Here’s what we can be fairly sure will happen in Monday’s presidential debate: Donald Trump will lie repeatedly and grotesquely, on a variety of subjects. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton might say a couple of untrue things. Or she might not.

Here’s what we don’t know: Will the moderators step in when Mr. Trump delivers one of his well-known, often reiterated falsehoods? If he claims, yet again, to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning — which he didn’t — will he be called on it? If he claims to have renounced birtherism years ago, will the moderators note that he was still at it just a few months ago? (In fact, he already seems to be walking back his admission last week that President Obama was indeed born in America.) If he says one more time that America is the world’s most highly taxed country — which it isn’t — will anyone other than Mrs. Clinton say that it isn’t? And will media coverage after the debate convey the asymmetry of what went down?

You might ask how I can be sure that one candidate will be so much more dishonest than the other. The answer is that at this point we have long track records for both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton; thanks to nonpartisan fact-checking operations like PolitiFact, we can even quantify the difference.

PolitiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Clinton statements and classified them on a scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” One might quibble with some of the judgments, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark. And they show two candidates living in different moral universes when it comes to truth-telling. Mr. Trump had 48 Pants on Fire ratings, Mrs. Clinton just six; the G.O.P. nominee had 89 False ratings, the Democrat 27.

Unless one candidate has a nervous breakdown or a religious conversion in the next few days, the debate will follow similar lines. So how should it be reported?

Let’s take it as a given that one can’t report at length on every questionable statement a candidate makes — time, space and the attention of readers and viewers are all limited. What I suggest is that reporters and news organizations treat time and attention span as a sort of capital budget that must be allocated across coverage.

Long ago, you-know-who suggested that propagandists should apply the “big lie” technique: make their falsehoods so huge, so egregious, that they would be widely accepted because nobody would believe they were lying on that grand a scale. And the technique has worked well for despots and would-be despots ever since.

But Donald Trump has come up with something new, which we can call the “big liar” technique. Taken one at a time, his lies are medium-size — not trivial, but mostly not rising to the level of blood libel. But the lies are constant, coming in a steady torrent, and are never acknowledged, simply repeated. He evidently believes that this strategy will keep the news media flummoxed, unable to believe, or at least say openly, that the candidate of a major party lies that much.

And Wednesday night’s “Commander in Chief” televised forum suggested that he may be right.

Obligatory disclaimer: No, I’m not saying that Mr. Trump is another Hitler. More like Mussolini. But I digress.

Back to the issue: All politicians are human beings, which means that all of them sometimes shade the truth. (Show me someone who claims to never lie, and I’ll show you someone who is lying.) The question is how much they lie, and how consequentially.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Hillary Clinton has been cagey about her email arrangements when she was secretary of state. But when you look at what the independent fact-checkers who have given her a “pants on fire” or “four Pinocchios” rating on this issue actually have to say, it’s remarkably weak: She stands accused of being overly legalistic or overstating the extent to which she has been cleared, but not of making major claims that are completely at odds with reality.

Oh, and it barely got covered in the media, but her claim that Colin Powell advised her to set up a private email account was … completely true, validated by an email that Mr. Powell sent three days after she took office, which contradicts some of his own claims.

The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is dead, at least according to Angela Merkel’s second-in-command. And the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may not be far behind.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said Sunday that “negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it.” According to Gabriel, who also serves as his country’s economy minister, negotiators from the European Union and United States have failed—despite 14 rounds of talks—to align on any item out of 27 chapters being discussed. Gabriel and his ministry are not directly involved in the negotiations.

EU officials were quick to downplay Sigmar’s statement, saying they hoped to “close this deal by the end of the year.” But Gabriel isn’t the first to cry foul on the TTIP, which, if enacted, would establish the world’s largest free trade zone between the United States and the EU’s 28 member states. In May, French negotiators threatened to block the agreement. U.S. negotiators have also reportedly been angry over the passage of a similar agreement between Canada and the EU, which included protections U.S. negotiators don’t want included in the TTIP.

Sunday’s TTIP news comes on the heels of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying that the Senate would not vote on the TPP in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress. (The Obama administration countered, saying it still hopes to pass the deal before the next president takes office.)

Milan — If you put a pin right in the middle of a map of Italy, you’re likely to hit Amatrice. A small, historic city known as “the town of the hundred churches,” it lies two hours from Rome and 3,280 feet above sea level, in the scenic Gran Sasso National Park, on the watershed between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas. The area straddles four of our most famous regions: Lazio, Abruzzo, Marche and Umbria. Amatrice is the centerpiece of picture-postcard Italy, for those who find Tuscany too obvious, Rome too noisy and Venice too crowded.

And in the space of just one summer’s night, Amatrice is all but gone.

So are the nearby villages of Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto, wiped out by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that struck central Italy early Wednesday, killing at least 241 people, including children, trapping scores more under debris, leaving thousands homeless and setting off tremors that were felt from Bologna to Naples.

Today, according to one witness, “The area looks like Dante’s Inferno.” But until yesterday it looked like paradise. A lovely corner of the country. Ancient, unspoiled hilltop villages — for many foreigners, the quintessence of their Italian fantasies. For us Italians, a source of pride.

AMSTERDAM — On April 30, 1941, a Jewish man here in Amsterdam wrote a desperate letter to an American friend, pleading for help emigrating to the United States.

“U.S.A. is the only country we could go to,” he wrote. “It is for the sake of the children mainly.”

A volunteer found that plea for help in 2005 when she was sorting old World War II refugee files in New York City. It looked like countless other files, until she saw the children’s names.

“Oh my God,” she said, “this is the Anne Frank file.” Along with the letter were many others by Otto Frank, frantically seeking help to flee Nazi persecution and obtain a visa to America, Britain or Cuba — but getting nowhere because of global indifference to Jewish refugees.

We all know that the Frank children were murdered by the Nazis, but what is less known is the way Anne’s fate was sealed by a callous fear of refugees, among the world’s most desperate people.

Sound familiar?

Not long ago, a good friend of mine said something revealing to me: “I don’t think of you as disabled,” she confessed.

I knew exactly what she meant; I didn’t think of myself as disabled until a few decades ago, either, even though my two arms have been pretty significantly asymmetrical and different from most everybody else’s my whole life.

My friend’s comment was meant as a compliment, but followed a familiar logic — one that African-Americans have noted when their well-meaning white friends have tried to erase the complications of racial identity by saying, “I don’t think of you as black,” or when a man compliments a woman by saying that he thinks of her as “just one of the guys.”

This impulse to rescue people with disabilities from a discredited identity, while usually well meaning, is decidedly at odds with the various pride movements we’ve come to know in recent decades. Slogans like “Black Is Beautiful” and “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It!” became transformative taunts for generations of people schooled in the self-loathing of racism, sexism and heterosexism. Pride movements were the psycho-emotional equivalents of the anti-discrimination and desegregation laws that asserted the rights of full citizenship to women, gay people, racial minorities and other groups. More recently, the Black Lives Matter and the L.G.B.T. rights movement have also taken hold.

Yet pride movements for people with disabilities — like Crip Power or Mad Pride — have not gained the same sort of traction in the American consciousness. Why? One answer is that we have a much clearer collective notion of what it means to be a woman or an African-American, gay or transgender person than we do of what it means to be disabled.

Think of a Donald Trump voter, the kind that various studies have identified as his archetypal backer: a white man without a college education living in a region experiencing economic distress.

What do you see? A new “forgotten man,” ignored by elites in both parties, suffering through socioeconomic dislocations, and turning to Trump because he seems willing to put the working class first? Or a resentful white bigot, lashing back against the transformation of America by rallying around a candidate who promises to make America safe for racism once again?

You’re allowed to answer “both, depending.” But where to lay the emphasis has divided liberals and conservatives against one another.

Conservatives who are generally happy with the Republican Party’s status quo, the mix of policies that Trump has ranged himself against, have stressed his voters’ baser proclivities and passions, dismissing them as bigots who are really the authors of their own unhappy fates.

Conservatives who favor a populist shift in how the G.O.P. approaches issues like taxes or transfer programs have stressed the ways in which Reaganite Republicanism has failed the working class, while urging a conservative politics of solidarity that borrows at least something from the wreck of Trumpism.

Likewise on the left: The more content you are with a liberalism in which social issues provide most of the Democratic Party’s energy, the more likely you’ll be to crack wise on Twitter — “a lot of economic anxiety here!” — every time Trump or one of his hangers-on or supporters makes a xenophobic foray.

Alternatively, the more you favor a left-wing politics that stresses economic forces above all else, the more you’ll cast Trump’s blue collar support as the bitter fruit of the Democratic Party’s turn to neoliberalism, and argue that social democracy rather than shaming and shunning is the cure for right-wing populism.

My sympathies are with the second group in both debates — as a partisan of a more solidaristic conservatism, and as an outsider who prefers the old left’s class politics to the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of elite liberalism today.
But it’s also important for partisans of socioeconomic solidarity, whether right wing or left wing, to recognize that racial and economic grievances can’t always be separated, and that a politics of ethnic competition is an unfortunately common state of political affairs.

Die-hard opponents of the 2010 health reform law, the Affordable Care Act, have often used its real and imagined problems to argue that it is fatally flawed. Now they are seizing on an announcement by Aetna that it will reduce its participation in the health insurance marketplaces set up by the law. Donald Trump’s campaign called Aetna’s move “the latest blow to this broken law that is slowly imploding under its regulatory red tape.”

This is hyperbole. The law has survived many setbacks, and it will overcome Aetna’s decision, too.

The law set up federal and state-run marketplaces where people who don’t have health insurance through their employers or government programs like Medicare can buy coverage. Despite initial problems with HealthCare.gov, the federal program’s website, and some state sites, the marketplaces have helped many Americans become insured. About 11 million people have bought policies, and the government provides tax credits to 85 percent of them to make the coverage affordable.

But some big national insurers like UnitedHealth, Humana and now Aetna say they are losing too much money on marketplace policies. The reason is that the customers they signed up used more medical services than the insurers had anticipated. On Monday, Aetna said it would reduce the number of counties where it sells such policies to 242, from 778, citing a $200 million pretax loss on those policies in the second quarter. The company had sold marketplace policies to about 911,000 customers as of April.

Aetna’s decision will cause problems in some places. For example, Pinal County in Arizona might have no insurer selling marketplace policies for 2017 unless another company steps in to replace Aetna. But competition is more robust elsewhere. A Kaiser Family Foundation report published in July said that in 16 states and the District of Columbia, there would be an average of 5.8 insurers selling policies for 2017. That number was down from 6.5 in 2016 but about the same as in 2014.

Die-hard opponents of the 2010 health reform law, the Affordable Care Act, have often used its real and imagined problems to argue that it is fatally flawed. Now they are seizing on an announcement by Aetna that it will reduce its participation in the health insurance marketplaces set up by the law. Donald Trump’s campaign called Aetna’s move “the latest blow to this broken law that is slowly imploding under its regulatory red tape.”

This is hyperbole. The law has survived many setbacks, and it will overcome Aetna’s decision, too.

The law set up federal and state-run marketplaces where people who don’t have health insurance through their employers or government programs like Medicare can buy coverage. Despite initial problems with HealthCare.gov, the federal program’s website, and some state sites, the marketplaces have helped many Americans become insured. About 11 million people have bought policies, and the government provides tax credits to 85 percent of them to make the coverage affordable.

But some big national insurers like UnitedHealth, Humana and now Aetna say they are losing too much money on marketplace policies. The reason is that the customers they signed up used more medical services than the insurers had anticipated. On Monday, Aetna said it would reduce the number of counties where it sells such policies to 242, from 778, citing a $200 million pretax loss on those policies in the second quarter. The company had sold marketplace policies to about 911,000 customers as of April.

Aetna’s decision will cause problems in some places. For example, Pinal County in Arizona might have no insurer selling marketplace policies for 2017 unless another company steps in to replace Aetna. But competition is more robust elsewhere. A Kaiser Family Foundation report published in July said that in 16 states and the District of Columbia, there would be an average of 5.8 insurers selling policies for 2017. That number was down from 6.5 in 2016 but about the same as in 2014.

For millions of Syrian civilians trapped for five years by a relentless war, mere lifesaving aid, let alone refuge, is out of reach. But for the 75,000 displaced people caught on Jordan’s desert frontier with Syria, salvation is only yards away. Unlike many of their fellow citizens, they can be saved. So why have they been effectively abandoned?

They are assembled in a kind of buffer zone on an inhospitable strip of land, much of it within Jordanian territory, just north of the official Jordanian border. But that border is closed, which prevents aid from reaching these desperate refugees and at the same time prevents them from seeking safety. If they move, they risk being pushed back into Syria or perishing in the harsh desert. Both options are morally intolerable and completely avoidable.

The refugees have amassed in makeshift camps in an area known as the berm, so named for its distinctive raised barrier of sand, which marks a mileslong no man’s land between Syria and Jordan. Military bases, checkpoints and patrols dot the area, along with various Syrian armed groups, some of whom mix among the refugees.

Since the start of Syria’s war in 2011, the area around the berm has served as an entry point to safety in Jordan from the unremitting violence in Syria. But on June 21, Jordan closed its northern border after a car bombing that day at a nearby Jordanian military base.

For the last seven weeks, relief agencies based in Jordan have not been able to get to the berm. Adequate food, water and medical supplies are not reaching the refugees, just as summer temperatures soar. Rodents roam the sprawling settlement, which lacks proper latrines and shelter. Dust storms regularly rip apart makeshift tents.

With the border closed, a critical lifeline has been cut, threatening death by starvation, illness, heat stroke or unattended medical complications. While some water is provided by a rudimentary pipeline, it’s unclear how many refugees have access to it. And it’s not known if an ad hoc delivery of food last week, dropped by crane over the berm, reached all those in need.

What is clear is that no medical aid is getting through. Just this week, Doctors Without Borders teams in Jordan received reports from United Nations personnel that pregnant women at the berm had died in labor.