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"Until December, a maximum of 50 people would come here," she says. "Now, we're serving 75. Most of the new ones are Senegalese and Moroccan."

Last year, 23,025 people arrived on boats — 8 1/2 times more than in 2019, according to United Nations refugee agency data.

Nearly all who reach the islands want to end up in mainland Spain, to find jobs or join relatives, which is more than 1,000 miles away.

In July, the U.S. government announced a plan for Costa Rica to temporarily host up to 200 refugees from Central America while they are processed for placement in the U.S. or elsewhere.

The new scale and diversity of refugees is challenging tiny Costa Rica’s capacity to manage these populations and ensure protection of their human rights. The U.S. plan to send more refugees their way will only add to this challenge.

The plan for Costa Rica to temporarily house refugees is in addition to an existing program that helps Central American minors gain refugee status in the U.S.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Xavier Becerra, nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, have conveyed similar messages about their immigrant roots.

Polls suggest 60% of Americans support some of its policies, such as a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

Yet this history of migration has coexisted with xenophobia: a form of prejudice against people from other countries.

The day-in, day-out work of the politician is the management of electoral coalitions: coaxing, cajoling, compelling people to work together who—in the more natural course of things—might have nothing in common

Unlike writers and intellectuals, politicians don’t have the freedom to work only with people they like and admire. Unlike writers and intellectuals, they have no duty to speak aloud their inner convictions—their work would become impossible if they did.

Politics unfortunately abounds in shams that must be treated reverentially for every politician who would succeed. If you are the sort of man whose stomach revolts against treating shams reverentially, you will be well advised to stay out of politics altogether and set up as a prophet; your prophecies may perhaps sow good seed for some future harvest. But as a politician you would be impotent. For at any given time the bulk of your countrymen believe firmly and devoutly, not only in various things that are worthy of belief, but also in illusions of one kind and another; and they will never submit to have their affairs managed for them by one who appears not to share in their credulity.

scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated

agree that they evolved from ancient wolves

he essence of the idea is that people actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.

Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language.

[Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery

Humans use discrete pulses of sound -- their language -- to alter the internal settings inside someone else's brain to suit an individual's interests. Because language is not a solitary pursuit, language is a form of social learning.

Brand helped to establish in 1996 to support projects designed to inspire “long-term responsibility.”

The theme of the talk was “Is Mass Extinction of Life on Earth Inevitable?”

the resurrection of extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, aided by new genomic technologies developed by the Harvard molecular biologist George Church.

social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.

Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way. More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?

“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”)

Einstein averred that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. He was right to be astonished. It seems sur­prising that our minds, which evolved to cope with life on the African savannah and haven’t changed much in 10,000 years, can make sense of phenomena far from our everyday intuitions: the microworld of atoms and the vastness of the cosmos. But our comprehension could one day “hit the buffers”. A monkey is unaware that atoms exist. Likewise, our brainpower may not stretch to the deepest aspects of reality.

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, or tropical forests – is made up of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. That, at least, is what most scientists believe, and there is no reason to doubt it. Yet there are inherent limits to science’s predictive power. Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that’s atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained compu­tation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead.

even if we could build a computer with hugely superhuman processing power, which could offer an accurate simulation, that doesn’t mean that we will have the insight to understand it. Some of the “aha” insights that scientists strive for may have to await the emergence of post-human intellects.

Continued warming of the Earth’s oceans over the next century could trigger disruptions to marine life on a scale not seen in the last 3 million years, scientists warn in a study released Monday.

most dramatic disruptions would likely be averted if the world’s nations can bring greenhouse gas emissions under control in the coming decades, the authors write in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

“Climate change may rapidly reorganize marine diversity over large oceanic regions,” s

"An image goes around the world and brings out emotion. It is shared," he said. "Europe is a group of principles, of values which oblige us to welcome those who are pushed out and look for refuge because they are persecuted." He said some of the 4 million displaced people in Syria have been "welcomed by neighboring countries that are themselves suffering."

efforts to reimagine the core experience of the book have stumbled. Dozens of publishing start-ups tried harnessing social reading apps or multimedia, but few caught on.

Social Books, which let users leave public comments on particular passages and comment on passages selected by others, became Rethink Books and then faltered. Push Pop Press, whose avowed aim was to reimagine the book by mixing text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics, was acquired by Facebook in 2011 and heard from no more. Copia, another highly publicized social reading platform, changed its business model to become a classroom learning tool. The latest to stumble is Small Demons, which explores the interrelationship among books. Users who were struck by the Ziegfeld Follies in “The Great Gatsby,” for instance, could follow a link to the dancers’ appearance in 67 other books. Small Demons said it would close this month without a new investor.

“A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.”

Truth to tell: populism and the immigration debate

The populist surge that helped propel Brexit isn’t going to help the UK take control of its borders, writes Tim Bale. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives have been honest with voters about immigration policy, and that shows little signs of changing after a hard Brexit. The gap between rhetoric and reality has given politicians the opportunity to indulge in populist promises. People sense they are not being told the whole truth – but do they want to hear it?

Just as political scientists had begun to take it for granted we had moved from an era of ‘position politics’ (the clash of big ideas between two tribes) to an era of ‘valence politics’ (where competence and credibility counts most)

Following bitter disputes, five Native American groups in the Pacific Northwest have come together to facilitate the reburial of an individual they know as “Ancient One.

Some anthropologists were eager to scientifically test the bones hoping for clues about who the first Americans were and where they came from. But many Native Americans hesitated to support this scientific scrutiny (including tests which permanently destroy or damage the original bone), arguing it was disrespectful to their ancient ancestor. They wanted him laid to rest.

(NAGPRA). It aimed to address the problematic history behind museum human remains collections.

the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.

Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.

Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.

The motivating force for the change came from the macro side, with modern macroeconomics being far more explicit than old-fashioned monetary theory about fluctuations in income and employment (as well as the price level).

The strength of microeconomics comes from the simplicity of its underlying structure and its close touch with the real world. In a nutshell, microeconomics has to do with supply and demand, and with the way they interact in various markets.

Public finance (see public choice) looks at how the government enters the scene. Traditionally, its focus was on taxes, which automatically introduce “wedges” (differences between the price the buyer pays and the price the seller receives) and cause inefficiency.

9-Year-Old Migrant Girl Dies Trying to Cross Rio Grande Into U.S.

The girl was found unconscious on an island on the Mexican side of the river near the Texas border and could not be revived.

the first reported death of a child in a new surge of migration along the southwestern border.