





TOKYO – Holding the U.S. team to just three hits, Olympic host country Japan captured the first gold medal for softball in a dozen years, winning 2-0.
Why it matters: Japan is the Americans' main rival in softball. The sport's Olympic future remains uncertain.
After a year in which murders spiked in the U.S., homicides are already trending up in many cities, presaging whatis likely to be a violent summer.
Why it matters: The rise in homicides is a public health crisis that has multiple interlocking causes, which makes solving it that much more difficult. We're still a long way from the murderous days of the 1990s, but rising gun violence is destroying lives and complicating efforts to help cities recover from COVID-19.
Driving the news: From Washington to Louisville, Kentucky, New York to Oakland, California, and Kansas City to Atlanta, murder rates are trending up in U.S. cities large and small.
Between the lines: While it may be tempting to dismiss 2020 and the early indicators in 2021 as aberrations caused by the pandemic, murder rates were already ticking upward in the years before the pandemic.
The intrigue: Criminologists still haven't settled on a single explanation for why violent crime dropped drastically from the 1990s, and they're even less certain why it's risen so dramatically over the past 16 months.
Yes, but: Even if 2021 eclipses last year's murder numbers, America will remain a far safer country than it was during the most violent years of the 1990s.
What's next: A violent summer on America's streets appears likely, given that homicide already appears to be trending above last year's spike.
The bottom line: The historic decline in murder over the past few decades was accompanied by mass incarcerations and increasingly brutal policing, leading to what the criminologist Patrick Sharkey termed "the uneasy peace."