Bernie Sanders is back, but one of his signature policies never left.

In 2015, he introduced Medicare-for-all to many Democrats for the first time. Since Sanders’ first run for president, that type of single-payer health care system has become a mainstream Democratic proposal.

Last week, Sanders launched his second presidential campaign, amid a field of presidential candidates who are trying to figure out how to position themselves around the policy. Trying to stand out from the pack, though — especially on health care — poses a problem: Differentiating yourself means getting into the details, and getting into the details can turn voters off.

Over the last few weeks, candidates have been working to show voters the daylight between their respective health care proposals.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has stressed that he supports Medicare-for-all, and that he wants private insurers to have a role in that system. “Even countries that have vast access to publicly offered health care still have private health care,” he told reporters this month.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar says she wants a public option, in the form of letting people buy into Medicaid. As for single-payer health care, she says it’s a possibility in the long-term.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who says he’s still debating a run, also wants a sort of public option, but only for people above age 50, whom he would allow to buy in to Medicare. “I think Medicare-for-all will take a while, and it’s difficult,” he told CNN’s State of the Union.

Long story short: In a huge Democratic presidential field, health care is the first issue where candidates are really differentiating themselves.

Bumper sticker politics

“Health reform is always more popular as a bumper sticker than as a piece of legislation,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

He points to both the Obamacare and the Obamacare repeal efforts as examples — some ideas behind Obamacare, like insuring pre-existing conditions, were popular. But other aspects that proponents said were necessary to make it work, like the individual mandate, infuriated some voters, helping propel Republicans to big wins in 2010.

Likewise, the Obamacare repeal effort fired up many Republican voters, but the implications of the various repeal plans — fewer people with insurance, lack of protections for pre-existing conditions — ultimately helped doom the effort.

Medicare-for-all may prove to be yet another example of this trend, according to Levitt.

“There’s a huge political benefit for candidates to be in favor of the idea of Medicare-for-all in a primary,” he said. “But the more the details get filled in, the less popular that idea will be.”

California Sen. Kamala Harris may be the first to face a big lesson in this. At a recent CNN town hall, host Jake Tapper asked her about her support of Sanders’ Medicare-for-all bill, which he said would “totally eliminate private insurance.”

(A quick note here: Sanders’ plan does not totally eliminate private insurance, but it would vastly diminish its role.)

Harris said that she would eliminate private insurance — but after a quick backlash, the next day clarified, with a campaign spokesman saying she also supports more incremental health care overhauls.

Polling also shows how tricky selling Medicare-for-all could be once the details come into play. A January poll from Kaiser shows that nearly 7 in 10 Americans like Medicare-for-all if they hear it will eliminate premiums and out-of-pocket costs. But that support drops to around 4 in 10 if people hear it will mean higher taxes.

Both of those things could be true of a Medicare-for-all system. But trying to sell even this basic trade-off on the campaign trail — especially this early — is tough.

At the other, more moderate end of the spectrum, Klobuchar said she’s for the broad goal of “universal health care,” and did get specific on her support of a public option. But when it comes to Medicare-for-all, she remained vague, saying it could be a possibility. Voters will almost certainly try to pin her down more on that in coming months, but for now her answer may help keep her from alienating some more liberal voters.

For many candidates, keeping health care rhetoric broad might be a smart move for now, says Nadeam Elshami, former chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“It’s okay for a candidate to say, ‘Look: This is generally what I believe in. But I’m willing to hear first and then get into specifics later, after I have a deeper discussion of this issue,'” he said.

The “socialist” threat

Progressive health care overhauls will also likely feed into one of President Trump’s main attack lines: labeling Democrats as “socialists” as a way of painting them as extreme.

“It’s a surprising development that 10 years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act and after a massive political backlash against it, and a huge effort to defend it, Democrats are in there immediately swerving so hard to an even greater government role for health care,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked for former House Speaker John Boehner and Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign.

Republicans know political backlash well — the backlash to their repeal efforts culminated in the GOP losing the House in 2018. Whatever criticism Trump throws Democrats’ way on health care for 2020, they will likely counter by asking him if he has his own alternative to Obamacare, having failed to fully repeal it.

Until then, Democrats will be doing similar calculations on both health care and a variety of other issues: weighing sweeping, progressive ideas that the president could try to label as “socialist” against incremental policies that might not excite liberal voters — and deciding which choice is most likely to get a Democrat into office.

Voters want sweeping health care changes …maybe

A basic tension underlies Democratic plans to overhauls the health care system: Only 1 in 3 Americans rate health care in the U.S. as “excellent” or “good,” according to Gallup. But at the same time, a large majority — 7 in 10 — view their own personal health care as “excellent” or “good.”

Which is to say, it’s easy to see how voters might want the system massively reformed. In addition, incremental changes that don’t go as far as Medicare-for-all might particularly infuriate progressive voters.

But at the same time, voters will likely bristle if that reform threatens to change their own health coverage, as some major health care overhauls, like Medicare-for-all, might do.

“There is a reason that President Obama’s signature promise on Obamacare was ‘If you like your plan, you can keep it,'” Steel said.

That promise proved untrue — some Americans saw their health care plans canceled under the new Obamacare rules, and Politifact named Obama’s statement the “lie of the year” in 2013.

Should a Democratic candidate’s health care proposal similarly threaten people’s current health plans, it’s a safe bet that it will become a major Republican line of attack.

BEIJING – China will now allow married couples to have up to three children as the country attempts to halt a declining birthrate.

The policy is a dramatic change for a country which, less than a decade ago, still performed forced abortions and sterilizations of women who had more than one child. The new three child limit raises the previous ceiling of two children. It is a recognition from the country’s top leaders that China will need to undertake drastic measures to counter a rapidly aging society.

“Implementing the policy and its relevant supporting measures will help improve China’s population structure, actively respond to the aging population, and preserve the country’s human resource advantages,” China’s Politburo, a top Communist Party governing body, wrote in a statement published on China’s state news agency Xinhua on Monday.

Only five years ago, China officially ended its One Child policy, a raft of restrictions that for more than three decades strictly limited couples to only one child. Those who had two or more children in violation of the policy were fined heavily. Pregnant women were sometimes effectively kidnapped by local family planning officials who cajoled, intimidated, or forced women to end the birth.

In 2016, that limit was raised to two children after years of relaxation to the One Child Policy. Since then, local governments have also extended mandatory maternity leave periods to up to four months. But rising childcare costs and greater participation of women in the workforce have meant fewer families are opting to have more children, even when they are allowed to.

China’s latest census figures released this year show the country’s birthrate has dropped to 1.3 live births per woman, far below the rate of 2.1 most demographers agree is needed to sustain a population at its current level.

Meanwhile, Chinese society is now aging faster than it can produce new workers, threatening to halt economic growth and bankrupt state pension funds. China’s latest census shows the proportion of people between 15 and 59 in 2020 declined by about 7 percentage points from 2010, while that of people 60 or older rose by more than 5 percentage points.

Yet the country’s ruling Communist Party has decided to retain an upper ceiling on family sizes, despite recommendations from China’s central bank to let people have as many children as they want.

The news that the government was now allowing three-child families was initially unclear in China. Popular Chinese social media site Weibo disabled the ability to read the thousands of comments left under news items about the family planning policy change due to what they alleged was “abnormal content”.

“As slow as our population growth may be, we still have 1.4 billion people, which is more than the Western countries combined,” Chinese state media tabloid Global Times wrote in an editorial this week. “China remains young as a rising nation. This won’t change in the long term.”

Amy Cheng contributed research from Beijing.

Capt. Pal Bratbak has patrolled the Barents Sea for decades. His Norwegian coast guard search and rescue cutter mostly chases after distress calls from fishermen. The fishermen are chasing the cod — and the cod sometimes lead them astray.

“The codfish, they don’t see the border, so we help every boat in our area,” he says, and that means as many Russian boats as Norwegian. A treaty allows both nations to catch a quota, and that management of the Barents Sea Arctic cod fleet is considered a success worldwide, both economically and environmentally.

“That’s important for Norway and the European Union and NATO and the whole world. And it’s important for the Russians,” he says.

Cooperation like that has been a given on the Russian-Norwegian frontier for decades, if not centuries. The Norwegians call it “high north, low tension.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though, that tension isn’t so low, and Bratbak is worried. The coast guard also enforces the fishing laws in the Barents Sea.

Years ago, in a rare case, a Russian trawler fled from a coast guard ship, into Russian waters — with Norwegian inspectors on board. Back then, Russian authorities promptly arrested the captain and returned the inspectors. Bratbak hopes the same cooperation would happen today, but his confidence is a bit shaken by recent events.

“In these days, Russia can use other methods to negotiate. Like in the Ukraine conflict, they are willing to use power (more) than talking,” he says.

Critical climate work is on hold

As a founding member of NATO, Norway’s government has joined the rest of Europe in isolating Russia. But as a country bordering Russia, it’s feeling the effects more immediately than some others — in everything from Arctic climate action and nuclear waste control to cross-border trade and regional sports leagues.

The protection of the pristine waters of the Arctic, as well as that cod fleet Capt. Bratbak mentioned, falls under an international group called the Arctic Council. The rotating chair of that group is currently Russia, and as such the council has suspended all activities, including crucial research on climate change.

“It’s not something you can point out that failed today, but it’s ongoing,” says Kim Holmen with the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso, where the Arctic Council would normally be coordinating research.

Russia has about half of the world’s Arctic landmass, including permafrost that, if it melts, could release megatons of trapped carbon and greenhouse gases.

Scientists like Holmen count on collaboration with their Russian colleagues.

“We have common publications. We have collected data together. We’ve been on each other’s cruises. I’ve been to people’s homes in Saint Petersburg, good friends,” he says.

Holmen isn’t in contact with those friends right now. He’s been working on the Arctic for more than 30 years, and he says the lesson from back in the Soviet days is that communication will only get them into trouble, which would delay getting back to work.

“Polar scientists are used to the cold,” says Holmen. “We hope and wish to pick up when it thaws.”

“We are seeing the Iron Curtain come back”

For residents of the border city of Kirkenes, their world changed overnight.

Guro Brandshaug is CEO of the Kirkenes Conference, an annual businesses summit between Russia and Norway. This was the 14th year the event was held, and, on a weeknight in February, it all started out relatively normally.

“On Wednesday the 23rd I welcomed our foreign minister and the Russian ambassador,” says Brandshaug.

With Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, she says, it was tense. But Kirkenes is a city built on friendly relations with Russia, and Brandshaug says no one she knew thought Russian President Vladimir Putin would really invade.

“And then we woke up on the morning on the 24th,” she says. “The Russians had started bombing Ukraine. It was a huge shock. People were actually crying.”

A nuclear waste dump poses a constant threat

“Everything that has been built up over the last 30 years, was just washed out in a few days. We are seeing the Iron Curtain coming back,” says Thomas Nilsen with the Barents Observer newspaper in Kirkenes.

The new Iron Curtain severed personal ties, economic links and even scuttled issues of mutual survival, Nilsen says. For years, Norway had been helping Russia safely dispose of spent fuel rods from its aging nuclear submarines, which were stationed in the Arctic.

At a park station in Svanvik, scientist Bredo Moller collects air samples for the Norwegian radiation safety authority.

“We are some, some kind of a nuclear watchdog on the border to Russia,” he says. “That’s more or less why we’re here — to monitor what’s on the other side of the border, just a few kilometers from here.”

He’s referring to one of the world’s biggest nuclear waste dumps, across the border, where tons of waste from Russian power plants and aging submarines pose a constant threat, either as a contaminant to the Arctic sea life or as material in a terrorist dirty bomb.

Moller says that just last November, Norway marked 25 years of cooperation on nuclear cleanup, and he went to Murmansk in Russia for a celebration with his colleagues.

“I have many friends in Murmansk, shaking their heads like me, waiting for this to end,” he says.

Moller is counting on those colleagues to keep up the work of saving the Arctic from nuclear contamination. And he’s certain his friends oppose the war in Ukraine just as he does — they just can’t speak right now. But it’s chilling that many local officials across the border, as well as 700 rectors and university presidents in Russia, have issued strong statements supporting Putin. And that makes Moller worry that even this vital work might not resume soon.

“It will take many, many years I’m afraid, to get back to that trust that we have gained through these 25 years of cooperation. So, yeah, it is frightening times,” he says.

The pricetag for President Trump’s border wall has topped $11 billion — or nearly $20 million a mile — to become the most expensive wall of its kind anywhere in the world.

In a status report last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is overseeing wall construction, reported that $11 billion has been identified since Trump took office to construct 576 miles of a new “border wall system.”

And the Trump administration is on the hunt for funding to build even more. The Department of Homeland Security has asked the Defense Department to come up with money for 270 additional miles of border wall that DHS says is needed to block drug smuggling routes on federal land. The Pentagon is studying the request, which did not come with a dollar figure.

If the Trump administration completes all of the wall projects it has set in motion, three-quarters of the U.S. southern border would be walled off from Mexico. The government inherited about 650 miles of border structures erected under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“You’re going to have a wall like no other. It’s going to be a powerful, terrific wall,” President Trump said at a rally in Milwaukee last week. “A very big and very powerful border wall is going up at a record speed, and we are fully financed now, isn’t that nice?”

To get an idea why the government is spending so much on Trump’s border wall, look no further than the construction sites down in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

On one side of a caliche road, you can see the pedestrian fence that was erected more than a decade ago. At 18 feet, it looks downright puny. On the other side of the road are massive steel bollards topped with an “anti-climbing plate” that rise 30 feet above the cotton fields, surrounded by men in hardhats and heavy equipment.

Bush’s fence averaged $4 million a mile; Trump’s wall costs five times that—$20 million a mile. The overall cost of $11 billion is approaching the price of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Customs and Border Protection spokesman Christian Alvarez points out there’s a lot more to Trump’s barrier.

“The border wall system will include a 150-foot enforcement zone, lighting, cameras, other technology, and most importantly an all-weather access road making it easier to respond to (undocumented immigrant) traffic,” Alvarez said. “So it’s not just gonna be the barrier itself.”

There’s more steel — an expensive commodity — in a 30-foot structure. Also, there are powerful floodlights, and every mile will have conduit for electric power and fiber optics that connect the surveillance cameras. Electronic gates that allow passage through the wall cost up to $1 million a piece. And there’s a graded, graveled enforcement zone as wide as a six-lane highway.

Trump’s border wall is now the tallest and most expensive in the world, said Reece Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaii who studies border walls.

“The cost of almost $20 million per mile cost is four times as much as the most expensive other walls being built,” Jones said.

Border walls are much in vogue in the post-Cold War era, he said, and there are now at least 60 around the world. Israel’s wall on the West Bank ranks as the second most expensive — at a paltry $1 million to $5 million a mile.

Congress appropriated funds to build the wall in the Rio Grande Valley, but the government now says it needs more. CBP is dipping into $600 million of the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, which holds money seized in criminal investigations.

Some of the extra money will be used to build the wall higher and 10 miles longer. There have also been “increased project costs due to unforeseen site conditions” — to wit, serious seepage problems where the levee wall crosses a canal that empties into the Rio Grande.

These extra costs came to light in a recent deposition made by Loren Flossman, CBP’s wall chief. He also said the agency needs more money to cover the ballooning expense of acquiring the strips of private property under the wall.

Taking private land through eminent domain involves multiple agencies, including the Department of Justice, and can lead to lawsuits. The process “significantly increases the hurdles that the government has to face,” said Scott Nicol, a longtime wall opponent with the Sierra Club in the Rio Grande Valley.

“Where you have private property and the government has to go through the courts to get that property, it takes a lot longer and it drives the cost up because you have to pay for that land,” Nicol said. “You have to send DOJ lawyers in to get that land.”

By mid-January, the government had constructed 101 miles of border wall. A hundred miles of this is replacement or secondary wall; only one mile has been built where no barriers previously existed.

Contrary to President Trump’s claims, the wall is not “going up at a record speed.” In fact, construction has fallen months behind schedule because of the complexities of acquiring private land in the South Texas.

The massive wall projects that are currently underway are fully financed, primarily because of the president’s willingness to sidestep a defiant Congress.

Over the last two budget cycles, a Democrat-controlled House authorized $2.75 billion for the wall — much less than Trump asked for. So Trump shut down the government, declared a state of emergency and diverted billions more from the Defense Department to pay for his wall.

Pro-immigrant groups promptly sued, and initially succeeded in getting federal injunctions to block military funding for the wall. But conservative majorities on both the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appeals court in New Orleans stayed the injunctions and let the administration proceed with construction.

“I mean, with all due respect to the president, he’s obsessed with this wall,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, Texas, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. “It’s a campaign promise, and what happened to that Mexico was going to pay for this?”

Democrats say they do want border security, but the way to do it is with manpower and technology, not steel and concrete.

“I live on the border. I don’t want to see chaos. I want to see law and order at the border,” Cuellar continued. “But I don’t want to just be spending billions of dollars to those federal contractors.”

The federal contractors are mostly giant construction companies with experience handling complex federal projects.

Then there’s Fisher Sand & Gravel. The North Dakota company snagged a $400 million wall contract after CEO Tommy Fisher went on Fox News — a channel Trump frequently watches — to boast how he could build the wall faster and cheaper out on the California border.

“So that current fence they’re building right now in Calexico, the government has been given basically 300 days to build two miles. With one crew, we can build 15 miles in one year,” Fisher told a Fox interviewer.

Now, the Pentagon inspector general is reviewing the contract. Auditors want to know if the White House steered it to Fisher, who maintains his bid was the best.