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The democratic nations of the world are in a global struggle against authoritarianism

But that struggle also has domestic fronts — the need to defeat the mini-Putins now found across the Western democracies. These are the demagogues who lie with Putinesque brazenness, who shred democratic institutions with Putinesque bravado, who strut the world’s stage with Putin’s amoral schoolboy machismo while pretending to represent all that is traditional and holy.

In the United States that, of course, is Donald Trump. This moment of heightened danger and crisis makes it even clearer that the No. 1 domestic priority for all Americans who care about democracy is to make sure Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office ever again.

Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have pointed out that Russia has run huge trade surpluses every year since the early 1990s, which should have led to a large accumulation of overseas assets. Yet official statistics show Russia with only moderately more assets than liabilities abroad. How is that possible? The obvious explanation is that wealthy Russians have been skimming off large sums and parking them abroad.

The sums involved are mind-boggling. Novokmet et al. estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P. To give you some perspective, this is as if a U.S. president’s cronies had managed to hide $20 trillion in overseas accounts.

, “the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.” As far as I can tell, the overseas exposure of Russia’s elite has no precedent in history — and it creates a huge vulnerability that the West can exploit.

On Monday, Ukraine published a video of a captured soldier in his unit, apologizing for taking part in the invasion.

Everyone is in a state of shock.

While casualty figures in wartime are notoriously unreliable — and Ukraine has put the total of Russian dead in the thousands — the 498 Moscow acknowledged in the seven days of fighting is the largest in any of its military operations since the war in Chechnya, which marked the beginning of President Vladimir V. Putin’s tenure in 1999.

North Korea on Saturday launched a ballistic missile toward the sea off its east coast, its second missile test in a week, South Korean defense officials said.

The missile, launched at ​8:48 a.m. from Sunan, near Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, flew 1​68 miles to the east, reaching an altitude of 3​4​8 miles, the South’s military said. No further details were immediately released, but the data ​was similar to the data collected when North Korea last conducted a missile test on Sunday​.

its state media released aerial photos of the Korean Peninsula that it said had been taken by a camera mounted on the rocket.

The Amazon is losing its ability to recover from disturbances like droughts and land-use changes, scientists reported Monday, adding to concern that the rainforest is approaching a critical threshold beyond which much of it will be replaced by grassland, with vast consequences for biodiversity and climate change.

The scientists said their research did not pinpoint when this threshold, which they described as a tipping point, might be reached.

Losing the rainforest could result in up to 90 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide getting put back into the atmosphere, he said, equivalent to several years of global emissions. That would make limiting global warming more difficult.

President Biden faces intensifying pressure at home four weeks into the war, with a solid majority of Americans expressing doubt that he has done enough to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, according to a poll by The Associated Press and NORC released Thursday.

Some 56 percent of Americans — and 43 percent of Democrats — said Mr. Biden, who was meeting on Thursday with European leaders, had not been “tough enough” in his response. About one-third said his handling the crisis was “just right,” according to the poll, which surveyed 1,082 U.S. adults between last Thursday and Monday, more than three weeks into the war.

Mr. Biden has tried to chart a middle course between punishing Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and provoking a direct military confrontation that could start a war between two nuclear superpowers.

Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the English department. She was one of several academics who described, in Heller’s phrase, an “orientation toward the present” among contemporary college students so powerful that they “lost their bearings in the past.”

“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” she told him, “I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.”

I flatter myself that I can mostly follow the sentence structure in these books, but in every other way I am the reader described by Claybaugh, too attached to the distracting present to enter fully the complex language of the past.