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The company adds information labels to some posts about climate change, and it reduces distribution of posts that its fact-checking partners rate as false. But it generally does not remove those posts, as it does with certain false claims about vaccines and the coronavirus. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, called the company’s approach “disturbing.”

“Unmitigated climate change is projected to lead to far greater numbers of human fatalities than covid-19,” said Mann, author of “The New Climate War.” “The fact that they’re treating greater threat with so much less urgency and care is problematic.”

“For too many years, the ideological opposition to harm reduction has cost lives,” said Dr. Carolyn Bennett, the federal minister of mental health and addictions, at a news conference on Tuesday.

British Columbia has been a leader in Canada’s harm reduction movement.

The exemption will go into effect on Jan. 31, 2023, and will expire after three years.

Decriminalization will allow police to focus on organized crime and drug traffickers, instead of individual users, said Sheila Malcolmson, the provincial minister of mental health and addictions. “We will take this year ahead to ready our justice and health systems,” she added.

“I think making drug use easier for them is kind of like palliative care,” said Mr. Doucette, who spent 35 years working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police before retiring, most of which he spent in drug enforcement. “It’s just condemning them to a slow death because of drugs, whereas if you get them off drugs, get them a life back, they can enjoy life.”

British Columbia has one of the highest per capita rates of drug death across North America, at 42.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021, according to provincial data.

In the U.S., the 10 states with the highest level of drug overdose, have rates ranging between 39.1 deaths per 100,000 in Connecticut, to 81.4 deaths per 100,000 in West Virginia, according to the latest mortality data, for 2020, by the Centers for Disease Control.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”

Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses.

Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics — a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.

“He doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.

The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president. Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.

Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years — less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.

Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”

“I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”

The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.

Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta. He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for low-income people in Indiana later this month.

Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.

The Carters walk every day — often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.

“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”

“He’s a good ol’ Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.

Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents — Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”

He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”

They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have. “I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn. “And you?” “No, I’m happy,” she says.

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.

The implications for China extend beyond Ukraine, and even Europe.

“He’s damned if he did know, and damned if he didn’t,” Paul Haenle, a former director for China on the National Security Council, said of whether Mr. Xi had been aware of Russia’s plans to invade. “If he did know and he didn’t tell people, he’s complicit; if he wasn’t told by Putin, it’s an affront.”

In any case, the invasion evidently surprised many in Beijing’s establishment

Mr. Xi’s statement with Mr. Putin on Feb. 4 endorsed a Russian security proposal that would exclude Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Even so, as Mr. Putin became determined to reverse Ukraine’s turn to Western security protections, Chinese officials began to echo Russian arguments. Beijing also saw a growing threat from American-led military blocs.

“Putin may have done this anyway, but also it was unquestionably an enabling backdrop that was provided by the joint statement, the visit and Xi’s association with all of these things,”

“He owns that relationship with Putin,” Mr. Haenle said. “If you’re suggesting in the Chinese system right now that it was not smart to get that close to Russia, you’re in effect criticizing the leader.”

For decades it sought to build ties with Russia while also keeping Ukraine close.

Over the past years, as growing numbers of Ukrainians supported joining NATO, Chinese diplomats did not raise objections with Kyiv, said Sergiy Gerasymchuk, an analyst with Ukrainian Prism, a foreign policy research organization in Kyiv.

For both leaders, their partnership was an answer to Mr. Biden’s effort to forge an “alliance of democracies.”

Before and shortly after the invasion, Beijing sounded sympathetic to Moscow’s security demands, mocking Western warnings of war and accusing the United States of goading Russia. Over the past two weeks, though, China has sought to edge slightly away from Russia. It has softened its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties. It has cast itself as an impartial party, calling for peace talks and for the war to stop as soon as possible.

Beijing had its own complaints with NATO, rooted in the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, during NATO’s war in 1999 to protect a breakaway region, Kosovo. Those suspicions deepened when NATO in 2021 began to describe China as an emerging challenge to the alliance.

n Feb. 23, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, accused Washington of “manufacturing panic.”

Chinese officials tweaked their calls to heed Russia’s security, stressing that “any country’s legitimate security concerns should be respected.” They still did not use the word “invasion,” but have acknowledged a “conflict between Ukraine and Russia.”

“Many decision makers in China began to perceive relations in black and white: either you are a Chinese ally or an American one,”

“They still want to remain sort of neutral, but they bitterly failed.”

grants membership only by unanimous consent.

Mr. Putin is trying to distract from more urgent matters.

Mr. Biden successfully urged NATO to accept Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as member states in the late 1990s. The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, Mr. Biden said that turning the former Cold War adversaries into allies would mark the “beginning of another 50 years of peace” for Europe.

we support Ukraine membership in NATO.

Officials in European nations with stronger liberal governance — notably in Sweden and Finland — have also floated the possibility of joining NATO

After annexing Crimea, Mr. Putin invaded eastern Ukraine and gave military aid to a separatist insurgency there. He did something similar in Georgia in 2008.

Mr. Biden blew past those comments without responding.

Putin’s behavior shocked many people because they bought into his image as a grand master of intricate policy maneuvers, which assumes intentionality, adroitness, and cunning. A more accurate judgment followed from saying to oneself: This is an aging dictator, who after 20 years of absolute power gets no pushback; who is paranoid, dismissive, and brutal

, he is someone who has deteriorated both physically and—as seen in his delivery of rambling, querulous speeches—mentally.

The personality of the Ukrainian president has made all the difference. Volodymyr Zelensky is an Everyman hero: reluctant, initially unsure, but patriotic and courageous.

A second explanation is narrower. It has to do with military analysts’ focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war.

War is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear.

less international-relations theory and more Carl von Clausewitz would have helped

Finally, the democratic pessimism of the past two decades has obscured from many the extraordinary power of freedom, and the innate resilience of liberal-democratic countries and institutions.

A culture of lies is corrosive, breeding cynicism and eventually self-doubt. Truth is not only more powerful but open to all of us, hence Václav Havel’s dictum that the way to resist tyranny is to live in truth.

Even healthy and influential private companies can be ordered to undergo painful restructuring or curtail certain business operations

When nearly every renminbi borrowed is domestic — lent by a Chinese creditor to a Chinese borrower — it gives regulators a degree of control over debt problems that their Western counterparts can only dream of.

Even the makeup of China’s high debt levels has a silver lining for regulators. China’s aggregate ratio of debt to gross domestic product was almost 300 percent (or around $52 trillion) in September 2022, compared to 257 percent for the United States.

But less than 5 percent of China’s debt is external, amounting to $2.5 trillion, one-tenth of the U.S. level.

Ultimately, all of this serves the party’s absolute priority of maintaining social stability; there is zero tolerance for financial distress or major corporate failures that could trigger street demonstrations

instead of introducing reforms to establish a healthy market-based economy in which inefficient businesses are allowed to fail, China’s Evergrande-style fixes — while defusing short-term crises — reward irresponsible behavior and perpetuate the excessive borrowing and wasteful use of funding that leads to recurring financial distress.

Soft landings may become harder to achieve. China faces perhaps its greatest array of economic challenges since it began reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s: high debt, an ailing real estate sector, a long-term economic slowdown, rising unemployment, an aging and shrinking population and worsening trade and diplomatic relations with the United States.

There is a very real risk that China could suffer the same fate as Japan, which is still struggling to emerge from an extended period of economic stagnation that began in the 1990s. Japan’s troubles were caused, in part, by a burst real estate bubble and financial-sector problems similar to what China is now facing.

China’s regulatory troubleshooters have proven the financial doomsayers wrong again and again. But their biggest test may yet lie ahead.

An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.

“I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Mr. Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.

now a new paper — by Mr. Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise — proves Mr. Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,

“The most significant aspect for me is that the tiling does not clearly fall into any of the familiar classes of structures that we understand.”

black and white squares also can make weird nonperiodic patterns, in addition to the familiar, periodic checkerboard pattern. “It’s really pretty trivial to be able to make weird and interesting patterns,” he said. The magic of the two Penrose tiles is that they make only nonperiodic patterns — that’s all they can do.“But then the Holy Grail was, could you do with one — one tile?” Dr. Goodman-Strauss said.

Sir Roger found the proofs “very complicated.” Nonetheless, he was “extremely intrigued” by the einstein, he said: “It’s a really good shape, strikingly simple.”

When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.

The simplicity came honestly. Mr. Smith’s investigations were mostly by hand; one of his co-authors described him as an “imaginative tinkerer.”

“It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Dr. Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,”

The first step, Dr. Kaplan said, was to “define a set of four ‘metatiles,’ simple shapes that stand in for small groupings of one, two, or four hats.” The metatiles assemble into four larger shapes that behave similarly. This assembly, from metatiles to supertiles to supersupertiles, ad infinitum, covered “larger and larger mathematical ‘floors’ with copies of the hat,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We then show that this sort of hierarchical assembly is essentially the only way to tile the plane with hats, which turns out to be enough to show that it can never tile periodically.”

some might wonder whether this is a two-tile, not one-tile, set of aperiodic monotiles.

Dr. Goodman-Strauss had raised this subtlety on a tiling listserv: “Is there one hat or two?” The consensus was that a monotile counts as such even using its reflection. That leaves an open question, Dr. Berger said: Is there an einstein that will do the job without reflection?

“the hat” was not a new geometric invention. It is a polykite — it consists of eight kites. (Take a hexagon and draw three lines, connecting the center of each side to the center of its opposite side; the six shapes that result are kites.)

“It’s likely that others have contemplated this hat shape in the past, just not in a context where they proceeded to investigate its tiling properties,” Dr. Kaplan said. “I like to think that it was hiding in plain sight.”

Incredibly, Mr. Smith later found a second einstein. He called it “the turtle” — a polykite made of not eight kites but 10. It was “uncanny,” Dr. Kaplan said. He recalled feeling panicked; he was already “neck deep in the hat.”

Dr. Myers, who had done similar computations, promptly discovered a profound connection between the hat and the turtle. And he discerned that, in fact, there was an entire family of related einsteins — a continuous, uncountable infinity of shapes that morph one to the next.

this einstein family motivated the second proof, which offers a new tool for proving aperiodicity. The math seemed “too good to be true,” Dr. Myers said in an email. “I wasn’t expecting such a different approach to proving aperiodicity — but everything seemed to hold together as I wrote up the details.”

Mr. Smith was amazed to see the research paper come together. “I was no help, to be honest.” He appreciated the illustrations, he said: “I’m more of a pictures person.”

Blend these factors — a desire for escape from our virtual lives; bidding as fast as pushing a button; and the promotion of new collecting fields like outdated technology devices — and you have Heritage Auctions in Dallas.

Heritage is a whirlwind of activity, of passion, of hype, constantly trying new ways of enticing people to own something beautiful and useless. Ninety-one million Americans, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, are having trouble paying household bills. Everyone else is a potential bidder.

Twenty years ago, Heritage had four categories: coins, comics, movie posters and sports. Now it has more than 50, which generated revenue of $1.4 billion last year. Everything, at least in theory, is collectible.

“We don’t question the value or legitimacy of a particular subject matter relative to outmoded norms,” Mr. Benesh said. “We’re not here to tell you what’s worthwhile. The marketplace will tell you. The bidders” — Heritage has 1.6 million — “will tell you.”

In mid-2020, the privately held company moved to a 160,000-square-foot building by Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, doubling the size of its former headquarters. Hundreds of specialists, most of them collectors themselves, prepare hundreds of thousands of items for bids here — researching, photographing, writing catalog copy.

The problem is, older historical items that were previously unknown are becoming rare. Every barn, basement and attic has been ransacked for treasures. New items related to Washington or Lincoln, for instance, are nearly impossible to find.

Republican politicians, sensing momentum, called on other firms to follow suit.

“This was always cosmetic,” said Shivaram Rajgopal, a professor at Columbia Business School. “If signing a piece of paper was getting these companies into trouble, it’s no surprise they’re getting the hell out.

American asset managers have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of their clients, and the financial firms were worried that a new strategy by Climate Action 100+ could expose them to legal risks.

Since its founding in 2017, the group focused on getting publicly traded companies to increase how much information they shared about their emissions and identify climate-related risks to their businesses.

In addition to the risk that some clients might disapprove, and potentially sue, there were other concerns. Among them: that acting in concert to shape the behaviors of other companies could fall afoul of antitrust regulations.

The new plan called on asset-management firms to begin pressuring companies like Exxon Mobil and Walmart to adopt policies that could entail, for example, using fewer fossil fuels

last year, Climate Action 100+ said it would shift its focus toward getting companies to reduce emissions with what it called phase two of its strategy

BlackRock also said that one of its subsidiaries, BlackRock International, would continue to participate in the group — a tacit acknowledgment of the different regulatory environment in Europe. BlackRock also said it was initiating new features that would let clients choose if they wanted to pressure companies to reduce their emissions.

Pimco, another big asset manager, followed suit. “We have concluded that our Climate Action 100+ participation is no longer aligned with PIMCO’s approach to sustainability,” a firm spokesman said in a statement.

JPMorgan said it was pulling out of the group in recognition of the fact that, over the past few years, the firm had developed its own framework for engaging on climate risk

The fracturing of Climate Action 100+ was a victory for Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who has led a campaign against companies pursuing E.S.G. goals, shorthand for environmental, social and governance factors.

Embracing E.S.G. principles and speaking up on climate issues has become commonplace across corporate America in recent years. Chief executives warned about the dangers of climate change. Banks and asset managers formed alliances to phase out fossil fuels. Trillions of dollars were allocated for sustainable investing.

“Phase two is not that different,” she said. “It’s basically investors working with companies and saying: ‘OK, you’ve disclosed the risk. We just want to know how you’re going to address it.’ Because that’s what the investors want. How are you dealing with risk?”

Mindy Lubber, the chief executive of Ceres and a member of the steering committee of Climate Action 100+, disputed the notion that the new strategy represented a change from the focus on enhanced disclosure.

“The political cost has heightened, the legal risk has heightened,” he said. “That said, these corporations are not doing U-turns,” he added. “They continue to consider climate. That’s not going away. It’s adapting to the current environment.”

Aron Cramer, chief executive for BSR, a sustainable-business consultancy, said the Wall Street firms were responding to political pressure, but not abandoning their climate commitments altogether.

Several of the firms that backed out of Climate Action 100+ said they remained committed to the issue. JPMorgan said that it had a team of 40 people working on sustainable investing and that it believed “climate change continues to present material economic risks and opportunities to our clients.”

In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm

The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from.

Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms.

He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.

The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes

Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity

Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.

Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.

Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own

One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president.

Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal

Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party are about three times more likely than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to say they have participated in at least one of these activities to address climate change in the past year (32% vs. 10%).

30% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they have participated in at least one of four activities in the past year, compared with 17% of those ages 65 and older.

Those who say they personally care a great deal about climate change are much more likely than those who say they care some to have participated in at least one of four climate-related activities in the last year (36% vs. 14%).

A relatively small share of the public (28%) believes that climate activism, such as protests and rallies, makes people more likely to support action on climate change.

About half of Americans (49%) say climate activism does not really affect people’s levels of support, and 21% believe it has the opposite of its intended effect and makes people less likely to support action on climate change.

Just 11% of Americans say climate activism is extremely or very effective in getting elected officials to act on climate change; 33% say it is somewhat effective

A narrow majority of Americans (54%) say that climate activism is not too or not at all effective in getting elected official to act on climate change.

However, a majority of Democrats believe climate activism is at least somewhat effective at motivating action from elected officials. By contrast, 69% of Republicans believe it is not too or not at all effective.

Overall, 53% of U.S. adults say they have talked about the need for action on global climate change in the past few weeks. By comparison, 46% say they have not talked about the need to address climate change recently.

Democrats (72%) are far more likely than Republicans (35%) to say they have talked about the need for action on climate change within the last week.