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Can I not have one g-ddamned day of hope?Just one day. In the middle of an endless waking nightmare. Jeremy Faust is the doctor in Boston who wrote a couple of pieces early in the epidemic for Slate, arguing (presciently) that the true fatality rate for COVID-19 was probably far below the three-percent figure gleaned from China’s Wuhan data. If it were really that high, he reasoned, we would have seen more dead on the Diamond Princess cruise after a huge number of passengers became infected. He’s been commenting sporadically on Twitter since then and noticed the enthusiasm over...

Harvard University is not ruling out the possibility that it might not open its campus again to students until 2021. The announcement comes as Harvard researchers have said that social distancing measures may be necessary until 2022. "We are analyzing multiple scenarios, but, in the end, we will be guided by public health considerations—just as we were in deciding on March 10 to send students home and then to implement plans for remote work" In a message to students on Monday, Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow wrote, "Many of you are concerned about plans for the fall. We are analyzing...

Professor Charles Lieber’s arrest on Jan. 28 made headlines on all the major U.S. media. After all, he was not only a Harvard professor, he was a world-class researcher in nanotechnology, working on highly sensitive research projects for the U.S. government. The FBI complaint alleges that he had been secretly participating in China’s “Thousand Talents Plan” since 2011, paid some $600,000 a year plus expenses to open and operate a lab at the Wuhan University of Technology (yes, that Wuhan). We know that China contracts with American experts in this way in order to steal their research and gain commercial...

Millions of college students will be closing out the semester from home, with online courses replacing in-person offerings. Due to the abrupt change, many schools are acknowledging the disruption, and associated changes in students’ circumstances, may lead to a decrease in academic performance unrelated to effort or intelligence, and are therefore instituting grading policies that provide appropriate understanding for the bizarre situation. Many universities, including Georgetown, Duke, University of Pennsylvania, have extended the deadline for taking a class pass/fail until either the last day of classes or even a week after report cards are released. However, many student groups are...

WASHINGTON - The Trump administration's decision to let states chart their own responses to the coronavirus crisis rather than impose a national strategy will cost thousands of lives and is likely to result in an open-ended outbreak rolling across the country, a dozen public health experts told NBC News. The only way to win what President Donald Trump has called a war against an "invisible enemy" is to establish a unified federal command, the experts insist - something Trump has yet to do. So far, the federal government hasn't leveraged all its authority and influence to dramatically expand testing and...

When Harvard told students to leave its dorms for the rest of the spring term earlier in March, most would have expected that they would be empty until the fall. But if some students have their way, the dorms will soon be filled with a new kind of resident. A petition calling for Harvard to house homeless people in its residential properties has gained serious momentum, having already amassed over 1,000 signatures. The author of the petition, Masters of Divinity candidate at Harvard’s Divinity School Christopher Diak also told The Harvard Crimson that he thought that because “there will be...

Harvard University, which has the largest endowment of any school in the country, is cutting its subcontracted dining hall workers without pay as it shuts down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The move is drawing criticism from employment rights advocates on and off campus who point to the university's $40.9 billion endowment as evidence that the school is hardly in financial straits. They also claim the decision violates Harvard's wage equality policy, which requires the university to compensate dining hall contract workers in a fashion comparable to the school's directly hired employees. Harvard closed campus dining halls and other...

Harvard University, which has the largest endowment of any school in the country, is cutting its subcontracted dining hall workers without pay as it shuts down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The move is drawing criticism from employment rights advocates on and off campus who point to the university's $40.9 billion endowment as evidence that the school is hardly in financial straits. They also claim the decision violates Harvard's wage equality policy, which requires the university to compensate dining hall contract workers in a fashion comparable to the school's directly hired employees.

Starting March 23, Harvard will not have in-person classes for the remainder of the spring semester amid fears of spreading the COVID-19 coronavirus, the university announced Tuesday. “The decision to move to virtual instruction was not made lightly,” University President Lawrence S. Bacow said in a statement. “The goal of these changes is to minimize the need to gather in large groups and spend prolonged time in close proximity with each other in spaces such as classrooms, dining halls, and residential buildings.” Students at Harvard release for spring break this Saturday and will begin remote classes. They are asked not...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is suspending her presidential campaign, a source familiar with the decision tells NBC News, a bitter blow for a senator who was long seen by prominent Democrats as headed for the White House. The decision ends a frantic year of campaigning for a candidate who branded herself as a progressive fighter from humble beginnings who was ready to take on a broken and corrupt system.

Mr Obama was briefed immediately on the suspected poisoning of the 41 year-old, which Chinese officials are linking to Mr Heywood’s powerful political allies, when American diplomats were told of the murder allegation. Gu Kailai, Mr Heywood’s former business partner and the wife of Bo Xilai, a senior politician who had been tipped for the highest political office, is suspected of ordering the Briton’s murder in a case at the centre of a political storm in China. The couple have disappeared from sight as the Communist Party attempts to regain stability....... Mr Obama was informed of suspicions over Mr Heywood’s...

Harvard, the crème de la crème of Ivy League education, has been proudly engaging in racial discrimination — in 2020.  Harvard has a sordid history of employing and supporting racists and engaging in antisemitic limitations on the admission of Jews. But this article isn't about the past; it is about present-day discrimination of a different group of Harvard-hated students: Asians. Asians have had their share of discrimination in American history, recall the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese internment camps as examples. But the Asian U.S. community has proven themselves to be resilient and forward-looking, and they have effectively jumped over...

Almost half of all blacks and Hispanics who attend Harvard were admitted because of illegal racial preferences in admissions according to a brief just filed by the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice has filed a brief in a federal lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions that says Harvard's race-based admissions process violates federal law. This filing marks a extreme departure from the Obama Civil Rights Division that spent significant time and resources seeking to expand the use of race in decision making. The brief filed by the Justice Department says Harvard "considers applicants’ race at virtually every...

The Department of Justice today filed an amicus brief in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In its amicus brief, the United States explains that Harvard’s expansive use of race in its admissions process violates federal civil-rights law and Supreme Court precedent. “Race discrimination hurts people and is never benign,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division. “Unconstitutionally partitioning Americans into racial and ethnic blocs harms all involved by fostering stereotypes, bitterness, and division among the American people. The...

For generations of future diplomats and cabinet officials educated at Harvard’s renowned John F. Kennedy School of Government, orientation day has come with a name placard that the students carry from class to class, so their professors can easily call on them. When Diego Garcia Blum, 30, got his placard last fall, the first-year graduate student immediately took a Sharpie to it, writing “He/Him” next to the big block letters of his name. Other students did the same thing, writing “She/Her” and “They/Them.” “Yup! Day 1,” Mr. Garcia Blum, recalled, adding, “That’s when I thought, the students are ahead of...

*** [The Department of Education's] records since approximately 1990 show U.S. universities and colleges have reported donations from Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in excess of $6.6 billion, but this sum may be significantly underestimated. According to investigations by Congress, GAO, and the Department, colleges and universities significantly underreport their foreign gifts and contracts. *** WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education announced today it is launching investigations into both Harvard and Yale Universities after it appears both Ivy League higher education institutions potentially failed to report hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign gifts and...

The Education Department opened investigations into Harvard and Yale as part of a continuing review that has found U.S. universities failed to report at least $6.5 billion in foreign funding from countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, according to department materials viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The investigations into the Ivy League schools are the latest in a clash between U.S. universities and a coalition of federal officials including law enforcement, research funders such as the National Institutes of Health and Defense and Energy Departments, and a bipartisan group in Congress that has raised concerns about the reliance...

The Department of Justice announced today that the Chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department and two Chinese nationals have been charged in connection with aiding the People’s Republic of China.  Dr. Charles Lieber, 60, Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, was arrested this morning and charged by criminal complaint with one count of making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement.  Lieber will appear this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts.Yanqing Ye, 29, a Chinese national, was charged in an indictment today with...

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University professor has been c harged with lying about his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program and concealing payments he received from the Chinese government for research, federal officials said Tuesday. Charles Lieber, chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology, is accused of hiding his involvement in China’s Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed to recruit people with access to and knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property.

The chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department was charged in a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday on allegations that he did not disclose Chinese government funding he received, in an escalation of U.S. efforts to counter what officials describe as Beijing’s aggressive recruitment at U.S. universities. The professor, Charles Lieber, allegedly lied to the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health about his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Plan, the complaint said. U.S. authorities have raised alarms in particular about the so-called talent programs run by the Chinese government, which officials say create conflicts of interest and offer incentives to...