of KrioRus, which has been operating in Moscow since 2006. Both KrioRus and Alcor said they had received a record number of inquiries in recent months.

Jim Yount, who has been a member of the American Cryonics Society for 49 years, said he has often seen health crises or the death of a loved one bring cryonics to the front of people’s minds.

“Something like Covid brings home the fact that they are not immortal,” said Mr. Yount, 78, during a recent stint working in the organization’s office in Silicon Valley.

The American Cryonics Society has been offering support services since 1969 but stores its 30 cryopreserved members at another organization, the Cryonics Institute, near Detroit.

Alcor, the most expensive and best-known cryonics company in the United States, said the pandemic forced it to cancel public tours of its Scottsdale operation. It has also been harder to reach clients quickly, both because of travel restrictions and limitations on hospital access.

“Usually we like to get to the hospital beforehand if we have advance notice that the patient is terminal so we can talk to the staff, get to know the layout and how we are going to get the patient out of there as quickly as possible,” said Mr. More, who is now a spokesman for Alcor.

The company stocked up on chemicals at the start of the pandemic, he said, “but actually we dodged a bullet for our members because fortunately we have had very few deaths.”

After averaging about one cryopreservation a month in the 18 months before the pandemic, Alcor has dealt with just six since January 2020, perhaps through a combination of luck and clients heeding the company’s plea to avoid risky activities during the pandemic.

KrioRus, the only operator with cryostorage facilities in Europe, was busier than ever and performed nine cryopreservations during the pandemic, according to Ms. Udalova, with some of the deaths caused indirectly by Covid.

Visa and quarantine rules threatened delays of up to four weeks to reach their bodies, and the company often had to rely on small local associates to deal with its clients, who died in South Korea, France, Ukraine and Russia.

Different problems have emerged in Australia, which has had some of the world’s most restrictive Covid border controls.

Southern Cryonics, a start-up, was unable to fly in foreign experts to train its staff, forcing it to delay by a year the planned opening of a facility capable of storing 40 bodies.

In China, the newest major player in cryonics, the Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute had to stop public visits to its facility in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, which has made it difficult to recruit clients.

The Cost of Maybe, Possibly Living a Bit Longer

More than 50 years after the first cryopreservations, there are now about 500 people stored in vats around the world, the great majority of them in the United States.

The Cryonics Institute, for instance, holds 206 bodies while Alcor has 182 bodies or neuros of people aged 2 to 101. KrioRus has 80, and there are a handful of others held by smaller operations.

The Chinese performed their first cryopreservation in 2017, and Yinfeng’s storage vats hold only a dozen clients. But Aaron Drake, the clinical director of the company, who moved to China after seven years as head of Alcor’s medical response team, noted that it took Alcor more than three times as long to reach that number of preserved bodies.

Yinfeng has priced itself at the top of the market alongside Alcor, which charges $200,000 to handle a whole body and $80,000 for a neuro.

Alcor has the largest number of people who have committed to paying its fees: 1,385, from 34 countries. (Fees are often funded with life insurance policies.) The Chinese have about 60 customers who have committed, while KrioRus said it has recruited 400 customers from 20 countries.

The Cryonics Institute has a different business model, charging basic fees as low as $28,000 with up to $60,000 more required if the members want transport and rapid “standby” teams like Alcor’s.

KrioRus is even cheaper, although it plans to raise its fees when it completes its current move from a corrugated metal warehouse 30 miles northeast of Moscow to a much larger facility being built in Tver, 105 miles northwest of the capital.

Alcor’s fees are so much higher mostly because the company places $115,000 of its “whole body” fee in a trust to guarantee future care of its patients, such as topping up the liquid nitrogen. That trust is managed by Morgan Stanley and is now worth more than $15 million.

Mr. Drake said he believes the Chinese are “hopeful that they will be able to outpace the American companies and they have built a program capable of doing that.”

The strongest reason for believing China will come to dominate the field is not just its population of 1.4 billion people but its domestic attitude toward cryopreservation. Far from being confined to the scientific fringe, Yinfeng is the only cryonics group that is supported by government and embraced by mainstream researchers.

“Our little business unit is owned by a private biotech firm that has about 8,000 employees and partners with the government on a lot of projects,” Mr. Drake said. He added that it is “well integrated into the hospital systems and cooperates with research institutes and universities.”

The cooperation in China is a long way from the situation in Russia, where Evgeny Alexandrov, the chair of a Commission on Pseudoscience started by the official Academy of Sciences, has derided cryonics as “an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis.”

In the United States, the Society of Cryobiology, whose members study the effects of low temperatures on living tissues for procedures such as IVF, adopted a bylaw in the 1980s threatening to expel any member who took part in “any practice or application of freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation.”

The society’s past president Arthur Rowe wrote that “believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow,” while another past president said the work of cadaver freezers edged more toward “fraud than either faith or science.”

The society has since eased off, and while its formal position is that cryonics “is an act of speculation or hope, not science,” it no longer bans its members from the practice.

Mr. More at Alcor said there is much less hostility from the medical and scientific establishments now than just five years ago, when there was often tension between rapid response teams and hospitals.

“It was quite common for us to show up at a hospital, try to explain what we’re doing and they would say, ‘You want to do what? Not in my hospital you don’t!’” he said.

“They wouldn’t let us in, so we would have to wait outside and it would slow things down, but that just doesn’t happen anymore. Usually the staff have seen one of the documentaries on science channels and they know something about what we do.”

“Typically the reaction now is: ‘Oh, this is fascinating, I’ve never seen this happen.’”

Peter Tsolakides, 71, a former marketing executive for Exxon Mobil and a founder of the Australian start-up Southern Cryonics, said he is grateful that people in the country “tend to have an open mind about new things.”

“I don’t think any public resistance will crop up here, and the state department of health has been really positive and helpful,” he said.

An important difference between Yinfeng and most other operators is the Chinese firm’s greater willingness to preserve people who die without having expressed any interest in being put on ice.

This is seen as an important ethical question in the West, given that it could come as quite a shock for somebody to die, perhaps after coming to peace with their fate, only to wake up blinking at the ceiling lights of a laboratory a few decades or centuries later.

“We don’t like to take third-party cases,” Mr. More said. “If someone phones up and says, ‘Uncle Fred is dying, I want to get him cryopreserved,’ we need to ask a bunch of questions before we even consider accepting that case.”

“Is there any evidence that Uncle Fred actually was interested in being cryopreserved? Because if not, we don’t want to do it. Are there any family members who are really opposed to it? Because we don’t want to have to go into a legal battle.”

The litigious bent in the United States make its cryonics firms especially twitchy. There have been many lawsuits by relatives of the deceased trying to stop the expensive cryonics procedure.

“You have relatives who think, ‘Now you’re dead, I can overrule your wishes and just take your money,’” Mr. More said. “It’s amazing how often people try to do that.”

The relatives of one client failed to inform Alcor that he had died and instead had him embalmed and buried in Europe. When Alcor found out a year later, it confirmed that his contract said he wanted to be cryopreserved no matter how much time had elapsed, so the company got a court order and had the body returned to Arizona.

Mr. Drake said that the primacy that Western society places on an individual’s choice in such cases is “a big difference with Eastern culture.”

“In China it has to do with what the family members want, just like with medical treatments,” he said. “Let’s say Grandpa gets cancer in China. Many times they won’t even tell Grandpa he has cancer, and the other family members will decide what treatments should be done.”

“They might then say, ‘Let’s have Grandpa cryopreserved,’ and it has to be a unanimous agreement of the whole family — but not including the individual who actually goes through it.”

Ms. Udalova said the Russian system is somewhere in the middle. Somebody who dies without leaving written proof of their intentions can still be cryopreserved if two witnesses testify that is what the deceased wanted.

That may help explain an intriguing difference in the gender balance of people who have been preserved.

Men outnumber women by almost three to one among Alcor’s clients, and the imbalance is even greater among people registered with the Australian start-up. But there is an almost even gender balance among KrioRus’s 80 patients.

“That is because of a cultural situation here in Russia,” Ms. Udalova said from her office in northern Moscow.

“Our clients are mostly men, but they often cryopreserve their mothers first, because Russian men are brought up only by their mothers.”

When those male clients eventually join their mothers in the firm’s metal vats, the gender balance will likely tip toward more men, she said.

The Chinese, like the Russian men who want to embark on any new life with their mothers by their side, are also baffled by the tendency of American men to plan a solo journey into the future.

“In the States you get some family members signing up together, but you get a lot more individuals signing themselves up and the Chinese don’t really get that,” Mr. Drake said.

“I think in almost all the cases in China so far, you’ve had a family member signing up their loved one who is near death.”

If waking up alone in the future does not appeal, there is a growing trend in the United States of people paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to cryopreserve their pets, with the cost based largely on the animal’s size.

“If you want us to do your horse it is going to be different from your cat’s brain,” Mr. More said. “We seem to be having more pets than humans at the moment, and that’s fine with dogs but it’s kind of tricky for cats and anything smaller because of their tiny blood vessels.”

“If you want to store a whole big dog, that’s going to cost about as much as a human because of its size. My wife and I had our dog Oscar cryopreserved. He was a large golden doodle, but we basically just had his brain stored to make it more affordable because I’m in neuro anyway.”

In Russia, KrioRus’s preserved cats and dogs have been joined by five hamsters, two rabbits and a chinchilla.

Life After the Deep Freeze

To smooth the jolt of trying to resume life in the future, most cryonics firms offer to store keepsakes, “memory books” and digital discs to help a revived patient rebuild memories or simply cope with nostalgia. Alcor uses a salt mine in Kansas for storage and is also working on options for putting money into a personal trust to finance a future life.

A final edge the Chinese cryonicists enjoy is a more accommodating cultural environment, as Western religions tend to be more focused on the concepts of heaven and hell, and the body and brains being merely the repositories of an eternal soul rather than machines that can be switched off and on.

Mr. More, for one, has little patience with religious critics of cryonics. “Where in the Bible or the Quran, or the Bhagavad Gita does it say, ‘Thou shalt not do cryonics’? It doesn’t. In fact in the Bible there are some people living for centuries.”

“Remember,” he added, “we are not talking about letting people live forever, just maybe a few hundred years more, and that’s nothing compared to eternity.”

When Christians complain that they would not like to be dragged back from heaven by having their body revived, Mr. More reminds them that they may be traveling from the other direction.

“Are you sure you’re not going downstairs?” he asks. “And if so, don’t you want an escape clause? Cryonics might give you a chance to come back and do some good works so you will have a better chance of getting to heaven.”

Ms. Udalova in Moscow said some of her clients cover their bases by opting for both cryonics and a church funeral.

“Russian priests always agree to do the religious service,” she said. “You just have dry ice in the coffin in the church.”

Tags Cryonics, Pandemic, Times, York

World News

Covid-19 Information: Reside Updates – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date June 17, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

New York City plans to move about 8,000 homeless people out of hotel rooms and back to barrackslike dorm shelters by the end of July so that the hotels can reopen to the general public, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday.

When the pandemic lockdown began last spring, New York City moved people out of the shelters, where as many as two dozen adults stayed in a single room, to safeguard them from the coronavirus. Now, with social distancing restrictions lifted and an economic recovery on the line, the city is raring to fill those hotel rooms with tourists.

“It is time to move homeless folks who were in hotels for a temporary period of time back to shelters where they can get the support they need,” Mr. de Blasio said at a morning news conference.

The mayor said the city would need the state’s approval, but a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that as long as all shelter residents — even vaccinated ones — wore masks, the state had no objections to the plan.

On Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo announced that the state was lifting nearly all remaining coronavirus restrictions and social distancing measures, after more than 70 percent of the state’s adults had received at least a first dose of a vaccine.

The hotels, many of them in densely populated parts of Manhattan, have been a source of friction with neighbors who have complained of noise, outdoor drug use and other nuisances and dangers from the hotel guests.

Wednesday’s announcement signals the end to a social experiment that many homeless people gave high marks to, saying that having a private hotel room was a vastly better experience than sleeping in a room with up to 20 other adults, many of them battling mental illness or substance abuse or both. Some people said they would sooner live in the street.

“I don’t want to go back — it’s like I’m going backward,” said Andrew Ward, 39, who has been staying at the Williams Hotel in Brownsville, Brooklyn, after nearly two years at a men’s shelter. “It’s not safe to go back there. You’ve got people bringing in knives.”

Credit…Luis Tejido/EPA, via Shutterstock

The German company CureVac delivered disappointing preliminary results on Wednesday from a clinical trial of its Covid-19 vaccine, dimming hopes that it could help fill the world’s great need.

The trial, which included 40,000 volunteers in Latin America and Europe, estimated that CureVac’s mRNA vaccine had an efficacy of just 47 percent, among the lowest reported so far from any Covid vaccine maker. The trial will continue as researchers monitor volunteers for new cases of Covid, with a final analysis expected in two to three weeks.

“We’re going to full speed for the final readout,” Franz-Werner Haas, CureVac’s chief executive, said in an interview. “We are still planning for filing for approval.”

CureVac plans to apply for approval initially to the European Medicines Agency. The European Union reached an agreement last year to purchase 405 million doses of the vaccine if the agency authorizes it.

Independent experts, however, said it would be difficult for CureVac to recover. Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, said that the vaccine’s efficacy rate might improve somewhat by the end of the trial. But because most of the data is already in, it’s unlikely the vaccine will turn out to be highly protective. “It’s not going to change dramatically,” she said.

And with an efficacy rate that low — far less than the roughly 95 percent of competing mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna — the results do not bode well for CureVac’s shots getting adopted.

“This is pretty devastating for them,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a vaccine supply expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think tank in Washington.

The news was disappointing to experts who had hoped the company could provide vaccines for low- and middle-income countries that don’t have nearly enough. CureVac had some advantages over the other mRNA vaccines, such as keeping stable for months in a refrigerator. What’s more, compared with its competitors, CureVac’s vaccine used fewer mRNA molecules per jab, lowering its cost.

The trial results released on Wednesday were based on data from 135 volunteers who got sick with Covid. An independent panel compared the number of sick people who had received a placebo with those who had received the vaccine. Although the vaccine did seem to offer some protection, the statistical difference between the two groups was not stark, working out to an efficacy rate of 47 percent.

Annual flu shots, by comparison, can reach 40 to 60 percent effectiveness. Both the World Health Organization and the Food and Drug Administration set a threshold of 50 percent efficacy to consider Covid vaccines for emergency authorization. If CureVac were to stay at 47 percent in the final analysis, it would fail to meet that standard.

The results caught scientists by surprise. CureVac’s shots yielded promising results in animal experiments and early clinical trials.

“This one’s a bit of a head-scratcher,” Dr. Dean said.

Dr. Haas blamed the disappointing results on the high number of virus variants in the countries where the vaccine was tested. Out of 124 of the Covid-19 cases that the company’s scientists genetically sequenced, only one was caused by the original version of the coronavirus.

More than half of the cases were caused by variants that have been shown to be more transmissible or able to blunt the effectiveness of vaccines. CureVac’s volunteers were also infected by variants that have yet to be studied carefully. Lambda, which has come to dominate Peru in recent weeks, accounted for 21 percent of the samples.

Dr. Haas said that the results should serve as a wake-up call for the threat that new variants can pose to the effectiveness of vaccines. “It’s a new Covid reality, that’s for sure,” he said.

Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech were tested last year before variants had emerged, which could partially account for their much higher efficacy rates. Even so, studies have found that their real-world effectiveness only drops moderately in the face of variants.

Dr. Kirkegaard predicted it would be a challenge for CureVac to compete with another Covid vaccine in development, made by Novavax. On Monday, Novavax reported that its vaccine, which doesn’t have to be kept frozen, reached an efficacy of 90 percent in a trial in the United States and Mexico.

“I suspect it will be difficult for them to really get a significant developing-country market,” Dr. Kirkegaard said.

Credit…Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA, via Shutterstock

On the night of March 26, 2020, as the coronavirus was engulfing Britain and its leaders were struggling to fashion a response, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ridiculed his government’s health secretary, with a profanity, as totally “hopeless,” according to a text message posted by his former chief adviser.

The WhatsApp message, one of several texts shared on Wednesday by Mr. Johnson’s former aide, Dominic Cummings, reignited a debate over how Britain handled the early days of the pandemic — a period when Mr. Cummings said it lurched from one course to another and failed to set up an effective test-and-trace program.

In riveting testimony before Parliament last month, Mr. Cummings pinned much of the blame for the disarray on the health secretary, Matt Hancock, whom he accused of rank incompetence and serial lying. Mr. Hancock denied the accusations before lawmakers last week. He said it was “telling” that Mr. Cummings had not provided evidence to back up his most incendiary claims.

The WhatsApp messages, and an accompanying 7,000-word blog post, are the former aide’s attempt to do so. They depict a government under relentless stress, racing to secure ventilators and protective gear, scale up a testing program, and settle on the right strategy to prevent the nation’s hospitals from collapsing.

In the text exchange with Mr. Johnson on March 26, Mr. Cummings noted that the United States went from testing 2,200 people a day to 100,000 in two weeks. He said Mr. Hancock was “skeptical” about being able to test even 10,000 a day, despite having promised two days earlier to reach that goal within a few days.

The exchange prompted Mr. Johnson’s profane description of Mr. Hancock. Later, Mr. Johnson was severely ill with Covid-19 and hospitalized, forcing his foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, to lead in his absence. Mr. Cummings said Mr. Raab did a far better job leading the government’s response to the pandemic, than Mr. Johnson, with whom he helped elect but has since had a bitter falling out.

Credit…Ann Wang/Reuters

This is the age of “vaccine diplomacy.” It is also the era of its bitter, mudslinging opposite.

For months, Taiwan has been unable to purchase doses of the BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, and the island’s leaders blame “Chinese intervention.” China, which regards Taiwan as its own territory, calls this accusation “fabricated out of nothing.”

It is unclear what steps, if any, the government in Beijing has taken to disrupt Taiwan’s dealings with BioNTech, the German drugmaker that developed the vaccine with Pfizer. BioNTech declined to comment.

But the crux of the problem is that a Chinese company claims the exclusive commercial rights to distribute BioNTech’s vaccine in Taiwan. And for many people in the self-governing democracy, buying shots from a mainland Chinese business is simply unpalatable.

Less than 5 percent of Taiwan’s 23.5 million people have been vaccinated so far, and the impasse is exacerbating Taiwan’s vaccine shortage as the island confronts its first major outbreak of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. It is a bleak illustration of how deeply entrenched the long-running conflict across the Taiwan Strait has become, with a degree of mutual distrust that not even a global medical emergency can allay.

Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

More than 600,000 people in the United States are known to have died of Covid-19 as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by The New York Times — a once-unthinkable number, 10 times the death toll that President Donald J. Trump once predicted. The milestone comes as the country’s fight against the coronavirus has made big gains but remains unfinished, with millions not yet vaccinated.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Center. “A lot of that tragedy was avoidable, and it’s still happening.”

As many Americans celebrate the beginning of summer and states have relaxed restrictions, the virus is still killing hundreds of people daily, nearly all of them unvaccinated, experts say. Though the sheer number of total deaths in the United States is higher than anywhere else, the country’s toll is lower per capita than in many European and Latin American countries, including Peru, Brazil, Belgium and Italy.

Cook County

10,993 deaths

Wayne County

5,126 deaths

New York City

Five-borough total

33,359 deaths

Los Angeles County

24,434 deaths

Number of deaths by county

Maricopa County

10,162 deaths

Harris County

6,518 deaths

Miami-Dade County

6,472 deaths

Cook County

10,993 deaths

Wayne County

5,126 deaths

New York City

Five-borough total

33,359 deaths

Los Angeles County

24,434 deaths

Number of deaths by county

Maricopa County

10,162 deaths

Harris County

6,518 deaths

Miami-Dade County

6,472 deaths

Cook County

10,993 deaths

Wayne County

5,126 deaths

New York City

Five-borough total

33,359 deaths

Los Angeles County

24,434 deaths

Number of deaths by county

Maricopa County

10,162 deaths

Harris County

6,518 deaths

Miami-Dade County

6,472 deaths

Number of deaths by county

Cook County

10,993 deaths

Wayne County

5,126 deaths

New York City

Five-borough total

33,359 deaths

Los Angeles County

24,434 deaths

Miami-Dade County

6,472 deaths

Number of deaths by county

New York City

Five-borough

total

The first known Covid death in the United States occurred in February 2020. By the end of that May, 100,000 people had been confirmed dead, an average of more than 1,100 Covid deaths each day. The pace kept accelerating: It took close to four months for the nation to log another 100,000 Covid deaths; the next, about three months; the next, just five weeks. By late February 2021, just over a month later, half a million Americans had died with Covid.

The most recent 100,000 deaths came more slowly, over about four months. About half of all Americans are protected with at least one dose of a vaccine, and public health experts say that has played the central role in slowing the death rate.

The pace of deaths nationwide

to reach

100,000

U.S. deaths

Feb. 29:

First report of

a U.S. death

The pace of deaths

nationwide

to reach

100,000

U.S. deaths

Feb. 29:

First report of

a U.S. death

The pace of deaths nationwide

to reach

100,000

U.S. deaths

Feb. 29:

First report of

a U.S. death

Source: Reports from state and local health agencies.

President Biden, speaking at a news conference in Brussels on Monday, said that he felt for everyone who had lost a loved one to the virus.

“Please get vaccinated as soon as possible,” he said. “We’ve had enough pain.”

Since mid-April, the U.S. pace of inoculations has dropped sharply, despite Mr. Biden’s July 4 deadline to have 70 percent of U.S. adults at least partly vaccinated. It’s the remaining unvaccinated population that is driving the lingering deaths, experts say. And the virus is still raging in other countries, including India and in parts of South America.

“Until we have this under control across the world, it could come back and thwart all the progress we’ve made so far,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents state health agencies. “I’m worried about the people who are not taking advantage of these vaccines. They’re the ones who are going to bear the brunt of the consequences.”

Deaths from Covid have declined by about 90 percent in the United States since their peak in January, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But about half of Covid deaths at the end of May were of people aged 50 to 74, compared with only a third of those who died in December, according to a recent New York Times analysis. Older white people are driving the shifts in death patterns, and Black people across most age groups saw the smallest decrease in deaths compared with other large racial groups.

Cumulative vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic people continue to lag behind other groups.

In Wayne County, Mich., home to Detroit, vaccine hesitancy is a major problem, said Dr. Teena Chopra, the medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the Detroit Medical Center. In May, all of her Covid-19 patients were either unvaccinated or had received only one vaccine dose. Several have died, she said, and patients with the virus were still being admitted.

“It makes me feel very frustrated and angry because getting people vaccinated is the only way to end the pandemic,” Dr. Chopra said.

Denise Lu, Daniel E. Slotnik, Julie Bosman and Mitch Smith contributed reporting.

Credit…Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times

Warmer weather and low coronavirus case numbers are raising hope in some countries in Europe that vaccine rollouts could usher in a more normal summer after an erratic year of lockdowns.

France announced on Wednesday, sooner than expected, that it was ending a mandate on mask-wearing outdoors and lifting a nighttime curfew that has lasted for months — an increasingly unpopular measure as days grew longer and cafes reopened.

“The health situation in our country is improving, and it is improving even faster than what we had hoped,” Jean Castex, the French prime minister, said in making the announcement, which some political opponents noted came a few days before regional elections.

In addition, tourists from the United States may be allowed back into European Union countries as early as Friday — a move crucial to lifting Europe’s battered economies. On Wednesday, ambassadors of the European Union indicated their support for adding the United States to a list of countries considered safe from an epidemiological point of view, a bloc official confirmed, though no official announcement is expected until Friday.

The traffic will be one-way, however, unless the United States lifts its ban on many European travelers, which was announced on Jan. 25 of this year, days after President Biden took office. The U.S. barred noncitizens coming from many countries around the globe, including the Schengen area of Europe, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

In Europe, however, low infection numbers in many countries in recent weeks have been taken as an optimistic sign. But that is not the case everywhere. In Britain, officials are keeping watch for the Delta variant, which has spurred a rise in cases, and on Monday delayed by a month a much-anticipated reopening that had been heralded as “freedom day.”

And in Moscow, a surge of cases prompted a shutdown, leaving Russian officials pleading with residents to get vaccinated.

Still, the move to open up the European Union countries to U.S. tourists signaled a wider hope that the bloc is on a pathway to normality.

Health policy in the European Union is ultimately the province of member governments, so each country has the right to decide whether to reopen, and to tailor the travel measures further — adding requirements for P.C.R. tests and quarantines, for example.

Travel from outside the bloc was practically suspended last year to limit the spread of the coronavirus, with the exception of a handful of countries that fulfilled specific criteria, such as low infection rate, and their overall response to Covid-19. Until Wednesday, the list contained a relatively small number of nations, including Australia, Japan and South Korea, but more are coming, including Albania, Lebanon, North Macedonia and Serbia.

Some countries heavily dependent on tourism, like Spain and Greece, have already reopened to external travelers. Germany also lifted more restrictions this month, announcing it would remove a travel warning for locations with low infection rates from July 1.

The European Commission recommended last month that all travelers from third countries who were fully vaccinated with shots approved by the European Medicines Agency or by the World Health Organization should be allowed to enter without restrictions.

The loosening of travel measures was enabled by the fast pace of vaccination in the United States and by the acceleration of the inoculation campaign in Europe, and bolstered by advanced talks between the authorities on how to make vaccine certificates acceptable as proof of immunity.

The European Union is finalizing work on a Covid certificate system, which is supposed to be in place on July 1. Fifteen member countries already started issuing and accepting the certificate ahead of schedule this month. The document records whether people have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, recovered from Covid or tested negative within the past 72 hours, and it would eventually allow those who meet one of the three criteria to move freely across the 27 member countries.

Travelers coming from outside the bloc would have the opportunity to obtain a Covid certificate from an E.U. country, the European Commission said. That would facilitate travel between different countries inside the bloc, but would not be required for entering the European Union.

Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The Biden administration, planning for the possibility that Americans could need booster shots of the coronavirus vaccine, has agreed to buy an additional 200 million doses from the drugmaker Moderna with the option to include any developed to fight variants as well as pediatric doses.

The purchase, with delivery expected to begin this fall and continue into next year, gives the administration the flexibility to administer booster shots if they prove necessary, and to inoculate children under 12 if the Food and Drug Administration authorizes vaccination for that age group, according to two administration officials not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Experts do not yet know whether, or when, booster shots might be necessary. The emergence of variants in recent months has accelerated research on boosters, and the current vaccines are considered effective against several variants, including the Alpha variant which was first identified in Britain and which became dominant in the United States.

And this week, U.S. health officials classified the Delta variant, which was first found in India, as a “variant of concern,” sounding the alarm because it spreads rapidly and may cause more serious illness in unvaccinated people. Concern over Delta prompted England to delay lifting restrictions imposed because of the pandemic.

Moderna, a company that had no products on the market until the F.D.A. granted its Covid vaccine emergency authorization last year, uses mRNA platform technology to make its vaccine — a so-called “plug and play” method that is especially adaptable to reformulation. Last month, the company announced preliminary data from a clinical trial of a booster vaccine matched to the Beta variant, first identified in South Africa; the study found an increased antibody response against Beta and Gamma, another variant of concern first identified in Brazil.

In announcing the purchase on Wednesday, Moderna said it expected to deliver 110 million of the new doses in the fourth quarter of this year, and 90 million in the first quarter of 2022. The option brings the total U.S. procurement of Moderna’s two-shot vaccine to 500 million doses.

“We appreciate the collaboration with the U.S. government for these additional doses of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, which could be used for primary vaccination, including of children, or possibly as a booster if that becomes necessary to continue to defeat the pandemic,” Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

“We remain focused on being proactive as the virus evolves by leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform to stay ahead of emerging variants,” he said.

Under its existing contract with Moderna, the federal government had until Tuesday to exercise the option to purchase doses for future vaccination needs at the same price it is currently paying — about $16.50 a dose. Similar conversations are underway with Pfizer-BioNTech, which also makes a two-dose mRNA vaccine, but no agreement has been reached, one of the officials said.

State health departments are also preparing for the necessity of “revaccination,” Dr. Nirav Shah, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and Maine’s top health official, told reporters on Wednesday.

“It may be just a bit too early to tell with finality whether second doses, booster doses” will be needed in the fall, Dr. Shah said. “Certainly the better job we do now lowers the likelihood that variants could run loose.”

He added, “There is a direct link between what we do now and what we may need to do later.”

As of Wednesday, about 65 percent of U.S. adults had received at least one shot, according to federal data. But with vaccination rates slowing down, the administration is still focused on trying to meet President Biden’s goal of having at least 70 percent of adults get one shot by July 4, and also on addressing the global vaccine shortage.

“With the concerning Delta variant growing and millions more Americans to vaccinate, we are focused on our urgent and robust response to the pandemic,” Kevin Munoz, a White House spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday.

Last week, at the outset of his meeting with leaders of the Group of 7 nations, Mr. Biden announced that the United States would buy 500 million doses of Pfizer vaccine and donate them for use by about 100 low- and middle-income countries over the next year, describing it as America’s “humanitarian obligation to save as many lives as we can.”

One of the officials said Wednesday that if the Moderna purchase left the administration with surplus vaccine, the administration would donate those doses to other countries.

Credit…Christian Petersen/Getty Images

After leading the Phoenix Suns into the Western Conference finals, Chris Paul is in danger of missing at least part of the series after entering the N.B.A.’s coronavirus health and safety protocols.

How soon Paul can return to the Suns was not immediately known. The Suns announced Wednesday that Paul was “currently out” because of the protocols and that they would next provide an update about his status on Saturday.

Among the factors that will determine how long Paul, 36, will be away from the Suns are his vaccination status and whether he tested positive for the coronavirus. Players who test positive are typically placed in isolation for 10 to 14 days, but isolation time, depending on the circumstances, can be reduced if a player is vaccinated.

The team did not say why Paul was in the protocol. It could mean that he tested positive, but it also could just indicate that he was in close contact with someone who had. The N.B.A. announced Wednesday afternoon that one player had tested positive for the virus within the past week but, as is the usual practice, did not name the player. It’s not clear whether Paul has been vaccinated.

The prospect of Phoenix’s losing Paul after landing a spot in the conference finals on Sunday by completing a four-game sweep of the Denver Nuggets, was the latest blow to an N.B.A. postseason rocked by a string of health-related absences for star players.

Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Record profits warranted record bonuses. That was the recommendation in January by executives at the biotech firm Emergent BioSolutions. The board of directors agreed, signing off on nearly $8 million in cash and stock awards for five company leaders.

The bonuses arrived this spring even as Congress was investigating the company’s production of Covid-19 vaccines in Baltimore, where manufacturing mistakes have rendered 75 million doses unusable and forced a two-month-long shutdown of operations.

Emergent has nonetheless enjoyed the best financial year in its two-decade history, thanks largely to the government, for its largess and its decision to sidestep competitive bidding and other typical processes, according to interviews and previously undisclosed documents.

The lucrative agreement with Emergent reflects the early chaotic days of the pandemic, when the Trump administration was engaged in what one government official called “panic buying” with little outside scrutiny.

Emergent was in a good position to benefit. A review of the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that its entire contract manufacturing business had never brought in anything close to the amount the federal government paid in 2020. Those payments exceeded the revenue the company had earned from all of its contract manufacturing in the previous three years combined.

Credit…Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO — The World Health Organization is urging the wealthy nations that recently pledged to donate one billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to give priority to Latin American nations with high levels of virus transmission and mortality.

Nine of the ten countries with the most recent deaths in proportion to their populations are in South America or the Caribbean, where vaccination campaigns are mostly off to slow and chaotic starts.

Health care professionals in the region are reporting a surge of younger patients requiring hospitalization, and in several cities, intensive care units are full or nearly so, according to Dr. Carissa F. Etianne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, a part of the W.H.O.

About 1.1 million new coronavirus cases and more than 31,000 deaths were reported last week in the Americas, most of them in South American nations where transmission remains out of control.

Colombia set new records for reported deaths three days in a row this week, peaking on Tuesday with 599 deaths. Brazil is on track to reach the grim milestone of 500,000 total deaths in the next week or two, and is reporting more than 70,000 new cases a day on average. Though Chile has carried out one of the world’s most aggressive inoculation campaigns, it has not yet managed to rein in transmission.

Dr. Etianne urged leaders of the major industrial democracies to use epidemiological criteria to determine which countries will be first in line to receive the one billion vaccine doses that the Biden administration and allied nations pledged to distribute.

“While vaccines are needed everywhere, we hope G7 nations will prioritize doses for countries at greatest risk, especially those in Latin America that have not yet had access to enough vaccines to even protect the most vulnerable,” she said.

W.H.O. officials said that focusing on the countries where the crisis is worst — including Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile — made sense from both a moral and a pragmatic standpoint. Large sustained outbreaks in those countries raise the potential for more dangerous virus variants to emerge and to cross borders.

“No region of the world is protected from new peaks of transmission,” said Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri, the Covid-19 incident manager at the Pan American Health Organization. “No country and no region will be safe until high vaccination coverage is reached.”

Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Japan’s leaders are racing to lift Covid-19 vaccination rates at home, but that hasn’t stopped them from donating doses in the Asia Pacific region as part of a wider geopolitical strategy.

Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi of Japan said this week that the country would send a million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Vietnam on Wednesday. The shots are among the 120 million doses that Japan expects to obtain as part of a deal it struck with the British-Swedish manufacturer.

Japan also donated more than a million AstraZeneca shots to Taiwan this month, and Mr. Motegi said this week that it planned to donate vaccines to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

Japan is donating vaccines to Taiwan and Vietnam directly rather than through Covax, the global vaccine-sharing program. That suggests geopolitics are a motivating factor, experts say.

China has been promoting its self-made vaccines in Southeast Asia and beyond in a charm offensive that has clear diplomatic overtones. Stephen Nagy, a political scientist at International Christian University in Tokyo, said that Japan appeared to see its own vaccine diplomacy as a counterweight.

“Watching what China has done, delivering a lot of Sinovac in particular countries, Japan does not want to fall behind,” he said, referring to the manufacturer of one of China’s main vaccines.

China has been asserting its geopolitical muscle in the region for years, flying warplanes over Taiwan and fortifying artificial islands in parts of the South China Sea that are also claimed by Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Japan has often found ways to gently push back.

In Vietnam, Japan has invested in large infrastructure projects and supplied the country’s navy with coast guard vessels for patrolling the South China Sea. After Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan took office last year, he made Vietnam his first overseas stop.

Vietnam could use more vaccines. It kept infections low until recently through rigorous quarantining and contact tracing, but is now experiencing its worst outbreak yet. Only about 1.5 percent of the country’s 97 million people have received even one shot, according to a New York Times tracker.

Japan’s health authorities have authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use, and about 90 million of its 120 million doses will be manufactured domestically. But the government has held off administering that vaccine locally because of concerns over very rare complications involving blood clots.

Japan’s inoculation campaign has also been held up by strict rules that allow only doctors and nurses to administer shots, and by a requirement that vaccines be tested on people in Japan before being approved for use.

Only about 25 million vaccine doses have been administered in Japan and 15 percent of the population has received at least one shot. That percentage is about the same as in India, and far below that of most richer countries.

The government wants to speed up vaccines in part so that it can allow domestic spectators when the Tokyo Olympics begin in July. The news agency Kyodo reported on Tuesday that officials are considering allowing up to 10,000 fans or half of a venue’s capacity — whichever is smaller — at Olympic events.

For now, Tokyo and nine other prefectures remain under a state of emergency that has been in effect since late April. The order is scheduled to expire on June 20, barely a month before the Olympics start.

Credit…Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

In the United States, fireworks lit up the night sky in New York City on Tuesday, a celebration meant to demonstrate the end of coronavirus restrictions. California, the most populous state, has fully opened its economy. And President Biden said there would be a gathering at the White House on July 4, marking what America hopes will be freedom from the pandemic.

Yet on Wednesday the country’s death toll passed 600,000 — a staggering loss of life.

In Russia, officials frequently say that the country has handled the coronavirus crisis better than the West and that there have been no large-scale lockdowns since last summer.

But in the week that President Vladimir V. Putin met with Mr. Biden for a one-day summit, Russia has been gripped by a vicious new wave of Covid-19. Hours before the start of the summit on Wednesday, the city of Moscow announced that it would be mandating coronavirus vaccinations for workers in service and other industries.

“We simply must do all we can to carry out mass vaccination in the shortest possible time period and stop this terrible disease,” Sergey S. Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said in a blog post. “We must stop the dying of thousands of people.”

It was a reversal from prior comments from Mr. Putin, who said on May 26 that “mandatory vaccination would be impractical and should not be done.”

Mr. Putin said on Saturday that 18 million people had been inoculated in the country — less than 13 percent of the population, even though Russia’s Sputnik V shots have been widely available for months.

The country’s official death toll is nearly 125,000, according to Our World in Data, and experts have said that such figures probably vastly underestimate the true tally.

While the robust United States vaccination campaign has sped the nation’s recovery, the virus has repeatedly confounded expectations. The inoculation campaign has also slowed in recent weeks.

Unlike many of the issues raised at Wednesday’s summit, and despite the scientific achievement that safe and effective vaccines represent, the virus follows its own logic — mutating and evolving — and continues to pose new and unexpected challenges for both leaders and the world at large.

Tags Covid19, Live, News, Times, Updates, York

World News

Biden-Putin Summit: Stay Updates – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date June 16, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

After spending much of his first trip abroad working to rebuild and strengthen America’s alliances in Europe, President Biden will sit down with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday for a summit freighted with history and fraught with new challenges.

Mr. Putin flew in from Moscow several hours before the meeting, which was set to begin at 1:35 p.m. local time in an 18th-century villa perched above Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The talks could stretch for five hours as the two sides engage in difficult topics ranging from military threats to human rights concerns.

During the Cold War, the prospect of nuclear annihilation led to historic treaties and a framework that kept the world from blowing itself up. At this meeting, for the first time, cyberweapons — with their own huge potential to wreak havoc — are at the center of the agenda.

While there is no expectation that the two sides will agree on formal rules to navigate the digital landscape, both Washington and Moscow have talked about a desire for stability. Mr. Biden is expected to single out the rising scourge of ransomware, much of it emanating from Russia, but Mr. Putin is expected to deny having anything to do with it.

The White House has said that Mr. Biden will also raise the issues of Mr. Putin’s repression of his domestic political opposition, Moscow’s aggression toward Ukraine and foreign election interference.

The Kremlin has said that there are areas of common ground, like climate change, where the two sides can find agreement. But for Mr. Putin, the symbolism of the summit itself is important to demonstrate the respect he seeks on the world stage.

Henry Kissinger once said that Americans vacillated between despair and euphoria in their view of the Soviet Union, and the same could be said of Russia under Mr. Putin, who has spent the past two decades tightening his grip on power.

As the two leaders sit down in the Swiss villa, no meals will be served during hours of discussions, and there is little chance of euphoria.

The optimism expressed by President George W. Bush after a 2001 summit in Slovenia, where he said he was “able to get a sense of his soul” and found Mr. Putin “trustworthy,” faded long ago.

Mr. Biden began his trip a week ago in Britain saying that the United States would respond in a “robust and meaningful way” to what he called “harmful activities” conducted by Mr. Putin. The Russian leader, whose advisers have spoken of a new Cold War, told NBC News on Friday that it was a “relationship that has deteriorated to its lowest point in recent years.”

It is the first summit meeting since President Donald J. Trump flew to Helsinki to meet Mr. Putin in 2018 and declared at a joint news conference that he trusted the word of the Russian leader over his own intelligence agencies when it came to election interference.

Mr. Putin said Mr. Biden was “radically different” from Mr. Trump, calling him a “career man.”

“I very much expect,” Mr. Putin told NBC, “that there will not be such impulsive movements on the part of the current president, that we will be able to observe certain rules of interaction and will be able to agree on things and find some points of contact.”

Mr. Biden has argued that a new existential battle is underway between democracy and autocracy, and with Mr. Putin on the vanguard of the autocrats, the American leader faced criticism from some quarters for even holding the summit.

“The bottom line,” Mr. Biden said in a news conference before the meeting, “is that I think the best way to deal with this is for he and I to meet.”

What They Want

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden and his aides have been careful to lower expectations for the blockbuster part of his first trip abroad as president: his meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“We’re not expecting a big set of deliverables out of this meeting,” a senior administration official told reporters aboard Air Force One as the president flew from Brussels to Geneva on Tuesday ahead of the summit.

But that doesn’t mean that the administration and the president have not thought about what they hope to achieve by giving Mr. Putin an international platform — something that critics on both the left and the right have said was a mistake for Mr. Biden to do.

Here are five outcomes that the president and the White House are looking for:

To look strong on human rights

Since taking office, Mr. Biden has received criticism for not taking a stronger stand on human rights. Some critics say he has not responded forcefully enough to the poisoning of Aleksei A. Navalny, a dissident and Putin critic.

The White House disputes that criticism. But the administration sees the meeting with Mr. Putin as an opportunity to challenge the Russian leader on his treatment of Mr. Navalny and his country’s support of Belarus, which detained a journalist by forcing down a passenger plane.

To be the anti-Trump

Part of Mr. Biden’s sales pitch during the 2020 presidential campaign was that he would turn his predecessor’s approach to Russia on its head.

Now, after four years in which Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia were continuously scrutinized, Mr. Biden and his top advisers are eager to present the president as a Moscow skeptic — someone who will not take Mr. Putin at his word as Mr. Trump famously did at a 2018 summit in Helsinki.

The Geneva meeting gives Mr. Biden the chance to draw that contrast explicitly and to be seen as standing up to the Russian president in ways that his predecessor did not. (One difference: Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin will not stand side by side in a joint news conference, a decision that American officials made early on, in the hopes of not giving the Russian leader a chance to try to outshine Mr. Biden.)

To take on cyberattacks

American intelligence officials say the Russian government has expanded its use of cyberattacks against the West, and the United States is one of the key targets.

Administration officials say Mr. Biden is determined to deliver a stern message to Mr. Putin about the use of cyberweapons and the dangers of an escalating online war.

To avoid rocking the boat

Mr. Biden and the administration have been careful to deliver a nuanced message about what kind of relationship they want with Russia and its leader. The phrase they use the most: “predictability and stability.”

Those are not words that evoke the image of a president bracing for an all-out fight with an adversary. In fact, White House officials have repeatedly said that Mr. Biden hopes to work with Russia where possible, even as he stands up to Mr. Putin in other areas.

That may prove the trickiest part of the summit.

To make some concrete progress

If he can find that balance, Mr. Biden is hoping to make some modest progress.

The two leaders might be able to further efforts to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons. They might also work together in the Middle East, where Russia helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. And Mr. Biden has also said he wants Russia to be part of global efforts to combat climate change.

What They Want

Credit…Pool photo by Maxim Blinov

President Vladimir V. Putin has long sought the West’s respect. Now, as he meets with his fifth United States president since taking power, he will have a rare opportunity to get it.

“Putin’s goal is to transition to a respectful adversarial relationship from the disrespectful one we have today,” said Vladimir Frolov, a Russian foreign affairs columnist. “That seems to be in line with Biden’s objectives for a ‘predictable and stable relationship.’”

Russia’s hopes for a thaw in relations during the Trump administration were dashed by sanctions, tensions and tumultuous American leadership. Russian officials now see a chance to change the course of the relationship that is plumbing its post-Cold War depths.

In an interview with NBC before the summit, Mr. Putin praised President Biden for his political experience, something that Mr. Putin’s supporters, nostalgic for a time when their country was an undisputed superpower and treated with respect by the United States, hope could be a sign of the old days.

“This is a different man,” Mr. Putin said of Mr. Biden.

There is little expectation that the summit will radically reframe the relationship, but supporters and critics of Mr. Putin hope that it will at least stop its downward spiral. And there is the sense that Mr. Biden is prepared to engage broadly with Mr. Putin despite his concerns about the treatment of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny.

Critics, including an aide to Mr. Navalny, say the summit, which comes ahead of Russian parliamentary elections and as Mr. Putin faces hits to popularity at home, is mostly a photo op.

“He does not plan on signing any agreements,” the aide, Leonid Volkov, wrote on Facebook. “He’s coming, essentially, for one photo, literally like fans dream of a selfie with their idol.”

A Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, told the RIA Novosti state news agency hours before the summit’s start that it was “an extremely important day.”

“The Russian side in preparing for the summit has done the utmost for it to turn out positive and have results that will allow the further deterioration of the bilateral relationship to be halted,” he said.

Even some Putin critics inside Russia hope that he and Mr. Biden find some common ground.

“If they manage to come to agreements on certain things, and there’s a sense in the Kremlin that this was a first step, then this could provide a big incentive to reduce persecution inside the country,” said Ivan I. Kurilla, an expert on Russian-American relations in St. Petersburg and a frequent Kremlin critic. “If Biden comes to Geneva and reads Putin a lecture about human rights and goes home, then I suspect Putin will do everything the other way around.”

With Donald J. Trump in Osaka, Japan, in 2019.

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

With Barack Obama in New York in 2015.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

With George W. Bush in Washington in 2005.

Credit…Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

With Bill Clinton in Moscow in 2000.

Credit…Dirck Halstead/LiaisonCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

After President Biden meets his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, the two men will not face the news media at a joint news conference, United States officials say.

Instead, Mr. Biden will face reporters by himself after two private sessions with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a move intended to deny the Russian leader an international platform like the one he received during a 2018 summit in Helsinki with President Donald J. Trump.

“We expect this meeting to be candid and straightforward, and a solo press conference is the appropriate format to clearly communicate with the free press the topics that were raised in the meeting,” a U.S. official said in a statement sent to reporters this weekend, “both in terms of areas where we may agree and in areas where we have significant concerns.”

Top aides to Mr. Biden said that during negotiations over the meetings, to be held at an 18th-century Swiss villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, the Russian government was eager to have Mr. Putin join Mr. Biden in a news conference. But Biden administration officials said that they were mindful of how Mr. Putin seemed to get the better of Mr. Trump in Helsinki.

At that news conference, Mr. Trump publicly accepted Mr. Putin’s assurances that his government did not interfere with the 2016 election, taking the Russian president’s word rather than the assessments of his own intelligence officials.

The spectacle in 2018 drew sharp condemnations from across the political spectrum for providing an opportunity for Mr. Putin to spread falsehoods. Senator John McCain at the time called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

Credit…Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

Yet this week the country’s death toll also surpassed 600,000 — a staggering loss of life.

In Russia, officials frequently say that the country has handled the coronavirus crisis better than the West and that there have been no large-scale lockdowns since last summer.

But in the week that President Vladimir V. Putin is meeting with Mr. Biden for a one-day summit, Russia has been gripped by a vicious new wave of Covid-19. Hours before the start of the summit on Wednesday, the city of Moscow announced that it would be mandating coronavirus vaccinations for workers in service and other industries.

It was a reversal from prior comments from Mr. Putin, who said on May 26 that “mandatory vaccination would be impractical and should not be done.”

The country’s official death toll is nearly 125,000, according to Our World in Data, and experts have said that such figures probably vastly underestimate the true tally.

While the robust United States vaccination campaign has sped the nation’s recovery, the virus has repeatedly confounded expectations. The inoculation campaign has also slowed in recent weeks.

Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

The most pressing, vexing item on President Biden’s agenda while in Europe may be managing the United States’ relationship with a disruptive Russia. He has sought support from allies to that end, but no part of the trip is more fraught than the daylong meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday.

Upon arriving in Britain last week before meeting with European leaders rattled by Russia’s aggressive movement of troops along Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Biden said the world was at “an inflection point,” with democratic nations needing to stand together to combat a rising tide of autocracies.

“We have to discredit those who believe that the age of democracy is over, as some of our fellow nations believe,” he said.

Turning to Russia specifically, he pledged to “respond in a robust and meaningful way” to what he called “harmful activities” conducted by Mr. Putin.

Aboard Air Force One

David E. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent, breaks down the agenda for President Biden’s first overseas trip.

Russian intelligence agencies have interfered in Western elections and are widely believed to have used chemical weapons against perceived enemies on Western soil and in Russia. Russian hackers have been blamed for cyberattacks that have damaged Western economies and government agencies. Russian forces are supporting international pariahs in bloody conflicts — separatists in Ukraine and President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria.

Mr. Putin has a powerful military and boasts of exotic new weapons systems, but experts on the dynamics between Washington and Moscow say that disruption is his true power.

“Putin doesn’t necessarily want a more stable or predictable relationship,” said Alexander Vershbow, who was United States ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush. “The best case one can hope for is that the two leaders will argue about a lot of things but continue the dialogue.”

Mr. Biden’s associates say he will also convey that he has seen Mr. Putin’s bravado before and that it doesn’t faze him.

“Joe Biden is not Donald Trump,” said Thomas E. Donilon, who served as national security adviser to President Barack Obama and whose wife and brother are key aides to Mr. Biden. “You’re not going to have this inexplicable reluctance of a U.S. president to criticize a Russian president who is leading a country that is actively hostile to the United States in so many areas. You won’t have that.”

Tags BidenPutin, Live, summit, Times, Updates, York

World News

Your Tuesday Briefing – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date June 15, 2021

NATO eyes potential threats from China

NATO leaders locked arms against China and Russia at their summit on Monday, as President Biden reaffirmed his commitment to the alliance. China’s growing influence and military might “present challenges,” the 30-nation alliance said.

This escalation of rhetoric from summits past reflected a new concern over how China intends to wield its rapidly growing military might and offensive cybertechnologies in the coming years.

NATO countries warned that China increasingly posed a global security problem, as well, signaling a fundamental shift in the attentions of an institution devoted to protecting Europe and North America, not Asia.

Putin: At the end of the summit, Biden discussed his approach to the Kremlin. “What I’ll convey to President Putin is that I’m not looking for conflict with Russia but that we will respond if Russia continues its harmful activities,” said Biden, who will meet with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday in Geneva. “And we will not fail to defend the trans-Atlantic alliance or stand up for democratic values.”

England postpones its reopening

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain announced on Monday that he would postpone by four weeks the easing of the latest lockdown in England, what British tabloids called “freedom day,” originally scheduled for June 21, after a spike in cases of the highly transmissible Delta coronavirus variant.

Restaurants and pubs in England will still have to observe social-distancing rules indoors and limit capacity, and nightclubs and theaters will remain closed. The decision will be reviewed in two weeks.

Britain’s vaccination campaign is among the most successful in the world, with about four-fifths of adults having received at least one shot. But those yet to receive their second dose remain susceptible to the Delta variant, more so than to earlier versions of the virus, scientists said.

By the numbers: Overall new cases in Britain are averaging about 8,000 per day and are doubling every week in the worst affected areas. Hospital admissions have begun rising.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In other developments:

In a rare interview with Times reporters, Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese scientist who works at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, denounced as baseless suspicions that the virus had originated in the lab. “How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence?” she said.
The U.S. neared 600,000 recorded deaths from the pandemic, the highest known count of any country. For comparison, the country reached 500,000 deaths by February, 400,000 in January and 300,000 in December.

The first steps from Israel’s new coalition government

In the first days of Israel’s fragile new coalition government, ministers announced plans to repair Israeli ties with U.S. Democrats and the Jewish diaspora, investigate a stampede at a holy Jewish site on Mount Meron in April that killed 45 and permit a contentious far-right march through Jerusalem.

The initiatives highlighted the complexities and contradictions of the coalition, which is an unlikely alliance of the hard right, the left and the center, as well as — for the first time in Israeli history — an independent Arab party.

The far-right march, originally planned for last month, was among the reasons Hamas cited for firing rockets toward Jerusalem on May 10, setting off an 11-day air war between the militant group and Israel. The group vowed to respond if the march was allowed to go ahead.

Quotable: “The support of Christian evangelicals and other groups is important and heartwarming, but the Jewish people are more than allies, they are family,” the new foreign minister, Yair Lapid, said in his first speech. “Jews from all streams — Reform, Conservative and Orthodox — are our family.”

Related: After a year of protests outside Balfour, the prime minister’s house, Israelis are debating what role they played in Benjamin Netanyahu’s downfall.

THE LATEST NEWS

News From Europe

An American father and son pleaded guilty in Tokyo on Monday to helping Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan chief, flee Japan as he faced trial on charges of financial wrongdoing. Above, a vehicle transporting Michael Taylor and his son Peter Taylor for their trial at the Tokyo District Court.
Unusual activity at the Taishan nuclear power plant in China has drawn international attention, as two French companies involved in the plant acknowledged problems on Monday but said they could be handled safely. Officials at the power plant said no leak had been detected.

Sports News

A Morning Read

Rush hour has long ruled our lives, our cities, our tax dollars. But if more of us continue to work remotely, it won’t have to, freeing up space, resources and desire for bike lanes and better bus service, which could take even more cars off the roads.

ARTS AND IDEAS

How to buy a work of art

Our T magazine editors compiled a sweeping guide to buying artwork, based on interviews with gallery owners, collectors and artists. Here’s their top advice for novice collectors.

Figure out what you like.

“Visit a lot of galleries and museum shows and meet with artists. I guess if I were to pick one word, it would be ‘exposure.’ And you never should limit yourself to art that you think you’re going to like.” — Ann Schaffer, patron and collector

Do your research.

“I believe in doing a bit of homework. Educating yourself and reading up about the kind of art you’re interested in is really essential.” — Denise Gardner, collector and board chair-elect at the Art Institute of Chicago

Go to a gallery and talk to people you meet.

“I don’t know any etiquette other than human kindness.” — Alexis Johnson, partner at Paula Cooper Gallery

Ask questions and establish contacts. (Expect a waiting list.)

“I like people who tend to be very open: ‘This is what I think I like, this is what I don’t know, this is where I’m starting.’” — Bridget Finn, co-founder of Reyes | Finn gallery

Success!

“You have to be sincere if you’re making inquiries and you’re asking about someone’s work, or you’re thinking about acquiring it. This is someone’s life’s work. This might be $1,000 to you, but this is someone’s soul.” — Jessica Wessel, lawyer and collector

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Tags briefing, Times, Tuesday, York

Politics

The Ladies Leaders of Right this moment, a Occasions Occasion

Post author By
Post date June 15, 2021

Hong Kong Website Doxxing Police Gets Blocked, Raising Censorship Fears

All over the world women claim power and wield it in unprecedented ways. Women lead at the highest levels of government and international institutions. You are at the forefront of global movements for racial and climate justice. On several continents, protest movements that began with reproductive rights have shaken the foundations of the political establishment in their countries.

Yet public life is still dominated by men who often see women leaders as a threat to their power and status. Women leading movements for change often face violent backlashes.

How will our world change when women take over male-dominated hierarchies? What difference can female leadership make in this time of overlapping global crises? And how exactly do you do it?

Be there when we find answers with the climate activists Greta Thunberg, Xiye Bastida and Ayisha Siddiqa, and a special guest, the former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an extensive conversation with the New York Times Amanda Taub.

Then reach out to Times journalists on the ground in countries where women’s-led movements are making meaningful and lasting change. It’s all part of our newest subscription-only event. We hope to see you there.

Tags event, leaders, Times, today, Women

World News

NATO Summit: Reside Updates – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date June 14, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Thomas Peter/Reuters

China’s rising military ambitions are presenting NATO with challenges that must be addressed, the 30-nation Western alliance said Monday, the first time it has portrayed the expanding reach and capabilities of the Chinese armed forces in such a potentially confrontational way.

The description of China, contained in a communiqué issued at the conclusion of a one-day summit attended by President Biden and others, reflected a new concern over how China intends to wield its military might in coming years.

Mr. Biden has made dealing with authoritarian powers a keystone of his presidency so far, especially Russia and China. But while the NATO communiqué describes Russia as a “threat” to NATO, using tough language that was not necessarily a surprise, it is the description of China that attracted unusual attention, and could set the tone for the alliance.

Both Mr. Biden and President Donald J. Trump before him put more emphasis on the threats that China poses to the international order, partly in terms of its authoritarian system and partly in terms of its military ambitions and spending.

NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said that China’s military budget is second in the world only to that of the United States, and that China is rapidly building its military forces, including its navy, with advanced technologies.

In a discussion of “multifaceted threats” and “systemic competition from assertive and authoritarian powers” early in the document, NATO says that “Russia’s aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.” China is not called a threat, but NATO states that “China’s growing influence and international policies can present challenges that we need to address together as an alliance.”

NATO promises to “engage China with a view to defending the security interests of the alliance.” Separately, NATO officials have said that China is increasingly using Arctic routes, has exercised its military with Russia, sent ships into the Mediterranean Sea and has been active in Africa. China is also working on space-based weaponry as well as artificial intelligence and sophisticated hacking of Western institutions.

Much lower in the document, China comes up again, and is again described as presenting “systemic challenges,” this time to the “rules-based international order.” NATO also cites China’s expanding nuclear arsenal and more sophisticated delivery systems as well as its expanding navy and its military cooperation with Russia.

In a gesture toward diplomacy and engagement, the alliance vows to maintain “a constructive dialogue with China where possible,” including on the issue of climate change, and calls for China to become more transparent about its military and especially its “nuclear capabilities and doctrine.”

The leaders will also sign off on a decision to spend next year updating NATO’s 2010 strategic concept, which 11 years ago saw Russia as a potential partner and never mentioned China. New challenges from cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, disinformation, and new missile and warhead technologies must be considered to preserve deterrence, and Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty, will be “clarified” to include threats to satellites in space and coordinated cyberattacks.

Credit…Pool photo by Kenzo Tribouillard

BRUSSELS — New United States presidents traditionally get an early, brief NATO summit meeting, as President Biden is on Monday in a session lasting less than three hours.

Few involved with NATO can forget the last time a new American president paid an inaugural visit. It was May 2017, and Donald J. Trump took the opportunity to deride the new $1.2 billion headquarters building as too expensive, and refused, despite the assurances of his aides, to support NATO’s central tenet of collective defense, the famous Article 5 of the founding treaty.

Mr. Biden, by contrast, is a longstanding fan of NATO and of the trans-Atlantic alliance it defends, so simply showing up with a smile and warm compliments for allies will go a long way to making his first NATO summit as president smooth and even unmemorable.

He drove that point home upon arriving at the summit on Monday morning in a brief greeting with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general — saying that the alliance was “critically important for U.S. interests” and pointing to Article 5 as a “sacred obligation.”

“There is a growing recognition over the last couple years that we have new challenges,” Mr. Biden said. “We have Russia, which is acting in a way that is not consistent with what we had hoped, and we have China.”

NATO also wants to show that it is not nearing “brain death,” as President Emmanuel Macron of France once complained, but instead preparing to adapt for a very different future.

The traditional communiqué is traditionally long — it is now 79 paragraphs — and was finished early Saturday evening.

There will be other issues for the leaders to discuss, even in a short meeting that is to provide each leader only five minutes to speak.

NATO is leaving Afghanistan pretty abruptly, after Mr. Biden’s decision to pull all United States troops out by Sept. 11. Many of NATO’s troops have already left. One of the main questions that remain: Can NATO continue to train Afghan special forces outside Afghanistan, and where?

Leaders will also talk about how to better prepare NATO’s “resilience,” including how to reduce dependence on Chinese-made technology, protect satellites and measure increased military spending. They want a new relationship with technology companies and new NATO partnerships in Asia.

They will begin to discuss a replacement for the secretary general, Mr. Stoltenberg, who worked hard to keep Mr. Trump from blowing up the alliance, and whose term ends in September 2022.

But for Mr. Biden, the meeting will be a bath of good feeling — and that is thought to be enough for now.

Credit…Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

Some NATO states worry that President Biden appears to be rewarding President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by meeting him on Wednesday in Geneva.

Skeptics say that the new United States president, his sights set squarely on the challenges posed by the rise of China, may be “sleepwalking” into an unwise rapprochement with a power that many European leaders view as their principal threat.

NATO leaders, who are gathering at a summit meeting on Monday, have usually gone out of their way to adjust to the strategic priorities of the group’s most powerful member, the United States. But the issue of China is more problematic, because NATO is a regional military alliance of Europe and North America. Its main concern remains a newly aggressive Russia — not distant China.

China is expanding militarily, exercising with Russia, sending its ships into the Mediterranean. It also has a base in Africa. So it has gotten NATO’s attention.

But NATO member states from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Germany, are concerned that a new concentration on China will divert alliance attention and resources from the problem closer to home.

Russia has invaded Ukraine and stationed thousands of troops on its borders. It has poisoned and imprisoned dissidents at home, and abroad has hacked Western governments and companies and propped up President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s even more oppressive Belarus.

Russia has also developed sophisticated new intermediate-range missiles that can carry nuclear warheads and modernized its armed forces significantly, making Europe more vulnerable.

“Even though European opinion is becoming more hawkish toward China, European countries are concerned with getting onboard with an overly confrontational U.S. approach,’’ said Michal Baranowski, the director of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund.

There is new concern, he said, after Mr. Biden decided to waive sanctions on companies involved in finishing the controversial natural-gas pipeline between Russia and Germany called Nord Stream 2.

In Poland, Mr. Baranowski said, “there is increased worry and the perception that Washington is going soft on Putin and sleepwalking into a reset with Russia.” Poland, he said, is not alone in saying: Let’s not overdo it with China.

Credit…Pool photo by Didier Lebrun

Monday’s NATO summit meeting of 30 leaders is short, with one 2.5-hour session after an opening ceremony, leaving just five minutes for each leader to speak.

The main issues will be topical — how to manage Afghanistan during and after the withdrawal of United States troops, Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s Belarus.

The leaders will also sign off on an important yearlong study on how to remodel NATO’s strategic concept — the group’s statement of values and objectives — to meet new challenges like cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, antimissile defense, disinformation and “emerging disruptive technologies.”

In 2010, when the strategic concept was last revised, NATO assumed that Russia could be a partner. China was barely mentioned. The new one will begin with very different assumptions.

NATO officials and ambassadors say there is much to discuss down the road: questions like how much and where a regional trans-Atlantic alliance should try to counter China, what capabilities NATO needs and how many of them should come from common funding or remain the responsibility of member countries.

How to adapt to the European Union’s still vague desire for “strategic autonomy,” while encouraging European military spending and efficiency and avoiding duplication with NATO, are other concerns. So is the question of how to make NATO a more politically savvy institution, as President Emmanuel Macron of France has demanded, perhaps by establishing new meetings of key officials of member states, like national security advisers and political directors.

More quietly, leaders will talk about replacing the current NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, whose term was extended for two years to keep matters calm during the Trump presidency. His term ends in September 2022.

Credit…Pool photo by Olivier Matthys

For the last four years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has crushed opponents at home and cozied up to Moscow, while showering his allies with sweetheart government contracts and deploying troops regionally wherever he saw fit.

And for the most part, the Trump administration turned a blind eye.

But as Mr. Erdogan arrives in Brussels for a critical NATO meeting on Monday, he faces a decidedly more skeptical Biden administration. President Biden and Mr. Erdogan will have a brief meeting on Monday afternoon during the summit.

Whereas President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has responded to the new order by growing even more belligerent, things aren’t that simple for Mr. Erdogan. Thanks to both the pandemic and his mismanagement of the economy, he faces severe domestic strains, with soaring inflation and unemployment, and a dangerously weakened lira that could set off a debt crisis.

So Mr. Erdogan has dialed back his approach, softening his positions on several issues in the hope of receiving badly needed investment from the West. He has called off gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean, an activity that infuriated NATO allies, and annoyed Moscow by supporting Ukraine against Russia’s threats and selling Turkish-made drones to Poland.

Yet Mr. Erdogan does have some important cards to play. Turkey’s presence in NATO, its role as a way station for millions of refugees, and its military presence in Afghanistan have given him real leverage with the West.

Credit…Tobias Schwarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As President Biden and his NATO counterparts focus on nuclear-armed Russia at their summit meeting on Monday, they may also face a different sort of challenge: growing support, or at least openness, within their own constituencies for the global treaty that bans nuclear weapons.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Geneva-based group that was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to achieve the treaty, said in a report released on Thursday that it had seen increased backing for the accord among voters and lawmakers in NATO’s 30 countries, as reflected in public opinion polls, parliamentary resolutions, political party declarations and statements from past leaders.

The treaty, negotiated at the United Nations in 2017, took effect early this year, three months after the 50th ratification. It has the force of international law even though the treaty is not binding for countries that decline to join.

The accord outlaws the use, testing, development, production, possession and transfer of nuclear weapons and stationing them in a different country. It also outlines procedures for destroying stockpiles and enforcing its provisions.

The negotiations were boycotted by the United States and the world’s eight other nuclear-armed states — Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia — which have all said they will not join the treaty, describing it as misguided and naïve. And no NATO member has joined the treaty.

Nonetheless, an American-led effort begun under the Trump administration to dissuade other countries from joining has not reversed the treaty’s increased acceptance.

“The growing tide of political support for the new U.N. treaty in many NATO states, and the mounting public pressure for action, suggests that it is only a matter of time before one or more of these states take steps toward joining,” said Tim Wright, the treaty coordinator of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons who was an author of the report.

Timed a few days before the NATO meeting in Brussels, the report enumerated what it described as important signals of support or sympathy for the treaty among members in the past few years.

In Belgium, the government formed a committee to explore how the treaty could “give new impetus” to disarmament. In France, a parliamentary committee asked the government to “mitigate its criticism” of the treaty. In Italy, Parliament asked the government “to explore the possibility” of signing the treaty. And in Spain, the government made a political pledge to sign the treaty at some point.

There is nothing to prevent a NATO country from signing the treaty. And the bloc’s solidarity in opposing the accord appears to have weakened, emboldening disarmament advocates.

NATO officials have been outspoken in their opposition to the treaty. Jessica Cox, director of nuclear policy at NATO, said “nuclear deterrence is necessary and its principles still work,” in an explanation of NATO’s position posted on its website less than two months ago.

“A world where Russia, China, North Korea and others have nuclear weapons, but NATO does not, is not a safer world,” she said.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

After President Biden meets his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, the two men will not face the news media at a joint news conference, United States officials say.

Mr. Putin has had a long and contentious relationship with United States presidents, who have sought to maintain relations with Russia even as the two nations clashed over nuclear weapons, aggression toward Ukraine and, more recently, cyberattacks and hacking.

President Barack Obama met several times with Mr. Putin, including at a joint appearance during the 2013 Group of 8 summit in Northern Ireland. Mr. Obama came under criticism at the time from rights groups for giving Mr. Putin a platform and for not challenging the Russian president more directly on human rights.

In the summer of 2001 — before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — President George W. Bush held a joint news conference with Mr. Putin at a summit in Slovenia. At the news conference, Mr. Bush famously said: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

At the time, then-Senator Biden said: “I don’t trust Mr. Putin; hopefully the president was being stylistic rather than substantive.”

Biden administration officials said on Saturday that the two countries were continuing to finalize the format for the meeting on Wednesday with Mr. Putin. They said that the current plan called for a working session involving top aides in addition to the two leaders, and a smaller session.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden and Jill Biden’s first overseas trip since he took office — which he continued at a NATO summit on Monday after she returned home following the Group of 7 meeting in Britain this weekend — has been a chance to use the stagecraft of state to make the point that America is once again an ally in the league of nations.

To prevent anyone missing the message, Dr. Biden put it in bold, bright letters — the word “Love” picked out in rhinestones on the back of the Zadig & Voltaire jacket she wore on day one of the gathering.

Such signaling suggests that the first lady is more than ready to use costume to make a point, especially at moments of high political theater like the G7, where the imagery is as choreographed as any of the meetings behind closed doors.

That’s why the G7 “family photo,” with Mr. Biden smiling gamely in a dark suit and bright blue tie while sandwiched, albeit in a socially distant way, between Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, was so important; why Dr. Biden’s trip to visit schoolchildren with Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, mattered; and why the photo of the Bidens looking relaxed and cheerful with Queen Elizabeth II went ’round the world.

In such settings the supporting players — i.e. the families — are as much as part of the narrative arc as the policy statements.

And what the four days of the G7 demonstrated during the president’s trip is that when it comes to playing that part, Dr. Biden has her own ideas about how it should be done.

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Before heading to Brussels for Monday’s NATO summit, President Biden had a lighthearted agenda item on Sunday to round out his visit to Britain, the first country visited on his inaugural European trip as president: an audience with Queen Elizabeth II.

The monarch welcomed Mr. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, to her home, Windsor Castle, where she has sought refuge since moving from Buckingham Palace early last year as the pandemic was bearing down on Britain.

In what was a very private visit, with cameras and reporters kept well away, Mr. Biden and the queen inspected an honor guard of grenadiers in the castle’s sun-splashed quadrangle before retiring inside for tea.

On every presidential visit to the country, it is the meeting with the queen that most symbolizes what American and British diplomats still reflexively call the “special relationship” — a term that Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently said he did not care for because it made Britain sound needy.

Earlier in the visit, at a reception in Cornwall on Friday, Mr. Biden and his wife looked relaxed as they chatted with the queen, who turned 95 in April. The monarch had also drawn laughs during a stilted, socially distanced group photo by asking, “Are you supposed to look as if you’re enjoying yourself?”

It was a happy contrast to the bereaved figure who sat alone in a choir stall at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor three months ago, during the funeral of her husband, Prince Philip.

“We had a long talk,” Mr. Biden told reporters after the meeting. “She was very generous.”

Tags Live, NATO, summit, Times, Updates, York

World News

Outages at Reddit and international information websites together with FT, New York Occasions and Bloomberg

Post author By
Post date June 8, 2021

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Jerod Harris | Getty Images

Reddit and global news sites like the Financial Times, New York Times and Bloomberg experienced intermittent outages Tuesday morning that left some users unable to access the sites.

Some visitors to the UK and US websites received an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message.

Amazon, Twitter, PayPal, Spotify, Twitch, the BBC and The Guardian were also reportedly affected. Tech site The Verge is using an open Google Doc to cover the story, even though they forgot to turn off editing.

Initial reports of the outage began around 6 a.m. ET, but the sites were mostly back online to users an hour later. However, some websites, including the UK government website, gov.uk and the New York Times, experienced slow load times and graphics issues.

US cloud computing service provider Fastly said on its website at 5:58 a.m. ET that it is investigating a technical problem. At 6:44 am ET, Fastly said the problem had been identified and “a fix will be implemented”. At 8:41 a.m. ET, Fastly said the problem was resolved. Fastly stock lost 1.6% in pre-trading hours after the default began. At one point it was down about 3%.

Fastly operates a content delivery network. A CDN is a network of servers and data centers around the world that enables the transfer of assets necessary to load Internet content such as HTML pages, JavaScript files, images, and videos.

The infrastructure that underlies much of the Internet is operated by relatively few companies. If either of them has a problem, it can lead to widespread global outages affecting billions of people.

“That happens when half of the internet relies on Goliaths like Amazon, Google and Fastly for all servers and web services,” said Gaz Jones, technical director of digital agency Think3, in a statement. “The entire internet is dangerously aimed at just a few players.”

When Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, ran into a problem in 2017, some of the world’s largest websites across the US east coast went offline for hours. In 2019, Cloudflare, another CDN company, had an issue that lasted about an hour and affected sites like the chat service Discord and the dating site OKCupid.

Toby Stephenson, chief technology officer for IT and cybersecurity firm Neuways, agreed that the incident “underscores the dependence of many of the world’s largest websites on content delivery networks.”

“Because there are so few of these CDN services, these outages can happen from time to time,” he said. “Using these CDNs to deliver content to readers makes these sites usually fast and responsive, but on that occasion they were left with an egg in their face. The tech backends of these large sites are probably fine, but they are Front ends that cannot be accessed and content cannot be transferred because the network has failed. “

Tags Bloomberg, global, including, News, outages, Reddit, sites, Times, York

Politics

U.S. Put Gag Order on Occasions Executives Amid Struggle Over E-mail Logs

Post author By
Post date June 5, 2021

U.S. Put Gag Order on Times Executives Amid Fight Over Email Logs

The US government learned of the memo, which is intended to express confidence that then-attorney general Loretta Lynch would not allow an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to go too far. Mr Comey is said to be concerned that if Ms. Lynch made the decision not to indict Ms. Clinton, Russia would publish the memo to make it appear illegitimate, which led to its unorthodox decision to announce that the FBI had received from recommended an indictment in the case.

The Justice Department under then-President Donald Trump, who fired Comey and viewed him as an enemy, spent years looking for sufficient evidence to accuse him of the crime of unauthorized disclosure of classified information – a move that eventually came to the fore if he had anything to do with it had to do with the fact that the Times learned of the existence of the document stolen by Russian hackers.

The longstanding leak investigation against Mr. Comey was seen as one of the most politicized and controversial within the Justice Department, even by the standards of a department that had been enforced on several cases to apply leak investigations and other guidelines on books Release to attack former officials criticizing Mr Trump.

Over the past year, prosecutors have discussed whether or not the investigation of Mr. Comey should be closed, according to two people familiar with the case, in part because there appeared to be little evidence that the former FBI director had classified information the press had passed on.

Last fall, ministry officials discussed whether the investigation was closed and prosecutors should write a rejection memo that would explain why Mr. Comey would not be prosecuted, one of the people said. But the FBI and prosecutors working on the case wanted to keep the investigation open, people said, and in January prosecutors obtained a special injunction requesting Google to release data in reporters’ emails.

With Mr. Trump out of office soon, the order was controversial among some within the department, according to two people with knowledge of the case. It was viewed as unusually aggressive for a case that was likely to end without charge. During the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration, at least one official wrote in a memo that according to someone familiar with the transition, the case should be closed.

In the court files attempting to force Google to release logs of who communicated with the four reporters who wrote the story, the Justice Department convinced the judge that the secrecy was warranted because, as the judge said on Jan. January wrote that “there is” reason to believe that notification of the existence of this order will seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation, including by allowing victims to destroy or manipulate evidence. “

Tags Email, executives, Fight, Gag, Logs, order, put, Times

World News

Your Friday Briefing – The New York Instances

Post author By
Post date June 4, 2021

Those forgotten in Italy’s vaccine drive

While the Italian government has said that people have a right to get vaccinated no matter their legal status, many undocumented migrants and homeless people have been unable to secure shots, putting both them and others at risk.

To book vaccination appointments, people must enter their social security numbers. But only three of Italy’s 20 regions accept the temporary numbers given to hundreds of thousands of migrants.

More than 125,000 people have died in Italy from the virus. The country’s vaccine rollout started at a sluggish pace, with strategic hiccups and a shortage of doses.

Quotable: “My heart is so weak that if I get Covid it will take me away for sure,” said one homeless immigrant, 63. “I am scared.”

A high-emission industry resists regulation

The International Maritime Organization, a little-known U.N. agency that is responsible for reducing carbon emissions in the shipping industry, is doing the opposite. The organization has repeatedly delayed and watered down climate regulations.

Just last week, delegates met in secret to debate what should constitute a passing grade under a new rating system. Under pressure from China, Brazil and others, they set the bar so low that emissions can continue to rise at roughly the same pace as if there had been no regulations at all.

Close ties: Representatives of shipbuilders, oil companies, mining companies, chemical manufacturers and others with huge financial stakes in commercial shipping are among the I.M.O.’s delegates.

Clashes at Facebook over global politics

Discontent within Facebook has surged in recent weeks over the company’s handling of international affairs, culminating in tense meetings and an open letter, signed by more than 200 employees, calling for an audit of the company’s treatment of Arab and Muslim posts.

Employees have complained about the company’s decisions to take down posts from prominent Palestinian activists when clashes broke out in Israel, as well as messages critical of the Indian government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook is in a tight spot. Governments across the world are pressuring it to remove content as they try to corral the platform’s power over online speech. But when Facebook complies, it upsets its employees, who say the social network has helped authoritarian leaders and repressive regimes quash activists and silence marginalized communities.

Analysis: “There’s a feeling among people at Facebook that this is a systematic approach, one which favors strong government leaders over the principles of doing what is right and correct,” said Facebook’s former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa region, who left in 2017.

THE LATEST NEWS

News From Europe

For years, Benjamin Netanyahu outfoxed his rivals. Here’s what changed this week.

ARTS AND IDEAS

A chef on the cookbook that changed her life

The chef and restaurateur Alice Waters, whose new book is “We Are What We Eat,” spoke to our Book Review.

What book, if any, most influenced your approach to food?

I got Elizabeth David’s “French Country Cooking” in my early 20s, shortly after I came back from studying in France in 1965. When I returned home to Berkeley, all I wanted to do was live like the French. Food is culture, and she revealed that. She also influenced me aesthetically — I loved the gracefulness and simplicity of her recipes and her cooking.

The last book you read that made you cry?

“The Water Dancer.” It’s heartbreaking.

The last book you read that made you furious?

Marion Nestle’s “Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.” That made me absolutely furious. The title of the book says it all. And I’m so grateful to Marion for telling the truth. We need her book more than ever right now.

And the last book you read that made you laugh?

Maira Kalman always makes me laugh. Her children’s books are incredible, like “Ooh-La-La (Max in Love).” The illustrations are unlike any others, and her own incredible imagination just comes out in them.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Tags briefing, Friday, Times, York

Health

The Illness Detective – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date June 3, 2021

Meningitis itself is not a disease, just a description that means that the tissues around the brain and spinal cord have become inflamed. In the United States, bacterial infections can cause meningitis, as can enteroviruses, mumps, and herpes simplex. But a high percentage of cases, as doctors say, have no known etiology: Nobody knows why the patient’s brain and spinal cord swell.

This was the case with the Dhaka eruption. CHRF is one of the leading microbiology laboratories in Southeast Asia and is responsible for tracking meningitis in the country for the World Health Organization. “Every case of meningitis that comes in, we cultivate,” Saha told me. “We do antigen tests for pneumococci, Neisseria meningitidis, Haemophilus influenzae and GBS” or group B streptococci – the four infections most likely to cause meningitis. “Then we do a much more sensitive and specific test for Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria as this causes the highest percentage of cases. And then we also do real-time PCR to look for DNA fragments from one of these pathogens. ”

When the outbreak began, the cause was thought to be bacterial again, but none of the tests could locate a pathogen. Over the next year, Saha worked to solve the puzzle, sometimes in collaboration with other laboratories. A partnership with an organization in China broke up when the group was unwilling to share their techniques. Another group of researchers in Canada did their own tests on the meningitis samples, but couldn’t figure out the cause either. Not long after, Saha was attending a conference at the British Museum where she gave a presentation entitled “The Dark Side of Meningitis”. “It was a negative conversation,” recalls Saha. “How: Why does everyone only talk about the successful cases? We have to talk about thousands of cases each year where we have no idea what is causing the disease. ”

Before meeting DeRisi, Saha was skeptical about further collaboration. But the two hit it off right away. Although DeRisi could be impatient, Saha liked that he was direct and appreciated that his “ethics are very strong. In his head he says: That’s right; that is wrong; I’ll do that. ”Still, she proceeded cautiously. “Because IDseq was new and I’m very meticulous, I built in a lot of controls,” she told me. Of the 97 cerebrospinal fluid samples, only 25 were from actual mystery meningitis cases. The remainder were either from cases for which Saha’s lab had already identified the cause or were not meningitis at all. Several were just water. “The idea was that all of this would be tested and the process dazzled,” says Saha. “Because I had to see whether the platform worked or not.”

However, when Saha and her team performed the mysterious meningitis testing through IDseq, the result was surprising. Rather than uncovering a bacterial cause as expected, a third of the samples showed signs of the Chikungunya virus – particularly a neuroinvasive strain that was thought to be extremely rare. “At first we thought: That can’t be true!” Saha remembers. “But when Joe and I realized it was Chikungunya, I went back and looked at the other 200 samples we had collected around the same time. And we also found the virus in some of these samples. ”

Until recently, chikungunya was a comparatively rare disease that occurs mainly in parts of central and east Africa. “Then it just exploded across the Caribbean and Africa and across Southeast Asia to India and Bangladesh,” DeRisi told me. No cases of chikungunya were reported in Latin America in 2011. In 2014 there were a million.

Common chikungunya can cause permanent neurological damage and lifelong joint pain. DeRisi called the disease “enormously devastating” and stated that chikungunya means “to be distorted” in the Kimakonde language spoken in Tanzania. But one neuroinvasive version that caused brain damage, particularly affecting children and infants, was particularly alarming.

Tags Detective, disease, Times, York