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Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”

That is the stark reality facing Ms. Harris as she assumes responsibility for expanding the same kind of aid programs that have struggled to stem migration in the past. It is a challenge that initially frustrated her top political aides, some of whom viewed the assignment from Mr. Biden as one that would inevitably set her up for failure in the first months of her tenure.

Her allies worried that she would be expected to solve the entire immigration crisis, irked that the early reports of her new duties appeared to hold her responsible for juggling the recent surge of children crossing the border without adults.Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.

Armchair psychiatrists claim that Mr Trump’s lifelong fear of being seen as a loser has inspired his battle against democracy.

at the stroke of noon on January 20th, the legal shield that Mr Trump has wielded to stave off lawsuits will vanish, exposing him to an abundance of civil and criminal legal peril.

Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, has been investigating several possible financial crimes, including Mr Trump’s alleged hush-money pay-offs to an adult-film star and a Playboy model on the eve of the 2016 election

Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."

The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.

As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin scrambled to save faltering markets at the start of the pandemic last year, America’s top economic officials were in near-constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue.

Laurence D. Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, was in frequent touch with Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Powell in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency rescue programs were announced in late March.

Mr. Fink planned alongside the government for parts of a financial rescue that his firm referred to in one message as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”

China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

Siddharth Breja, who was senior vice president for global finance, claims he was fired on March 21 in retaliation for whistle-blowing and objecting to the shipment of the contaminated and expired pods and other illegal and unsafe conduct that “has jeopardized and continues to jeopardize public health and safety and the lives of millions of consumers, many of them children and teens.”

Juul did not recall the pods, Mr. Breja said, yet he was told to charge the supplier, Alternative Liquids Inc., $7 million so that Juul could recover from the contaminated batches. The supplier was not reachable for comment.

Mr. Breja detailed a culture of indifference to safety and quality-control issues among top executives at the company and quoted the then-chief executive Kevin Burns saying at a meeting in February: “Half our customers are drunk and vaping” and wouldn’t “notice the quality of our pods.”

Germany announced on Thursday that it would spend $44.5 billion to quit coal — but not for another 18 years, by 2038.

The move shows how expensive it is to stop burning the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, despite a broad consensus that keeping coal in the ground is vital to averting a climate crisis, and how politically complicated it is.

Germany doesn’t have shale gas, as the United States does, which has led to the rapid decline of coal use in America, despite President Trump’s support for coal. Germany also faces intense opposition to nuclear power. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, that opposition prompted the government to start shutting down the country’s nuclear plants, a transition that should be complete by 2022.

The UN's Libya envoy Ghassan Salamé has called on foreign powers to stop interfering in Libya's civil war.

On the eve of peace talks in Berlin, Mr Salamé said foreign support of proxy groups in the conflict had created a "vicious cycle" of violence.But Mr Salamé told the BBC that he was optimistic about the negotiations.It comes after nine months of conflict between the powerful General Khalifa Haftar and the UN-backed government in the capital Tripoli.

Mr Salamé called on international powers to stop supporting local proxy groups with mercenaries, arms, financing, and direct military support.He said such actions created "a vicious circle where their proxies call for intervention in their fight, and their own ambitions bring more divisions."

On the other side of the world in Washington, two deep-pocketed organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, vowed to spare poor countries from desperation. Their economists warned that immense relief was required to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and profound damage to global prosperity. Emerging markets make up 60 percent of the world economy, by one I.M.F. measure. A blow to their fortunes inflicts pain around the planet.

The shutdown of tourism has punished many developing countries.

$11 billion going to low-income countries.

Back in the spring, most scientists, including Anthony Fauci, the top infectious-disease expert in the U.S., predicted that a vaccine would take at least 12–18 months to deliver. That time frame was viewed as wildly optimistic, even reckless, given the more typical four to six, sometimes as many as 10 to 15, years that vaccine development typically requires

Today, most scientists working in infectious disease, including Fauci, are saying the United States will know whether there’s an effective COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year or early 2021, and one could become available by the end of 2021. That incredible speed is not being accomplished at the expense of safety; rather, it is the result of unprecedented collaboration across borders, academia, and industry.

The ideal vaccine will do three things: protect individuals from becoming infected, prevent life-altering effects for those who do get COVID-19, and block transmission of the virus to others. The vaccine does not need to be 100 percent effective at all three to be a powerful addition to our defenses against this virus.

he paid no federal income taxes in 11 out of 18 years the newspaper examined. He also managed to pay federal income taxes of just $750 in both 2016 and 2017.

some of Trump's companies are doing well and profitable; others, not so much. Some of his best-known ventures "report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year," according to the Times. That includes his famous golf courses — which have reportedly racked up at least $315 million in losses over the past two decades.

Trump Tower in New York is a major moneymaker

In 1971 Congress passed a comprehensive child-care plan. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to have crossed his desk, and arguing that “good public policy requires that we enhance rather than diminish both parental authority and parental involvement with children.”

It is expected to consist of a universal pre-kindergarten programme for three- and four-year-olds and free or heavily subsidised child care for most Americans.

Some public spending on child care has such vast benefits in later life that in broad terms it is an investment that pays for itself.

He is the mayor of Pavlopil, a village in eastern Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin started grabbing Ukrainian territory in February 2014, Mr Shapkin knew his village was in danger.

On one side were pro-Russian separatists, armed by the Kremlin. On the other were loyalist forces. If they fought over Pavlopil, villagers would surely die.

He suggested that the separatists enter in the morning, unarmed and on foot, to buy food and cigarettes. The Ukrainian army could do the same each afternoon. That way, they would not bump into each other and start shooting.

Then, after Kabul fell to the Taliban last August, Khyal Mohammad Ghayoor received a call from a stranger who identified himself only by the dual honorifics, Hajji Sahib, which roughly translates to a distinguished man who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca. The man told Mr. Ghayoor he was needed back in Afghanistan, not as a baker but as a police chief.

“I am very excited to be back in a free and liberated Afghanistan,” he said.

A similar mass exodus of Afghanistan’s professional class occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviets withdrew and the Taliban wrested control from the warlords who filled the leadership vacuum.

Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.

Victory would depend, realized Spike Wilson, the president of the California Real Estate Association, on convincing the large majority of white voters—who did not want to see themselves as racially prejudiced in any way—that the Realtors were campaigning not for discrimination but for American freedom.

The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s

at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 

just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe.

That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply

Knocking the stool out is extraordinarily hard, and the current high value of bitcoin and ether makes it even harder. To attack a blockchain and shut it down requires gaining 51% control of the computational power or value of tokens staked to verify transactions. The more valuable the tokens, the more energy it takes to attack a proof-of-work chain, like Bitcoin, and the more money to attack a proof-of-stake chain, like Ethereum. The security of these chains—as measured by the amount someone would have to spend to attack them—is now in the region of $10bn to $15bn.

It would require either a government or an extraordinarily rich individual to mount such an attack

Unravelling is therefore the more conceivable path. The events of this year have revealed just how prone to this sort of thing crypto is.

"Every person in this generation doesn't believe in the government. They want to leave Laos, they don't believe anything the government says," he tells the BBC. "Most of my friends have the same thoughts, but we only talk about it privately. If you say bad things about them in public, I don't know what will happen."

The economic crisis has been caused by a rash programme of government borrowing used to finance Chinese-backed infrastructure projects which has begun to unravel. The crisis shows little sign of easing, with public debt spiralling to unsustainable levels, resulting in government budget cuts, sky-high inflation and record-breaking currency depreciation, leaving many living on the brink in one of South East Asia's poorest countries.

"If you see your country becoming a colony of China, you see a government that is totally corrupt, and you cannot speak up because if you do you might be killed - would you want to stay?"

there was widespread concern that the pandemic would leave lasting economic scars. After all, the 2008 financial crisis was followed by a weak recovery that left real gross domestic product in many countries far below the pre-crisis trend even a decade later. Indeed, as we approach Covid’s four-year mark, many of the world’s economies remain well short of full recovery.

But not the United States. Not only have we had the strongest recovery in the advanced world, but the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook also points out that American growth since 2019 has actually exceeded pre-Covid projections.

let’s take a moment to celebrate this good economic news — and try to figure out what went right with the U.S. economy.

Countries agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels

who should transition first? What should determine each nation’s ambition? These efforts will be expensive. Who should pick up the tab?

The “Global Stocktake” from Dubai, like statements from earlier conclaves, got around these questions with the standard diplomatese: