“It takes a remarkable force to keep nearly a million people quietly indoors for an entire day, home from work and school, from neighborhood errands and out-of-town travel. It takes a remarkable force to keep businesses closed and cars off the road, to keep playgrounds empty and porches unused across a densely populated place 125 square miles in size. This happened … not because armed officers went door-to-door, or imposed a curfew, or threatened martial law.

As of early March, there were fewer than 200 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the United States. Nonetheless, Congress passed, and US president Donald Trump signed, an $8.3 billion "emergency funding" bill theoretically related to containing the disease. Had the federal government done nothing at all, the "beer flu" might have conceivably have ended up killing a tiny fraction of the number of Americans who will die of influenza during the same period.

WASHINGTON DC (March 5, 2020) — In a case before the US Supreme Court that could determine how far the courts may go in shielding police from being held accountable for wrongdoing, The Rutherford Institute is challenging a lower court ruling that prevents victims of police shootings for suing police for violations of their civil rights 

On March 3, US president Donald Trump spoke (via telephone) with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, chief of the Taliban's Doha diplomatic office and signer, on behalf of his organization, of the recently-concluded Afghanistan "peace deal." "The direct contact between an American president and a top Taliban leader would once have been unthinkable," writes Michael Crowley at the New York Times.