WASHINGTON — The baby had so many pustules ravaging his face he could barely open his right eye, a photograph that left the president, national security adviser and close aides nearly speechless with horror.
A global pandemic had begun in a hospital in Oklahoma City. Doctors soon diagnosed smallpox, a virulent, deadly and disfiguring infection that had disappeared from the planet two decades before. What would the president do?
This was the scenario that a cast of Washington power players sought to tackle over two days at Andrews Air Force Base in June 2001. The exercise, code-named Dark Winter, has passed into Washington lore as the first high-profile alarm of the dire consequences of a pandemic. For months after Dark Winter, advisers to President George W. Bush attempted to come to grips with what they predicted would happen in such a contagion: overwhelmed hospitals, broken medical supply chains and frenzied grocery buying.
Three months later, the 9/11 attacks made
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Increasingly, Democrats and Republicans believe that climate change and China pose a single interconnected challenge. As a result — and for the first time ever — a window is opening for bipartisan cooperation on climate policy. Historically progressive ideas like a 'carbon border adjustment mechanism' now have conservative champions, for instance. But with Washington's main focus on the Warming War with China, can it still save the planet?
A look at China’s electricity grid: how it works, who foots the bill, and how its structure leads to power crunches and expensive prices despite the relative abundance of energy in China.
The academic talks about the changing understanding of Leninist regimes; common misperceptions of the post-Mao era; and what the collapse of the Soviet Union means for China today.
