Given Germany's notorious history of brutally stigmatizing various minority populations, it is shocking and outrageous that a German "research institute" and the Hamburg-based weekly news magazine would sink to such sleazy malice.

The U.S. Constitution is not "waived" due to disease or natural disaster. We must beware of politicians and other officials who seek to exercise power through "mandates" without a single vote or the active exercise of informed consent.

COVID-19 is a serious disease, but it bears constant repeating that the recovery rate now is between 97% and 99.75%.

We must resist authoritarian impulses and exercises by various officials seeking to consolidate power and impose their will over the constitutional processes and guarantees we enjoy. Our Constitution was designed and ratified for exactly such challenges and it has endured 231 years through a myriad of challenges far more grave than a virus.

While working talks have resumed, both China and India have reinforced their air and ground assets. China has advanced fighter jets at three air bases within striking distance of Indian military positions.

Indian diplomats have loudly denounced a recent law passed by the Chinese national legislature, the National People's Congress, which makes it mandatory for China's leaders never to negotiate away one inch of professed Chinese territory. The legislation referred to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity as "sacred and inviolable."

China also has underscored its inflexibility by constructing extended civilian housing along the Line of Actual Control, thereby defying Indian counterclaims that these future habitats are being built on territory seized by China.

It is likely that China will again initiate armed skirmishes along disputed border regions to test the Biden Administration's will to defend U.S. allies.

China will doubtless factor U.S. responses to its attacks on allied countries in the Indo-Pacific region into its decision-making calculus on how best to seize Taiwan.