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Opinion | Wonking Out: Why the Dollar Dominates

Is the U.S. dollar about to lose its special dominant role in the world financial system? People have been asking that question for my entire professional career. Seriously: I published my first paper on the subject in 1980.

A lot has changed in the world since I wrote that paper, notably the creation of the euro and the rise of China. Yet the answer remains the same: probably not. For different reasons — political fragmentation in Europe, autocratic caprice in China — neither the euro nor the yuan is a plausible alternative to the dollar.

Also, even if the dollar’s dominance erodes, it won’t matter very much.

What do we mean when we talk about dollar dominance? Economists traditionally assign three roles to money. It’s a medium of exchange: I don’t give economics lectures in payment for groceries; I get paid in dollars to lecture and use those dollars to buy food. It’s a store of value: I keep dollars in my wallet and my bank account. And it’s a “unit of account”: salaries are set in dollars, prices are listed in dollars, mortgage payments are specified in dollars.

Many currencies play these roles in domestic business. The dollar is special because it plays a disproportionate role in international business. It’s the medium of exchange among currencies: Someone who wants to convert Bolivian bolivianos to Malaysian ringgit normally sells the bolivianos for dollars, then uses the dollars to buy ringgit. It’s a global store of value: Many people around the world hold dollar bank accounts. And it’s an international unit of account: Many goods made outside the United States are priced in dollars; many international bonds promise repayment in dollars.

Where does this continuing dominance come from, given that the U.S. economy no longer has the commanding position it held for a couple of decades after World War II? The answer is that there are self-reinforcing feedback loops, in which people use dollars because other people use dollars.

In that old 1980 paper I focused on the size and thickness of markets. There are a lot more people wanting to exchange bolivianos and ringgit for dollars than there are people wanting to exchange bolivianos for ringgit, so it’s much easier and cheaper to make boliviano-ringgit transactions indirectly, using the dollar as a “vehicle,” than to try to do those transactions directly. But all those indirect transactions make dollar markets even bigger, reinforcing the currency’s advantage.

Gita Gopinath, the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Jeremy Stein, a professor of economics at Harvard, have described another feedback loop involving pricing. Because many goods are priced in dollars, dollar assets have relatively predictable purchasing power; this reinforces demand for these assets, which in turn makes it somewhat cheaper to borrow in dollars than in other currencies. And cheap dollar borrowing in turn gives businesses an incentive to limit their risks by pricing in dollars, again reinforcing the dollar’s advantage.

So what might dislodge the dollar from its special position? Not that long ago the euro seemed like a plausible alternative: Europe’s economy is huge, as are its financial markets. As a result, many people outside Europe hold euro assets and, when selling to Europe, set prices in euros. But one remaining U.S. advantage is the size of our bond market and the liquidity — the ease of buying or selling — that market provides.

Until its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Europe seemed to have a comparably large bond market, since euro bonds issued by different governments seemed interchangeable and all paid about the same interest rate. Since then, however, fears of default have caused yields to diverge:

This means that there is no longer a euro bond market: There’s a German market, an Italian market and so on, none of them comparable in scale with America’s market.

What about China? China is a huge player in world trade, which you might think would make people want to hold a lot of yuan assets. But it is also an autocracy with a propensity for erratic policies — as evidenced by its current rejection of Western Covid vaccines and continuing adherence to an unsustainable strategy of disastrous lockdowns. Who wants to expose their wealth to a dictator’s whims?

And yes, the United States has to some extent weaponized the dollar against Vladimir Putin. But that’s not the kind of action that we can expect to become commonplace.

All in all, then, the dollar’s dominance still looks pretty secure — that is, unless America also ends up being run by an erratic autocrat, which I’m afraid looks like a real possibility in the not-too-distant future.

But here’s the thing: Even if I’m wrong, and the dollar does lose its dominance, it wouldn’t make that much difference. What, after all, does the United States gain from the dollar’s special role? I often read assertions that America’s ability to foist newly printed dollars on the rest of the world allows it to run persistent trade deficits. Folks, let me tell you about Australia:

The United States may be able to borrow slightly more cheaply, thanks to the dollar’s special role, and we get what amounts to a zero-interest loan from all the people holding dollar currency — mostly $100 bills — outside the country. But these are trivial advantages for a $24 trillion economy.

So is the dollar’s world dominance at risk? Probably not. And the truth is, it really doesn’t matter.

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Covid Live Updates: For Bereaved U.K. Families, Fines for Johnson Prolong Heartbreak

After Leona Cheng tested positive for the coronavirus late last month, she was told to pack her bags for a hospital stay. When the ambulance came to her apartment in central Shanghai to pick her up two days later, no one said otherwise.

So Ms. Cheng was surprised when the car pulled up not to a hospital but to a sprawling convention center. Inside, empty halls had been divided into living areas with thousands of makeshift beds. And on exhibition stall partitions, purple signs bore numbers demarcating quarantine zones.

Ms. Cheng, who stayed at the center for 13 days, was among the first of hundreds of thousands of Shanghai residents to be sent to government quarantine and isolation facilities, as the city deals with a surge in coronavirus cases for the first time in the pandemic. The facilities are a key part of China’s playbook of tracking, tracing and eliminating the virus, one that has been met with unusual public resistance in recent weeks.

Footage circulating on Chinese social media on Thursday showed members of one Shanghai community protesting the use of apartment buildings in their complex for isolating people who test positive for the virus. Police officers in white hazmat suits could be seen physically beating back angry residents, some of whom pleaded with them to stop.

China’s leaders have said that the country, unlike most of the rest of the world, cannot afford to live with the virus because it has a large and vulnerable aging population. But China’s zero-tolerance policy — in which anyone who tests positive is sent to a hospital or isolation facility, and close contacts are placed in quarantine hotels — is becoming both a logistical and political challenge as officials face more than 350,000 cases since the start of the current outbreak in March.

As of April 9, Shanghai had converted more than 100 public venues, including public schools and newly built high-rise office buildings, into temporary facilities called “fangcang,” or square cabin, hospitals. They are intended to house more than 160,000 people who have tested positive for the virus, officials said last week.

The protests on Thursday, at the Zhangjiang Nashi International apartment complex in Shanghai’s Pudong district, broke out after the developer notified 39 households that they would have to relocate because officials would turn nine buildings into isolation facilities, the developer said in a statement.

When Ms. Cheng first arrived at the exhibition center, it felt vast, cold and empty, she said in a phone interview. Ms. Cheng, who is a student in her early 20s, also wrote about her experience on Chinese social media.

The fluorescent lights were glaring but she tried to get some rest. She woke up the next morning to find her hall suddenly crammed with people.

There was no tap for running water and no showers, Ms. Cheng said, so each day she and others would crowd around several fresh water machines, waiting to fill up the pink plastic wash basins they had been given. The portable toilet stalls soon filled with so much human waste that Ms. Cheng said she stopped drinking water for several days so she wouldn’t have to use them as frequently.

Even if someone had figured out how to turn off the floodlights, Ms. Cheng said, it would still have been hard to sleep at night. That was when people would shout out their complaints and let off steam.

“Lots of people complained, and some people shouted out that it was too smelly to sleep,” she said.

Worried about upsetting her mother, Ms. Cheng didn’t tell her that she was in a fangcang. She said instead that she could not do video calls, giving her mother vague answers about daily life in quarantine. A woman sleeping in a nearby bed took a similar approach when speaking with her daughter. The two women shared a smile when they discovered they had the same secret.

Ms. Cheng said she struggled to come to terms with a quarantine system that reduced her to a number. If she wanted something, she had to find a nurse or doctor who was assigned to her zone. But the nurses and doctors were so busy that it was hard to get any help, she said.

Ms. Cheng said she had once admired the government’s goal of keeping the virus out of China. It meant that for more than two years, she could live a normal life, even as cities and countries around the world had to lock down.

Now, she’s not so sure.

“This time I feel it is out of control and it’s not worth controlling the cases because it is not so dangerous or deadly,” she said, referring to the highly contagious Omicron variant. “It’s not worth sacrificing so many resources and our freedom.”

Joy Dong and Li You contributed research.

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How Remote Work Is Changing N.Y.C.

Over a period in February and March, a survey of nearly 9,500 private-sector employees, commissioned by the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of business interests, asked what might be done to contribute to the city’s renaissance. Some respondents pointed precisely to the ways in which remote work enriched the places where people live. “Recognize that non-Manhattan neighborhoods have actually benefited and stop centering the recovery on return to office,” as one worker put it.

“The way I think about it, we have had a Manhattan-centric economy for a long time,” Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership, told me. “In the past seven or eight years, we’ve seen more jobs created in Brooklyn and Queens than in Manhattan. We’ve seen the beginning of a shift. But we haven’t shifted our planning and policies.” She pointed to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s resurrection of the idea for a 14-mile transit line connecting Jackson Heights, in Queens, and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, as an example of the sort of thinking that will be required for a more geographically diffuse economy.

Ideally, more jobs would be created outside of traditional corridors, and housing and ancillary businesses would follow. Recently Maria Torres-Springer, the deputy mayor for economic and workforce development, explained the significance of several new Metro North stops added in the Bronx, near medical institutions like Montefiore, which she envisioned attracting health care start-ups nearby.

“We’ve been thinking about that area as a great opportunity to leverage those investments in transportation to make sure there’s more economic activity,” she told me.

The survey conducted by the Partnership for New York City also revealed persistent worries about crime and disorder, particularly in the transit system. This, above all else, may be the biggest hindrance to getting people back into office buildings. In addition to the troubling events of this week, which included two teenagers stabbed in different subway stations, the first months of the year witnessed the death of Michelle Go, pushed from a platform in Times Square; the assault of a scientist by hammer, a few minutes after she left work; and the attack of a woman at a Bronx subway station who was struck in the face with human waste.

Whether subway crime is truly rampant or whether it is simply perceived to be, the fact remains that it presents a significant obstacle to convincing New Yorkers to spend dozens of hours a week in a patch of central Manhattan oversaturated with things they do not necessarily want at prices they rarely find reasonable. The cold brew turns out to be just as good at home.

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What to Know About 2022 World Cup Travel to Qatar

The most avidly followed sports event on earth, the FIFA World Cup, returns this fall — another chance to find out if what’s often been said about soccer is true: That 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes, and the Germans always win.

At the last World Cup, in 2018, the Germans didn’t win. The French did, and they’ll be back for this year’s tournament in Qatar, along with their young superstar Kylian Mbappé. So will Argentina’s incomparable Leo Messi and Portugal’s icon Cristiano Ronaldo in what could be their World Cup swan songs. A new star is sure to rise into the footballing firmament this year — will it be Canada’s Alphonso Davies, born to Liberian parents in a Ghanaian refugee camp and raised in Alberta, now shining for Bayern Munich? And how will the Americans do after failing to qualify for the 2018 tournament?

These are some of the many reasons for fans to head to the 64 matches of the 2022 World Cup tournament in Qatar, where the desert heat has pushed the schedule back from its customary summertime window to Nov. 21 to Dec. 18.

For those planning to attend, the time to get tickets and a place to stay is now. But there are also some compelling reasons not to attend. Below, a primer on Qatar 2022: where to go, how to go and, crucially, should you even go at all.

Concerns arose soon after Qatar was named host in 2010. As the tiny Persian Gulf nation rushed to build seven new soccer stadiums, an airport, transit system, hotels, apartments and other infrastructure, allegations quickly followed that many of the country’s 2 million migrant workers were being forced to endure deplorably dangerous conditions.

The human rights organization Amnesty International detailed “rampant” exploitation and abuse, with reports of migrant laborers being unpaid and working excessive hours, often in oppressive heat. The country responded to the scrutiny by introducing labor reforms in recent years, and tournament organizers say that they have improved conditions for workers.

The country’s treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people has also sparked criticism. Qatar has said it will welcome L.G.B.T.Q. fans at the tournament, but the country’s laws make male homosexuality illegal and punishable by up to three years in prison. Qatar does not recognize same-sex marriage or civil partnerships, and demonstrating for gay rights is prohibited. Even while insisting that L.G.B.T.Q visitors would be accepted, a senior Qatari security official, Abdulaziz Abdullah Al Ansari, said this month that rainbow flags might be confiscated to “protect” fans.

Concerns over Qatar’s human rights record have spurred some of soccer’s leading figures to speak out. Lise Klaveness, the president of Norway’s soccer federation, scolded FIFA for allowing Qatar to host the tournament in a speech this month, calling it “unacceptable.” Gareth Southgate, the manager of England, called for assurances for the safety of traveling fans. “It would be horrible to think some of our fans feel they can’t go because they feel threatened or they’re worried about their safety,” he said.

A spokesman for the Qatari organizers said in an email that Qatar has hosted other sporting events since it was awarded the rights to the World Cup without incident. “Everyone will be welcome to Qatar in 2022,” he wrote. “FIFA and Qatar are committed to delivering a discrimination free tournament that is welcoming to all.”

This year’s World Cup comprises 32 teams, 31 of which have survived the two-year qualifying process. (The 32nd, Qatar, qualified automatically as hosts.) They are placed in eight groups of four teams each, with each team guaranteed at least three matches.

The top 16 advance to the knockout phase — followed by the quarterfinals and semifinals — with the world champion crowned at the grand finale at the 80,000-seat Lusail International Stadium in Lusail, a city just north of Doha, the country’s capital, on Dec. 18.

Qatar is by far the smallest country ever to host the tournament, so in some ways this should be the easiest World Cup to attend. All eight stadiums are within a 35-mile radius of Doha, so instead of needing to hop on planes and trains to follow their team over hundreds or even thousands of miles, fans at Qatar 2022 will hardly have to travel at all. In fact, five of the eight stadiums are accessible via the Doha Metro (shuttle buses will take fans to the outlying stadiums).

Even though the tournament will be played in November and December, it will still be hot, with an average high of 85 degrees at the start of the tournament and 75 by the end. But games will kick off in the late afternoon and evening, and all the stadiums (only one has a retractable roof) will be air-conditioned, using solar-powered ventilation and cooling systems designed to keep spectators comfortable.

You can enter the ticket lottery until April 28 at 5 a.m., E.D.T. After that, FIFA will conduct a random selection draw, with successful applicants being notified starting May 31. You can apply for tickets to individual matches, or all matches a particular team will play. There is also a way to reserve provisional tickets if your team advances to the knockout phase.

Prices range from $70 to $220 for individual tickets to group matches and escalate through the knockout phase. Tickets for the championship final will cost from $600 to $1,600.

If you succeed in getting tickets, the next thing to do is get a Hayya Card — a mandatory all-purpose identification card for the World Cup visitor. The Hayya Card (Hayya means “let’s go”) not only acts as an entry visa to Qatar but it must be presented — in addition to your ticket — to get into the stadium on match days.

Several airlines fly from New York to Doha, including American, Finnair, Turkish and Royal Jordanian. Qatar Airways offers more than 100 weekly flights from 12 cities in the United States.

Qatar Airways also offers all-inclusive packages that come with match tickets, flights and accommodations. One package featuring tickets to all the U.S. matches (three group games plus a round-of-16 game, if the United States advances) is advertised from $6,950 per person. Other packages range from $4,050 to $7,300, for the one that includes tickets to the championship final.

As for the country’s coronavirus rules, Qatar currently requires adult visitors to show either proof of vaccination or a certificate of recovery to avoid quarantine, as well as negative results from a test taken within 48 hours of departure. Current in-country regulations require masking on public transport and in stadiums, stores and hotels. Proof of vaccination is required to enter many buildings, and travelers are required to have Ehteraz, a Covid-19 notification app, on their phones.

Beds may be hard to come by, with just 130,000 rooms for the up to 1.5 million visitors expected over the tournament. Apartment complexes meant to house fans are still being built, many near expressways and in dusty industrial zones.

The Qatar 2022 website has an accommodations portal that is the best place to start your search for lodgings. The website features listings at hotels, apartments and villas or aboard two large cruise ships docked at Doha for the duration of the tournament. There is also an option to stay at “fan villages,” which the site describes as “a variety of casual camping and cabin-style accommodation for the avid fan,” accompanied by a photo of a tent amid vast sand dunes. “More information coming soon,” says the caption.

A recent search on the site for hotel rooms showed nothing available, a disappointment for those who’d fancy a room at the Four Seasons Doha. But even the lowly three-star listings showed no vacancies.

However, some apartments and villas were available. On the low end was an apartment in Al-Wakrah, a suburb of Doha, for $84 a night. On the high end, a villa in Doha was going for $920 a night.

Cabins aboard the MSC Poesia, moored at Doha port, start at $179 on the website; aboard the MSC World Europa they’re $347.

Airbnb had some bookings in Qatar for the World Cup, tending to consist of tents going for $100 a night or apartments starting at $500 a night. Some fans may have to resort to staying in the United Arab Emirates at Abu Dhabi, 330 miles from Doha, or Dubai, 390 miles away, and take a car, bus or plane to the game.

Fans attending the World Cup should be mindful that while the country is making some allowances for the coming influx of tourists, Qatar is a conservative Muslim country and visitors should be aware of its laws and customs.

For instance, it is illegal to drink in public. During the World Cup, alcohol will be available in designated areas, like hotels and special “fan zones,” but public intoxication can carry a six-month jail sentence.

“Visitors (men as well as women) are expected to show respect for local culture by avoiding excessively revealing clothing in public,” the official Visit Qatar website advises. “It is generally recommended for men and women to ensure their shoulders and knees are covered.”

Public displays of affection between men and women are “frowned upon,” according to Visit Qatar.

Even if you are a super fan of soccer with the funds to travel, deciding whether to go to this year’s World Cup could be fraught. Remember, you can always wait for 2026, when the World Cup will be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022.



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Twitter Expected to Employ Poison Pill to Counter Musk Takeover

Twitter was expected to unveil its counterattack against Elon Musk as soon as Friday by putting in place a corporate maneuver known as a poison pill, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The strategy would aim to slow or block Mr. Musk’s $43 billion bid to buy Twitter.

A poison pill, devised by law firms in the 1980s to protect companies from corporate raiders, essentially lets a takeover target flood the market with new shares or allow existing shareholders to buy them at a discount. That means anyone trying to acquire the company must buy up many more shares to gain control.

The details of how Twitter’s poison pill would be designed were not known.

On Thursday, Mr. Musk announced his intentions to acquire the social media service, a purchase that he believed would allow him to roll back Twitter’s moderation policies.

Twitter attempted to wrangle the world’s wealthiest man in recent weeks as he steadily snapped up its shares. Last week, Twitter offered Mr. Musk a board seat, but he soured on the arrangement when it became clear that he would no longer be able to freely criticize the company. He rejected the role on Saturday and informed Twitter on Wednesday evening of his acquisition plans.

Mr. Musk seemed to be girding for a protracted fight on Thursday. “Taking Twitter private at $54.20 should be up to shareholders, not the board,” he tweeted, alongside a Yes/No poll.

Still, it is not clear who, if anyone, will be on Mr. Musk’s side. His initial, bare-bones offer left open significant questions about his ability to cull together financing. Mr. Musk has hired Morgan Stanley to advise on the bid, although the investment bank is not typically known for financing large-scale deals on its own. And Twitter shareholders seemed wary: Twitter’s stock fell almost 2 percent on Thursday, closing at $45.08 — significantly below Mr. Musk’s offer.

Prince Al Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who described himself as one of Twitter’s largest and most long-term shareholders, said on Thursday that Twitter should reject Mr. Musk’s offer because it was not high enough to reflect the company’s “intrinsic value.” Analysts also suggested that Mr. Musk’s price was too low and did not reflect Twitter’s recent performance.

Mr. Musk argued that taking Twitter private would allow more free speech to flow on the platform. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” he said in an interview at the TED conference on Thursday.

He also insisted that the algorithm Twitter uses to rank its content, deciding what hundreds of millions of users see on the service every day, should be public for users to audit.

Mr. Musk’s concerns are shared by many executives at Twitter, who have also pressed for more transparency about its algorithms. The company has published internal research about bias in its algorithms and funded an effort to create an open, transparent standard for social media services.

But Twitter executives balked at Mr. Musk’s hardball tactics. After a Thursday morning board meeting, the company began exploring options to block Mr. Musk, including the poison pill and the possibility of courting another buyer.

During an all-hands meeting on Thursday afternoon, Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, sought to reassure employees about the potential shake-up. Although he declined to share details about the board’s plans, he encouraged employees to stay focused and not allow themselves to be distracted by Mr. Musk.



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U.S. Offers Protection to People Who Fled War in Cameroon

The strife has displaced some two million people in Anglophone regions and has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and widespread food insecurity. As of December, 4.4 million people in Cameroon required humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations. The State Department has cataloged serious human rights violations perpetrated by the police and the military, including torture and extrajudicial killings.

Fearing for their lives, several thousand Cameroon citizens from the English-speaking northwest have embarked on treacherous journeys, crossing South America, including the lawless jungle stretch called the Darien Gap, and Mexico to reach the United States, in order to seek asylum. On arrival, many have been locked up in immigration detention facilities.

Hundreds have been expelled back to Cameroon. International human rights groups have documented that some of them have fallen victim to persecution and abuse after returning to their country.

In announcing the decision, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, cited the “extreme violence” perpetrated by government forces and armed separatists, and a rise in attacks by Boko Haram, the terrorist group. He said nationals of Cameroon would be allowed to remain and work in the United States “until conditions in their home country improve.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 900,000 people are now eligible for the temporary protected status program, which was signed into law in 1990 by President George Bush. The protection is extended to people already in the United States from countries ravaged by natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary circumstances that prevent their nationals from safely returning or living there.

The U.S. government periodically reviews each country’s status, which is granted for six to 18 months, and decides whether to renew. Each time a country is recertified, recipients must reapply and pass a background check. The Biden administration has renewed or reinstated protections for many countries, after determining conditions on the ground remained precarious.

The largest group of beneficiaries, more than 200,000, are from El Salvador. Nationals from Haiti, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela are among others under such protections — though people who entered the country unlawfully from those countries in later years do not have the protection.

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Kim Jong-un Gives North Korean TV Anchor a Luxury Home

SEOUL — When a brand-new luxury residential district opened in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, this week, the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said it would be reserved for his most elite supporters, those he called “true patriots.”

Among them was the nation’s top state TV news anchor, Ri Chun-hee.

At a ceremony on Thursday, Mr. Kim not only presented one of the two-story apartments to the legendary anchorwoman. He also gave her a tour of her new home while holding her hand. Naturally, she narrated it all in a state media video.

Known both inside and outside the hermetically sealed nation for her soaring, bombastic and emotional news readings, Ms. Ri, 79, has been a staple on North Korean television on and off for more than 50 years.

A mouthpiece of the country’s dictators since 1971, she has guided her countrymen and women through major developments like nuclear and missile tests, as well as the deaths of the country’s past leaders: Kim Il-sung in 1994 and Kim Jong-il in 2011.

She could seem to melt with emotion while delivering news about the country’s current leader, who is revered as a god by North Korean citizens. But to South Korean viewers, when she has turned to more alarming announcements, such as the North’s weapons tests, her warlike cries could seem as bloodcurdling as the information itself.

South Korean government and intelligence monitors — as well as South Koreans in general — have braced themselves whenever Ms. Ri appeared on TV and opened what they call a “mouth that fires out cannons.”

“Her steel-grinding voice gives the enemy the shudders,” a 2008 issue of the North Korean magazine Chosun said of Ms. Ri.

In North Korea, she holds the title of “labor hero,” according to Chosun. Abroad, she is known as “the pink lady,” for the color of the traditional Korean attire she wears to deliver news reports.

Ms. Ri disappeared from the airwaves in the 2010s amid reports that she had retired, but she has since resurfaced occasionally to deliver the most important news, including narrating Mr. Kim’s New Year’s address in 2021.

Ms. Ri did not put her booming voice to use when North Korea tested its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile in March. That time, the country’s state media released a Hollywood-style video of Mr. Kim, who appeared to personally guide the test launch, clad in a sleek leather jacket and sunglasses.

Later, South Korea said elements of the missile launch might have been faked, with Mr. Kim disguising an older missile as a new one to exaggerate his country’s weapons achievements.

In the video of her house tour this week, she was far more operatic than bombastic. She said her new home felt “like a hotel” and was furnished with every amenity she needed.

State media video showed a spacious riverside apartment with shiny wooden floors, a living room furnished with a white five-seat sofa, a spacious bedroom, a kitchen with an L-shaped counter and a six-person dining table. The apartment also has a study, along with a veranda that offered a view of downtown Pyongyang. The images showed no sign of a TV. (The value of the apartment wasn’t immediately clear. The total number of bedrooms and square footage were unknown.)

The ceremony was widely publicized by the North Korean state, which published photographs of Mr. Kim and Ms. Ri taking the tour. Among others rewarded with an apartment at the complex were members of the state media, whose mission is also to spread propaganda.

Such largess for those deemed loyal to the regime is not uncommon in North Korea. Kim Jong-il gave luxury cars, watches, liquor or houses to his close aides. The current leader has given mostly verbal encouragement to officials — or has purged them. But he has recently sought to strengthen his support base by providing luxe apartments to high-ranking officials, even as the country has endured economic travails made worse by pandemic-prompted isolation and a diplomatic stalemate with much of the world.

Part of a five-year project to build 50,000 apartments in the capital to address the country’s housing problems, the opening of the luxury apartments occurred two days after the completion of high-rises intended for 10,000 ordinary residents. They may house Pyongyang’s working population, including a growing white-collar work force, which has faced constant food and electricity shortages.

The gift for Ms. Ri came ahead of the 110th anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, on Friday. The occasion is regarded as one of the most important national holidays in the North, which has in previous years commemorated the birth anniversary with mass rallies or military parades.

Mr. Kim said, according to the state media, “There is nothing to spare for national treasures like Ri Chun-hee, who has led a virtuous life with the revolutionary microphone.” He also asked her to continue vigorously serve as the voice of his ruling Workers’ Party.

As for Ms. Ri, she said that she was “so grateful for the benevolent care of the party” that she and her family were “moved to tears.”

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Mike Bossy, Hall of Famer on Champion Islander Teams, Dies at 65

Mike Bossy, the Hockey Hall of Fame wing who played a key role in propelling the New York Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup championships in the early 1980s, has died. He was 65.

The Islanders announced his death but gave no other details. Bossy revealed in October that he had lung cancer.

The Islanders, founded as a National Hockey League expansion team in 1972, won only 12 games in their first season at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island and weren’t much better the following season.

But they began reaching the playoffs under General Manager Bill Torrey and Coach Al Arbour, who assembled teams that featured Bossy at right wing and his linemates Bryan Trottier at center, Clark Gillies at left wing, Denis Potvin on defense and Billy Smith in goal.

The Islanders defeated the Philadelphia Flyers, the Minnesota North Stars, the Vancouver Canucks and the Edmonton Oilers in their Stanley Cup championship run from 1980 to 1983, then lost to the Oilers in the 1984 cup final.

The Canadian-born Bossy was among the N. H.L’s fastest skaters, and he possessed an uncanny ability to get off wrist shots before opposing goalies had any notion that the puck was coming their way.

“Mike’s got the fastest hands I’ve ever seen,” Arbour, a former defenseman who had played alongside Gordie Howe’s with the Detroit Red Wings and Bobby Hull with the Chicago Black Hawks, once said.

Bossy twice led the N.H.L. in goals, with 69 in the 1978-79 season and 68 in 1980-81. He scored at least 51 goals in each of his first nine seasons before a back injury limited him to 38 goals in his last season. His 85 goals in 129 playoff games were the most in N.H.L. history at the time.

Bossy scored 573 goals and had 553 assists in 752 regular-season games over 10 N.H.L. seasons, all with the Islanders.

He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1991.

A finesse player and slightly built, Bossy eluded hard checks and refused to get into melees.

“Guys knew he wouldn’t fight,” Trottier told Sports Illustrated in 1999. “They’d punch him, spear him, it didn’t matter. He didn’t need much room. The guy was so creative, he could make something special with just a half inch.”

“I probably developed what scouts called my quick hands and quick release more out of self-defense than anything else,” Bossy recalled in his memoir, “Boss: The Mike Bossy Story” (1988, with Barry Meisel). “The N.H.L. was zoom, zoom, zoom compared to junior. I learned to make quick passes and take quick shots to avoid getting hammered every time I had the puck.”

Bossy won the Lady Byng Trophy for gentlemanly play in 1983, 1984 and 1986. He incurred only 210 penalty minutes.

He was selected by the Islanders as the No. 15 pick in the 1977 N.H.L. amateur draft after being passed over by teams who, despite his remarkable goal-scoring in junior hockey, believed he didn’t have the checking skills to survive in the N.H.L.

It didn’t take long for Bossy to prove otherwise. He won the Calder Memorial Trophy for 1977-78 as the N.H.L.’s rookie of the year, scoring a rookie-record 53 goals that stood for 15 years. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the 1982 Stanley Cup playoffs.

Michael Bossy was born on Jan. 22, 1957, in Montreal, one of 10 children of Borden and Dorothy Bossy. His father was of Ukrainian descent, and his mother was English. Borden Bossy flooded the backyard of the family’s apartment building during winters to create an ice rink, and Mike learned to skate at 3.

He dropped out of Laval Catholic High School to join the Laval National team of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League near the end of its 1972-73 season and played in four full seasons for Laval, scoring 309 goals.

Then came his selection by the Islanders in the draft.

Bossy’s N.H.L. career was cut short by a chronic injury. At the beginning of the Islanders’ 1986 training camp, he experienced back pains. He missed 17 games during the regular season and injured his left knee in the playoffs, when the Flyers eliminated the Islanders in a preliminary round. Doctors eventually found that he had two injured discs that couldn’t be repaired by surgery. He sat out the 1987-1988 season, then retired from hockey in October 1988.

The Islanders retired Bossy’s No. 22 in March 1992, making him their second player accorded the honor, after Potvin.

Bossy married Lucie Creamer and had two daughters with her. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

Bossy, who was bilingual, pursued business ventures and broadcasting work in Canada after his playing career ended. When he was found to have cancer, he took a leave from his post as a hockey analyst for the Montreal-based French-language channel TVA Sports.

For all that Bossy and his Stanley Cup champion Islanders accomplished, they lacked the charisma of his contemporary, the Oilers’ Hall of Fame center Wayne Gretzky and Gretzky’s Edmonton teams that won four Stanley Cups in the 1980s.

“We never got one millionth of the recognition we should,” Bossy once told Sports Illustrated. “We had a very low-key organization. They didn’t want guys doing too much because they thought the hockey might suffer. People don’t talk about us in the first mention of great teams.”

He added: “I guess as I get older I get tired of telling people I scored more than 50 nine consecutive years. Everything I’m saying makes it sound like I’m bitter, but I’m not whatsoever. It’s just that when you do something well, like our team did, you’d like to get recognized for it.”

As for comparisons with Gretzky, Bossy told The New York Times in January 1986, when he became the 11th player in N.H.L. history to score 500 goals: “People call him the Great Gretzky. I can’t compete with that. I do feel comfortable with what I’ve helped my team achieve. Whether I think of Wayne Gretzky as the greatest thing since apple pie is another question.”

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Opinion | Bill Gates: We Must Develop Drugs Much Faster in the Next Pandemic

Treating disease is nothing new to humans. The practice of using roots, herbs and other natural ingredients as healing agents dates to ancient times. Some 9,000 years ago, Stone Age dentists in modern-day Pakistan drilled into their patients’ teeth with pieces of flint. The ancient Egyptian architect and physician Imhotep cataloged treatments for 200 diseases nearly 5,000 years ago, and the Greek physician Hippocrates prescribed a form of aspirin — extracted from the bark of the willow tree — more than 2,000 years ago. But it’s only in the past couple of centuries that we’ve been able to synthesize medicines in the lab rather than by extracting them from things we found in nature.

While some of the drugs we rely on today were invented intentionally through painstaking research, others are products of pure accident. In the 1880s, for instance, two chemistry students at the University of Strasbourg were testing whether a substance called naphthalene — a byproduct of making tar — could be used to cure intestinal worms when they stumbled upon a solution to a problem they weren’t even looking to solve. Naphthalene didn’t get rid of worms — but to the students’ surprise, it did break the person’s fever. After further investigation, they realized they hadn’t even administered naphthalene at all, but rather a then-obscure drug called acetanilide, which the pharmacist had given them by mistake. Soon, acetanilide was on the market as a cure for fevers, but doctors found that it had an unfortunate side effect: It made some patients’ skin turn blue. Eventually, they derived a substance from acetanilide that had all the benefits without the blue hue. It was called paracetamol, which Americans know as acetaminophen, a.k.a. Tylenol.

Today, drug discovery still relies on a mixture of good science and good luck. Unfortunately, when an outbreak appears to be headed toward a pandemic, there’s no time to count on luck. The next time we’re faced with a contagion, scientists will need to develop treatments as fast as possible, much faster than they did for Covid.

So let’s suppose we’re in that situation: There’s a new virus that looks like it could go global, and we need a treatment. How will scientists go about making an antiviral?

The first step is to map the virus’s genetic code and figure out which proteins are most important to it. These essential proteins are known as the “targets,” and the search for a treatment essentially boils down to defeating the virus by finding things that will keep the targets from working the way they should.

Until the 1980s, researchers trying to identify promising compounds had to rely on slow trial and error to identify the right ones. Today, using 3-D modeling and robotic machines that run thousands of experiments at a time, companies can test millions of compounds in a matter of weeks — a task that would otherwise take a team of humans years to complete.

Once a promising compound is identified, the scientific teams will analyze it to determine whether it’s worth further exploration. Once they’ve found a good candidate, they will typically spend several years in the “preclinical” phase, studying it to determine whether it is safe and triggers the desired response. The first studies will be done in animals. (Finding the right animal is not easy. Researchers have a saying: “Mice lie, monkeys exaggerate and ferrets are weasels.”)

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Opinion | RaDonda Vaught, Medical Errors and a Better Way Forward

We all carry the memory of our mistakes. For health care workers like me, these memories surface in the early morning when we cannot sleep or at a bedside where, in some way, we are reminded of a patient who came before. Most were errors in judgment or near misses: a procedure we thought could wait, a subtle abnormality in vital signs that didn’t register as a harbinger of serious illness, an X-ray finding missed, a central line nearly placed in the wrong blood vessel. Even the best of us have stories of missteps, close calls that are caught before they ever cause patient harm.

But some are more devastating. RaDonda Vaught, a former Tennessee nurse, is awaiting sentencing for one particularly catastrophic case that took place in 2017. She administered a paralyzing medication to a patient before a scan instead of the sedative she intended to give to quell anxiety. The patient stopped breathing and ultimately died.

Precisely where all the blame for this tragedy lies remains debated. Ms. Vaught’s attorney argued his client made an honest mistake and faulted the mechanized medication dispensing system at the hospital where she worked. The prosecution maintained, however, that she “overlooked many obvious signs that she’d withdrawn the wrong drug” and failed to monitor her patient after the injection.

Criminal prosecutions for medical errors are rare, but Ms. Vaught was convicted in criminal court of two felonies and now faces up to eight years in prison. This outcome has been met with outrage by doctors and nurses across the country. Many worry that her case creates a dangerous precedent, a chilling effect that will discourage health care workers from reporting errors or close calls. Some nurses are even leaving the profession and citing this case as the final straw after years of caring for patients with Covid-19.

From my vantage point, it is not useful to speculate about where malpractice ends and criminal liability begins. But what I do know as an intensive care unit doctor is this: The pandemic has brought the health care system to the brink, and the Vaught case is not unimaginable, especially with current staffing shortages. That is, perhaps, the most troubling fact of all.

It has been more than 20 years since the Institute of Medicine released a groundbreaking report on preventable medical errors, arguing that errors are due not solely to individual health care providers but also to systems that need to be made safer. The authors called for a 50 percent reduction in errors over five years. Even so, there is still no mandatory, nationwide system for reporting adverse events from medical errors.

When patient safety experts talk about medical errors in the abstract, in lecture halls and classrooms, they talk about a culture of patient safety, which means an openness to discussing mistakes and safety concerns without shifting to individual blame. In reality, however, conversations around errors often have a different tone. Early in my intern year, a senior cardiologist gathered our team one morning, after one of my fellow interns failed to start antibiotics on a septic patient overnight. The intern had been busy with a sick new admission and had missed subtle changes in the now septic patient, who had spiraled into shock by the morning.

“You must never stop being terrified,” the attending doctor told us. Even after decades of practice, she remained in a constant state of high alert. When you allow yourself to neglect your usual compulsiveness, she said, that’s when mistakes happen. Not because of imperfect systems, overwork and divided attention but because an intern was not appropriately terrified.

I carried her words with me for years. I have repeated them to my own residents. And there is a truth here: The cost of distraction on our job can be life or death, and we cannot forget that. But I realize now that no one should have to maintain constant terror. Mistakes happen, even to the most vigilant, particularly when we are juggling multiple high-stress tasks. And that is why we need robust systems, to make sure that the inevitable human errors and missteps are caught before they result in patient harm.

The electronic health records we use now prompt doctors and nurses when patients’ combinations of vital signs and lab results suggest that they might be septic. This can be frustrating when we are fatigued by alarms and alerts, but it helps us recognize and react to patterns that a busy medical team might otherwise miss. When it comes to administering medications, they must generally be approved by a pharmacist before they can become available to a nurse to administer. Some hospitals create a no-talk zone where nurses withdraw these medications, because that process requires a focus that is often impossible in the frenzy of today’s hospitals.

Once the medication is in hand, nurses use a system to scan the drug along with the patient’s wristband to help ensure that the correct medication is given to the correct patient. None of these systems are perfect. But each serves to acknowledge that no individual can hold full responsibility for every step that leads to a patient outcome. Just being vigilant is not enough.

What’s needed alongside these systems is a culture in which doctors and nurses are empowered to speak up and ask questions when they are uncertain or when they suspect that one of their colleagues is making a mistake. This could mean that a nurse questions a doctor’s medication order and discovers it was intended for a different patient. Or that a junior doctor admits she is out of her depth when faced with a procedure that she should know how to do.

Stories in medicine so often celebrate an individual hero. We valorize the surgeon who performs the groundbreaking surgery but rarely acknowledge the layers of teamwork and checklists that made that win possible. Similarly, when a patient is harmed, it is natural to look for a person to blame, a bad apple who can be punished so that everything will feel safe again. It is far easier and more palatable to tell a story about a flawed doctor or a nurse than a flawed system of medication delivery and vital sign management.

But when it comes to medical errors, that is rarely the reality. Health care workers and the public must acknowledge that catastrophic outcomes can happen even to well-intentioned but overworked doctors and nurses who are practicing medicine in an imperfect system. Punishing one nurse does not ensure that a similar tragedy won’t occur in a different hospital on a different day. And regardless of the sentence that Ms. Vaught receives in May and whether it is fair, her case must be viewed as a story not just about individual responsibility but also about the failure of multiple systems and safeguards. That is a harder narrative to accept, but it is a necessary one, without which medicine will never change. And that, too, would be a tragic error but one that is still in our power to prevent.

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