US Politics

Donald Trump’s pardon of four American men convicted of killing Iraqi civilians while working as contractors in 2007 violated US obligations under international law, United Nations human rights experts have said.Nicholas Slatten was convicted of first-degree murder and Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard were convicted of voluntary and attempted manslaughter over an incident in which US contractors opened fire in busy traffic in a Baghdad square and killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians.The four contractors, who worked for the private security firm Blackwater, owned by the brother of Trump’s education secretary, were included in a wave of pre-Christmas pardons announced by the White House.“Pardoning the Blackwater contractors is an affront to justice and to the victims of the Nisour Square massacre and their families,” said Jelena Aparac, the chair of the UN working group on the use of mercenaries.The group said the Geneva conventions obliged states to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes, even when they are acting as private security contractors. “These pardons violate US obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level,” it said.By allowing private security contractors to “operate with impunity in armed conflicts”, states would be emboldened to circumvent their obligations under humanitarian law, the group said.The pardons have been strongly criticised by many in the US. Gen David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, respectively the commander of US forces and the US ambassador in Iraq at the time of the incident, called Trump’s pardons “hugely damaging, an action that tells the world that Americans abroad can commit the most heinous crimes with impunity”.In a statement announcing the pardons, the White House said the move was “broadly supported by the public” and backed by a number of Republican lawmakers. More

How we will ultimately remember the pandemic of 2020 is not yet known. Right now, it is the omnipotent crisis, dominating every waking moment. For those with any interest in the news, there are the daily death totals, surpassing those of 9/11, and reminders that a vaccine is here but not here, still many months away from ending this hell for good.But a more deadly pandemic in 1918 and 1919 was largely lost to history, swallowed by the end of the first world war and the roaring 20s, the mass death hardly making a groove in the long-term psyche of the nation. The generation that lived through coronavirus may talk about it until they die or choose, like their ancestors in the early 20th century, to bury it away and focus on new horizons.Covid-19 has shown us, at least, what will be necessary and what we can absolutely do without. There are white-collar jobs that can be performed adequately from home. For some companies, large offices in central business districts are an extravagant waste of money. Hygiene, we hope, will change forever, with routine hand-washing and occasional mask-wearing in crowded areas becoming normalized in America. One hundred years ago, survivors of the flu pandemic learned about the importance of fresh air and proper ventilation, and this is a lesson we were forced, under horrific circumstances, to internalize anew.We learned, too, what it is we don’t want – a world utterly consumed by screens. Yes, we will maintain our smartphone addictions, and laptops and tablets will continue to consume much of our time inside our homes. The pandemic has boosted Zoom stock by 500%. For many of us, this has been 2020: one Zoom after another, human faces in little boxes. In the early months of the pandemic, there were Zoom birthday parties, Zoom cocktails, Zoom Easters and Zoom Passovers. The life we had lost needed to be approximated, as much as possible, by Zoomworld, forging connections and alleviating boredom.After a while, I didn’t want to Zoom any more. I’m sure I wasn’t alone. Each drifting gaze, faulty connection, and wistful joke about the time we’d all be indoors at the bar again was a reminder of what I had lost. As the year drifted on and I tried to navigate a world with such conflicting public health guidance, friend meet-ups sporadically scheduled, I knew that I never wanted to endure another social interaction on a screen again. It was reality flattened and condensed, drained of what it should be. The longer I spoke to the distant, pixelated face in front of me, the more I remembered that this facsimile of my prior life wasn’t anything close to what I wanted.Children had it worse. For years, tech maximalists had sold us a future of education-by-screen; why have physical classrooms at all? The internet offered unlimited possibility. Information was everywhere, easily summoned at a keystroke. Students of the 21st-century classroom would merely need lessons uploaded to their screens. A teacher only had to be a face trapped in a sleek tablet.Students make friends, learn from each other, and form crucial bonds with their teachersAs we’ve learned, remote learning in public schools has been a disaster. Yawning inequality gaps have only been exacerbated, with the wealthiest students enjoying an in-person education at private schools while poorer students suffer in school districts that have sent many of them home. Not all students have functioning internet. Others live in chaotic households that make daily learning impossible. In December, families sued the state of California, alleging school districts failed to provide “basic educational equality” for children of color from low-income backgrounds during the pandemic.Rectifying this divide – universal broadband access is a worthy goal – would make remote learning more viable, but it is still a lackluster substitute for the socialization that comes with education in a physical classroom. Students make friends, learn from each other, and form crucial bonds with their teachers. Young children are in particular need of in-person learning. Adequate mental and emotional development can’t happen in isolation.Many people understood this before the pandemic. But for a long period of time, there were those that argued that more tech would bolster the education experience. To boost test scores – of course, big tech loved a lengthy standardized test – just pay for an interactive whiteboard in every classroom and shell out for individual tablets. Why was this better? Well, it was shiny and new.Higher education, long overpriced, faces its own post-pandemic reckoning, with many smaller schools threatened with closure. College students may find some educational functions can be performed remotely. Yet the MOOC revolution and online-only schools will not be able to supplant the surviving colleges and universities that prioritize in-person education. Few students that endured a year of Zoom classes will demand more of them when the pandemic ends. Professors, meanwhile, will be eager to resume life inside a classroom, where lively discussions and genuine learning can take place naturally without the mediator of a Zoom screen.The pandemic made it easy to imagine an approaching dystopia: one in which, in the coming years, we would all sequester ourselves away from light and air, too terrified to venture outdoors. Instead of heading to the bar or the gym, we would build worlds of our own within our four walls, content to approximate the reality we once knew.Instead, we rediscovered parks and trails, flocked to beaches, and revolutionized city streets with outdoor dining. We wearied of our devices. There is no app or program that can replicate a friend’s laughter across the table or a teacher’s lesson at the front of a classroom. After the pandemic, in a post-vaccination world, we will race back to our old lives. Zoomworld will belong to history. More

Luke Letlow, Louisiana’s incoming Republican congressman, has died from complications related to Covid-19 at the age of 41.
“The family appreciates the numerous prayers and support over the past days but asks for privacy during this difficult and unexpected time,” Letlow’s spokesman, Andrew Bautsch, said in a statement. “A statement from the family along with funeral arrangements will be announced at a later time.”
Louisiana’s eight-member congressional delegation called Letlow’s death devastating. “Luke had such a positive spirit, and a tremendously bright future ahead of him,” they said in a statement.
“He was looking forward to serving the people of Louisiana in Congress, and we were excited to welcome him to our delegation where he was ready to make an even greater impact on our state and our nation.”
US cases
The state’s newest congressman, who was due to take office in January, was admitted to a hospital in Monroe on 19 December after testing positive for Covid-19. He was later transferred to a hospital in Shreveport and placed in intensive care.
Dr GE Ghali of LSU Health Shreveport told the Advocate that Letlow had no underlying health conditions that would have put him at greater risk of Covid complications.
Letlow, from the small town of Start in Richland Parish, was elected in a December runoff election to fill the seat vacated by Ralph Abraham. Letlow had been Abraham’s chief of staff and ran with his boss’s backing for the job.
US House leaders offered their condolences on Tuesday night. “May it be a comfort to Luke’s wife Julia and their children Jeremiah and Jacqueline that so many mourn their loss and are praying for them at this sad time,“ said Nancy Pelosi.

More than 7,000 people in Louisiana have died of Covid-19 since March, according to data from the state health department.
When he announced his positive test, Letlow joined a list of Louisiana officials who have contracted the coronavirus since the pandemic began, including Sen Bill Cassidy.
Cassidy, a Republican and doctor who tested positive for Covid-19 earlier this year and has since recovered, posted in a Twitter video: “It just, just, just, just brings home Covid can kill. For most folks it doesn’t, but it truly can. So, as you remember Luke, his widow, his children in your prayers, remember as well to be careful with Covid.” More

The sense of relief Democrats felt with Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election was not the same as a feeling of victory.
The party’s loss of congressional seats and failure to take control of state legislatures, not to mention the US Senate, indicated an alarming slippage for a party that had thought it was growing as Trump was supposedly torching the Republican brand.
After the election, a fierce internal Democratic debate broke out, with centrists arguing that slogans such as “Defund the police” and “Medicare for All” had hurt the party with moderate voters and exposed candidates to wild accusations from Republicans equating universal healthcare with Pol Pot.
The progressives said that on the contrary, the party had not staked out its program on behalf of working people proudly enough, instead trying to play it safe behind an innocuous presidential candidate whose main pitch was a return to normalcy.
The problem, said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to reach voters with decisive rebuttals to wild charges from Republicans.
The political strategist David Axelrod said the problem was that the party needed to learn how not to talk down to working-class voters, noting that while Democrats dominated in and around big cities in the 2020 election, Republicans had won in 80% of US counties.
“If Democrats continue to cede 80% of the country, if they can’t break through, they’re kind of screwed, in my view, at least in the short run,” Axelrod said on his podcast.
The debate is not academic. Two years from now, with Joe Biden in the White House and the Senate up for grabs, the Democrats could create their first opportunity in more than a decade to do something big: deliver major legislation to expand healthcare, protect voting rights, defend the environment, or implement humane immigration policy.
Democratic political analysts, organizers and operatives interviewed by the Guardian agreed that opportunity lay ahead, but emphasized that to capitalize on it, the party must renew its efforts to connect with voters all year long, at a local level, and not be afraid of progressive messaging especially on economic issues.
One key insight: local politics is not the same as national politics, and opportunities to reach even diehard Trump supporters abound when there is no Super Bowl presidential race inflaming partisan passions.
“Locally, you can do more,” said David Pepper, the outgoing state chair of the Democratic party in Ohio. “You can win and make progress despite the national conversation. It’s a different type of politics.
“It’s what the Koch brothers did for decades before we caught up.”
The entire Democratic party sensed opportunity in 2020. With Trump having alienated a significant share of moderate voters, and Democrats running high-single-digits ahead of Republicans on the generic ballot, control of both Congress and the White House seemed tantalizingly close. The party spent $50m in an effort to flip state legislatures in advance of the redistricting process.
But when the dust had settled, none of the eight statehouses targeted by Democrats produced a win, and control of the US Senate hung on thin hopes of winning two runoff races next month in Georgia. Most damagingly, Democrats had lost at least 11 seats in Congress, with candidates swamped by Trump voters but also not helped by Biden at the top of the ticket.
Democratic primary voters picked Biden in part on the theory that he was most capable of beating Trump. But Democrats disagree on whether Biden’s success in districts where other Democrats lost meant that the party seemed too far left – or insufficiently bold in its progressive prescriptions.
“In general, instead of blaming the progressives for the down-ballot failures, we should listen to them more,” said Brad Bannon, a Washington-based Democratic strategist. “Because I think the progressives in the party do a better job of talking basic economics, and talking about it in a way that people relate to.”
There were bright spots. In Ohio, Democrats flipped a state supreme court seat by 10 points – in the single race in the entire country in which Democrats flipped a statewide seat from red to blue in a state Trump won.
Pepper, the outgoing party chair, said the party had made local gains by encouraging voters to vote their entire ballots – instead of skipping down-ballot races – and by seeking to contest every election, no matter how local, in every year, not just in presidential races and during midterms.
“We’ve done that for five years and it totally works,” Pepper said. “We have in Ohio now our biggest city footprint in recent history at least. We have mayors in almost every big city, winning by more, and bigger council footprints in these big cities.”
Fighting to win local elections in 2019, Ohio Democrats unseated Republican mayors in three cities – Irontown, Coshocton and Norwalk – in counties that Trump won just one year later by an average of 45 points.
But the swell of partisan politics in 2020 overwhelmed the ability of scrappy campaigning to make a difference statewide, with Trump taking Ohio by eight points.
To fight in a noisy election year, Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times last month, Democrats need to beef up their ability to go on TV and target ads on the internet for an entire election cycle instead of right before elections.
But it’s not clear what level of messaging would be required to bring around Republican-leaning voters, when a majority of Republicans are prepared to believe, absent any evidence, in a multi-state conspiracy to steal the presidential election – in short, to believe anything that Trump, a historic liar, says.
One of Trump’s strengths is his zeal at playing into the empirically proven politics of anger and resentment, of racist fears and xenophobic scapegoating. Democrats are aware that one challenge they face is to offer an alternative to voters who might be susceptible to, or at least not repelled by, that kind of pitch.
“It’s not just about having deliverables and tangibles to offer,” said Axelrod on the Hacks on Tap podcast. “It’s about changing an attitude that basically thinks of these folks as something less.
“The Democratic party envisions itself as the party of working people but it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of working people. And the Democratic party needs to figure that out.” More

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, blocked an effort by Democrats to quickly increase coronavirus relief payments to US citizens from $600 to $2,000. Donald Trump demanded the raise on Tuesday, tweeting that Americans had ‘suffered enough’ from the Covid pandemic. But amid mounting pressure from fellow Republicans,  McConnell objected to a move by Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, to swiftly pass the measure
McConnell blocks initial Democratic effort for $2,000 Covid stimulus checks More

A growing number of Republicans on Tuesday backed Donald Trump’s demand to increase coronavirus relief payments to US citizens from $600 to $2,000, though the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, blocked Democrats’ effort to quickly pass the measure.
Trump’s party has been plunged into chaos and conflict over his demands to increase one-off cheques for Americans, a measure that passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on Monday.
“$2000 for our great people, not $600!,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday, saying Republicans must approve the payments “unless they have a death wish”.
The conflict over the payments has created an odd situation in the last days of his administration where Trump and Democrats are pushing for the same outcome. Some critics saw Trump’s move as an apparent return to his posture as a populist outsider and disrupter of the Washington establishment, and as loyalty tests to strengthen his sway after he leaves offices.
His position has also created a dilemma for McConnell, while Democrats – and Senator Bernie Sanders – see a renewed chance to pass a higher amount of aid with so many Americans facing financial hardship.
Put on the spot by Trump, more Republicans on Tuesday abandoned their previous opposition to the higher sum and came over to the president’s side. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, senators from Georgia facing tight races for re-election next week, tweeted their support for $2,000 direct payments. Loeffler told the Fox News channel: “I’ve stood by the president 100% of the time. I’m proud to do that and I’ve said absolutely we need to get relief to Americans now and I will support that.”

Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump)
Unless Republicans have a death wish, and it is also the right thing to do, they must approve the $2000 payments ASAP. $600 IS NOT ENOUGH! Also, get rid of Section 230 – Don’t let Big Tech steal our Country, and don’t let the Democrats steal the Presidential Election. Get tough! https://t.co/GMotstu7OI

December 29, 2020

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida did likewise, stating: “I agree with the president that millions of working-class families are in dire need of additional relief, which is why I support $2,000 in direct payments.” Fellow Republican Josh Hawley has also expressed support.
Final passage of the aid increase in the Senate would require 60 votes and the backing of a dozen Republicans to hand Trump an unlikely victory.
The Georgia runoffs could weigh heavily in McConnell’s thinking on whether to allow such a vote to go ahead.
As Trump played golf in Florida on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, made a plea from the Senate floor: “In the wealthiest nation on earth, modern-day breadlines stretch for miles down American highways. The fastest way to get money into Americans’ pockets is to send some of their tax dollars right back from where they came.
“Two-thousand-dollar stimulus cheques could mean the difference between American families having groceries for a few extra weeks or going hungry. The difference between paying the rent or being kicked out of your home that you’ve lived in for years. It could buy precious time for tens of millions of people as the vaccine thankfully makes its way across the country.”
Schumer demanded: “Will Senate Republicans stand against the House of Representatives, the Democratic majority in the Senate, and the president of their own party to prevent these $2,000 checks from going out the door?”
McConnell objected, blocking initial consideration of the measure, but was set to come under growing pressure from Democrats and members of his own party to hold an up-or-down vote this week.
For example Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, threatened to block McConnell from holding a separate vote on Wednesday to override Trump’s veto of a $740bn defence bill unless the majority leader yields.
“This week on the Senate floor Mitch McConnell wants to vote to override Trump’s veto of the $740bn defense funding bill and then head home for the New Year,” Sanders said. “I’m going to object until we get a vote on legislation to provide a $2,000 direct payment to the working class.”
The defence bill is heading to the Senate after the House voted 322 to 87 to override Trump’s presidential veto. It was the first time either chamber of Congress has delivered such a rebuke. Some 109 Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues to ensure the required two-thirds majority.
This prompted further anger and criticism from Trump against his own party. “Weak and tired Republican ‘leadership’ will allow the bad Defense Bill to pass,” he tweeted, complaining that the legislation will change the names of military bases that honour Confederate leaders and maintain legal protects for big tech companies.
Trump has been less engaged with Congress than previous presidents and remained on the sidelines during months of negotiations over the $900bn coronavirus relief package, only to threaten to withdraw his signature before finally caving in last Sunday.
But the current disputes appear connected to his fixation with overturning his election defeat. He has railed against McConnell and others for acknowledging Biden as president-elect and called on Republicans to raise objections when Congress gathers to certify the outcome on 6 January. Some analysts have described it as less a power grab than an attention grab by a man who sees the media spotlight shifting to Biden.
Trump tweeted: “….Can you imagine if the Republicans stole a Presidential Election from the Democrats – All hell would break out. Republican leadership only wants the path of least resistance. Our leaders (not me, of course!) are pathetic. They only know how to lose!”
Trump’s erratic behaviour in the final weeks of his presidency have even alienated media owner and longtime ally Rupert Murdoch. His New York Post newspaper said in an editorial this week: “If you insist on spending your final days in office threatening to burn it all down, that will be how you are remembered. Not as a revolutionary, but as the anarchist holding the match.” More

Two Georgia counties must reverse their decision to purge thousands from voter rolls in advance of the state’s 5 January runoff elections that will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the US Senate.Georgia federal judge Leslie Abrams Gardner said in an order filed late on Monday that these two counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address information to invalidate voter registrations, Reuters reported.“Defendants are enjoined from removing any challenged voters in Ben Hill and Muscogee Counties from the registration lists on the basis of National Change of Address data,” she said in the court order. This judge is the sister of Stacey Abrams, the Democratic activist who lost a race for Georgia governor in 2018.Of the more than 4,000 registrations that officials tried to rescind, the vast majority were in Muscogee County. President-elect Joe Biden won this county during the November election. Another 150 were in Ben Hill county, which Donald Trump won with a sizable margin.Almost 2.1 million people – more than 25% of Georgia’s registered voters – have voted in the Senate runoff election that started on 14 December. This race will decide whether Democrats control both houses of Congress.In turn, the result will also influence the fate of Biden’s policy initiatives as a Republican-controlled Senate – even if held by a slim majority – would probably block his agenda. This also includes Biden’s ability to secure his desired cabinet appointees.Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are facing off against GOP incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively. Recent data from FiveThirtyEight places Warnock and Perdue slightly ahead of their opponents.Warnock and Ossoff victories would mean that the Senate is divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. In situations where votes on legislation are evenly split, the tie-breaking vote would be cast by Kamala Harris, as vice-president.The deeply significant runoff has prompted record-breaking fundraising. Ossoff and Warnock each raised more than $100m in a mere two months–surpassing their conservative opponents. Ossoff, who runs a media production business, raised more than $106m from 15 October to 16 December, per his campaign’s most recent financial report. Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, took in slightly more than $103m.Leaders of both parties have made campaign stops. Biden – the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992 – and Harris have campaigned in the state. Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, have also campaigned.Reuters contributed to this report More

Donald Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the news headlines in 2020. Three terms in particular came to symbolise the year: “witch-hunt,” “black swan” and “exponential”.Trump has tweeted the phrase “witch-hunt” approximately once every three days on average during his presidency and not only in connection with his impeachment trial. He continued to use it later in the year to describe accusations that he mismanaged America’s Covid-19 response, inquiries into his tax returns, an investigation into alleged criminal conduct at the Trump Organization and other controversies.Most people made their minds up long ago about whether Trump was guilty of his alleged transgressions. But neither his supporters nor his critics have given full thought to the linguistic implications of the term “witch-hunt”. Perhaps it doesn’t mean what they think it does.The original witch-hunts began in early modern Europe and spread to colonial America, in the religious persecution of those accused of practising witchcraft. In Europe, an estimated 40,000-60,000 people – mainly women – were executed between 1400 and 1782. Americans usually think of the 1692-93 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in which 30 people were convicted and 19 hanged.The term entered widespread use only in the mid-20th century, to describe the frenzied search for communists “under the bed”. Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem trials, The Crucible, was an allegory for US senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings into alleged communist infiltration of the US government.To be sure, the 17th-century witch trials and McCarthyism differed in important ways. For one thing, communists really existed. But the two historical episodes had one thing in common that distinguishes them from the accusations against Trump. In a genuine witch-hunt, the hunters start from the firm belief that a particular type of evil-doer – witches or communists – is hiding in plain sight, and then try to identify who they are.When the president and his many supporters accuse his detractors of carrying out a witch-hunt, they are making a different claim. They are claiming that Trump’s critics start from the unwavering belief that he is up to no good, and see it as their job to find crimes to pin on him. They have identified him, and they are out to get him one way or another. “Persecution” or “harassment” would more accurately convey Trump’s meaning.Such distinctions are crucial. When federal authorities charged the gangster Al Capone with tax evasion in 1931, it was not a witch-hunt. The target of their investigation was determined first; then the charges that could put him away were identified – an application of the rule of law.The second phrase that pervaded 2020 was “black swan”. When the new coronavirus spread beyond China and suddenly affected the health and jobs of people around the world, many described it as a quintessential “black swan” event.Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s eponymous 2007 book turned black swan virtually into a household expression, because it appeared to describe the 2007-09 financial crisis so well. Taleb defined the term to mean a major event that nobody realised was even a possibility, because they had never seen one of its kind before. But the metaphor is more insightful than that.The historical importance of the notion of a black swan lies in British philosophy. Like most Britons, David Hume (writing in the 18th century) and John Stuart Mill (writing in the 19th century) had never seen one. Reasoning by induction, they might easily have concluded that all swans were white. But, as British ornithologists were aware, Dutch explorers had discovered black swans in Australia in 1697. So, the best way to use the black swan metaphor is to point out that competent experts can and do factor in data from other decades, centuries and countries, and that competent policymakers should listen to their warnings.Contrary to the widespread belief in US financial markets before 2007, housing prices can go down as well as up. Similarly, health experts and well-informed policymakers had been well aware before 2020 that a pandemic like Covid-19 was not only possible, but likely to strike sooner or later. In too many countries, however, political leaders failed to heed the warnings and recommendations. The world has paid dearly for their mistake.So, this year’s Covid-19 pandemic was indeed a black swan. But the phrase is perhaps best defined not just as a sudden major development that catches the general public by surprise, but as a “tail event” – known by scientific experts and responsible officials to be a dangerous possibility (albeit one with relatively low probability in any given year).Finally, the word “exponential” was used frequently in common speech even before the pandemic – and almost always incorrectly, to mean “rapid”. Of course, anyone wishing to play language police must confront the argument made by Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, who insisted that, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.”But linguistic precision is often important for achieving intellectual precision. Exponential is a mathematical term. It does not mean rapid. Hard as this may be to believe, there is not even a correlation or association between exponential and high growth rates. The money that one has in the bank changes exponentially, due to compound interest, but the rate can be low or even negative, as European interest rates demonstrate.With the arrival of Covid-19, people finally began to use the word “exponential” correctly, to describe the number of infections. The reason why the number of cases rises exponentially is that each infected person infects a number of other people. Epidemiologists call this average ratio the rate of reproduction, represented by R. It is designated R0 in a population with no immunity and no countermeasures.The use of R has drawbacks, particularly the difficulty of estimating it. But the concept makes an important point. If R is greater than one, as it was in the early stages of the pandemic and presumably has become again in many places, it means that things are getting worse.R can be brought down via wearing face masks, social distancing, frequent hand-washing, testing, isolation, and now inoculation with the new Covid-19 vaccines. When R falls below one, it means that the pandemic is dying out, and that the rate of exponential growth is negative.So, here’s wishing everyone no witches to hunt, the swans they expect and an R well below one in 2021.• Jeffrey Frankel is a professor at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government. He served as a member of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers© Project Syndicate More