“For us Native Americans, we need to be together, sharing food, stories, praying so our loved ones who are dead can reach the creator,” said Robert Gill, a funeral director from Buffalo, Minn., and a citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe. Mr. Gill said he preserved some bodies for months to give people a…
Spurred by rising Covid cases and the Delta variant’s spread, a wave of major employers announced the same rule for unvaccinated workers this week: They will need to submit to regular surveillance testing. The new requirement raises a thorny question: Who pays for those coronavirus tests? Doctors typically charge about $50 to $100 for the…
President Biden is in a tough spot: He campaigned on the ideas that he had the team to manage a pandemic and that his five-decade career as a Washington deal maker was just the ticket to overcome the country’s political polarization. That’s not happening, not even a little. Not only are Republicans resisting Mr. Biden’s…
Reconsidering pseudonymity and what it means to “be yourself” online.
That decision does not mean the F.D.A. has broadly authorized Johnson & Johnson to distribute doses made by Emergent on an emergency basis. The F.D.A. signed off on previous batches of vaccine made at the Baltimore factory but with a warning that it could not guarantee the company had followed good manufacturing practices. The agency…
Making things even more complex is the fact that the rules frequently change. In Spain, nighttime curfews banning people from being outside between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. were reintroduced in some spots last week, including Barcelona. “If you’ve come here to party then it could be disappointing, but if you are here for the…
A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding. In June, an American scientist discovered that more than 200 genetic sequences from Covid-19 patient samples isolated in China early in the pandemic had puzzlingly been removed from an online database. With some digital sleuthing, Jesse Bloom, a virologist…
When Congress created Supplemental Security Income in 1972, it left no question about its intentions. The program, lawmakers wrote, was “designed to provide a positive assurance that the nation’s aged, blind and disabled people would no longer have to subsist on below-poverty-level incomes.” Today, it helps ensure the opposite. The maximum annual benefit is $9,528,…
In yet another unexpected and unwelcome twist in the pandemic, fully immunized people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant may spread the virus to others just as easily as unvaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report published on Friday. The vaccines remain powerfully effective against severe illness…
This time of year, my diet turns almost completely plant-based. I suppose it’s only natural: Height-of-season summer produce is seductive, with tantalizing shapes and colors, and the kind of sweetness that comes from being freshly picked. This is the magic moment when melons, berries, stone fruit, peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans and squashes collide. This menu…