
Vaccination disparities reflect 'two Americas' this July 4th
CNN
Millions of Americans have their lives and livelihoods back and are basking in a summer of freedom. But a divided nation's varied faith in vaccines and a more infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus are thwarting hopes of a full declaration of independence from the pandemic.
President Joe Biden long ago named the Fourth of July as the moment when citizens would escape the clutches of the virus -- if the country united in one last huge effort to follow health guidelines and embraced the vaccine rollout. Biden fell short of his target of 70% of American adults getting at least one dose of vaccine by the holiday. In a briefing this week, Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said that more than 180 million Americans -- and 67% of adults -- had received at least one shot.
President Donald Trump’s allies in the Republican Party and his Make America Great Again movement — even some who previously warned against wading into new foreign conflicts — largely rallied behind his actions in Venezuela on Saturday, hours after the capture of President Nicolás Maduro in a large-scale military operation.

More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.











