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"Last night was at a scale we haven't seen in Belfast or further afield in Northern Ireland for a number of years," Roberts said. In a tweet, the Police Federation for Northern Ireland called for calm, saying, "These are scenes we hoped had been confined to history."

On Wednesday night, seven police officers were injured

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement set up a power-sharing arrangement between Protestants and Catholics. It largely ended 30 years of political violence in Northern Ireland among Irish republicans, British loyalists and U.K.-armed forces that resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 people.

Since the U.K.'s departure from the European Union at the beginning of the year, Northern Ireland has experienced shortages on grocery shelves that have been blamed on red tape and delays caused by new post-Brexit checks at ports in Northern Ireland. As part of the Brexit agreement, the EU insisted on the checks in exchange for allowing a soft border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

When Scotland held a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom in 2014, 55 percent of voters elected to remain. Now, in light of Brexit, the S.N.P. is calling for another referendum. Polls suggest the result would be much closer now. “Independence is coming,” Ian Blackford, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party in the British Parliament, said during a debate there in October. “We will take our place as a proud European nation.”

But Northern Ireland’s history often reads like a case study in how the most extreme elements in the society can wreak undue havoc.

That would be a problem for any London government, because a majority of people in Northern Ireland want to stay in the United Kingdom, but it is particularly poisonous for Mrs. May. That is because her minority government depends on the support of Northern Ireland’s hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, for which keeping its place in the United Kingdom is an existential matter.

Mrs. May’s other option is to play hardball and hope that the national leaders of the European Union retreat from the position proposed on Wednesday, at least allowing this issue to be fudged a little longer.

his speech raised the temperature on an inflammatory issue.

An alternative theory is that it is designed to provoke a full-scale crisis that could lead to Mr. Johnson suspending part of the protocol, blaming the European Union and stoking pro-Brexit sentiment at home.

Removing the court, Mr. Ferrie said, “would effectively mean cutting Northern Ireland off from the E.U.’s single market and related opportunities.”

trying to wrangle the last bits of sovereignty from the E.U.

he protocol is being implemented in an unnecessarily heavy handed way

t particularly opposes the removal of the Court of Justice of the European Union, based in Luxembourg and the bloc’s highest court, as the final arbiter of disputes.

Mr. Johnson has the ability to suspend parts of the protocol under Article 16 of the Brexit agreement, but he is considered unlikely to do so before the climate summit, COP26, Britain is hosting in Glasgow from Oct. 31 through Nov. 12.

But Mr. Frost’s intervention suggests that such concessions will hardly be sufficient, setting the scene for several weeks of tense negotiation.

When England started its first phase five days earlier on 13 May, new daily cases had fallen but were still about 75% of its late-April to early-May peak.

There was another stark difference. Ireland started lifting lockdown only after testing and contact-tracing systems were fully scaled up. England took the plunge before its systems were ready.

he UK appeared to lack sufficient testing and contact-tracing capacity for such a surge, said L’Estrange. “Perhaps they can get it up and running quickly. But they’re behind the curve and playing catch-up. You have to have sufficient testing and contact-tracing capacity ready to go before you ease restrictions. They’ve put the cart before the horse. They released the virus without having the apparatus in place to control it, and they’ve released it at a high level.”

Ireland’s lockdown easing started after England’s and is scheduled to go more cautiously and slowly, with the last phase starting on 10 August, and schools opening in September. England’s plan envisages schools starting to open on 1 June and the final phase of lifting starting on 4 July.

the decision about schools was political. “It is not a scientific decision. Scientists can offer some advice.”

An editorial in the British Medical Journal this week excoriated the UK’s record on testing and tracing. “Meaningless political soundbites promising to recruit 18,000 contact tracers, test 200,000 people a day, or invest in unjustified contact tracing apps, divert focus and could lead to more deaths. These headline grabbing schemes should be replaced by locality-led strategies rooted in communicable disease control,” it said.

The teenager was taken into custody Monday afternoon, and the police were searching his residence as part of a criminal investigation, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police. On Tuesday, the police said the boy had been released on bail.

TalkTalk’s efforts to play down the impact of the data breach have not stopped British authorities from criticizing the company and the failure of its online security systems

Shares of TalkTalk are down 8 percent since the hacking attack was confirmed on Friday.

For although Trump will eventually exit political life, the seditionists will not. They will remain, nursing their grievances, feverishly posting on social media, angrily listening to Tucker Carlson

even if we put the number of truly seditious Americans at 10 or 15 percent, that’s a very large number of people

those who do hold these views are quite numerous. In December, 34 percent of Americans said they did not trust the outcome of the 2020 election. More recently, 21 percent said that they either strongly support or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol building. As of this week, 32 percent were still telling pollsters that Biden was not the legitimate winner.

Perhaps in 2024, seditionists, rather than reality-based Republicans, will be running the elections in Georgia and Arizona. Americans could see worse postelection scenarios than the one we’ve just lived through.

the seditionists have in fact declared their independence from the rest of us. January 6 was indeed their 1776: They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit, ruled over by a different president chosen according to a different rule book

yet they cannot be wished away, or sent away, or somehow locked up. They will not leave of their own accord, and Americans who accept Biden’s lawful victory won’t either. We have no choice except to coexist.

But how? Clearly we need regulation of social media, but that’s years away. Of course we need better education, but that doesn’t help us deal with the armed men who were standing outside the Ohio statehouse this week.

Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject.

That’s the counterintuitive advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil

In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.

The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate.

That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.

the Biden administration, or indeed a state government, could act on this principle and, for example, reinvigorate AmeriCorps, the national-service program, offering proper salaries to young people willing to serve as cleaners or aides at overburdened hospitals, food banks, and addiction clinics

infrastructure investment can produce projects benefiting all of society too. So can a cross-community discussion about infrastructure, or even infrastructure security

Ask for ideas. Take notes. Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting. “Who won the 2020 election?” is, for these purposes, a bad topic. “How do we fix the potholes in our roads?” is, in contrast, superb.

Here’s another tactic from the world of conflict prevention: work with trusted messengers, people who have authority within the seditious community, who sympathize with its shared values but are nevertheless willing to talk their comrades down from the brink.

Clearly the Republican Party is well placed to reach out to members who have rejected democracy, which is why it’s important to support the Adam Kinzingers and the Ben Sasses, even the Mitch McConnells who belatedly and self-interestedly switch sides

some of the Colombian program’s principles have useful resonance. It focuses on the long term, offering former outcasts the hope of a positive future, and providing training and counseling designed to help them assimilate

Not coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of advice that can be heard from psychologists who specialize in exit counseling for people who have left religious cults.

in both cases, identification with the group comes to dominate people psychologically. “Other interests and ideas become closed off,” he said. “They dismiss anything that pushes back against them.”

Before they can be convinced otherwise, they will have to see some kind of future for themselves in an America run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Congress.

the Englishness of Brexit only matters if people see themselves as something other than British.

Brexit revealed the scale of the problem that was already there.

he passage reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a figure who had been close to Boris Johnson and worried that the U.K. was in danger of becoming an anachronism like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Britain, this person said, was failing because it had grown lazy and complacent, unable to act with speed and purpose. The state had stopped paying attention to the basics of government, whether that was the development of its economy, the protection of its borders, or the defense of the realm. Instead, it had become guilty of a failed elite groupthink that had allowed separatism to flourish, wealth to concentrate in London and its surrounding areas, and the political elite to ignore the public mood.

Austria-Hungary did not, as is often portrayed, disintegrate because it was illegitimate or a relic of a bygone era. It fell apart because in its desperation to survive World War I, it undermined the foundation of its legitimacy as an empire of nations, becoming instead an Austrian autocracy. In its scramble to survive, it forgot who it was.

States that have forgotten who they are tend not to last long.The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: In each case, the breakup came about because of the demands of the dominant state in the union (or from outside the union, in the case of Sicily) as much as the demand for independence or autonomy from the peripheries.

One of the problems in Britain is that the loss of faith in the country is now so pervasive that it is hard to know whether it can be rebuilt

if Britain is to survive, it has to believe that there is such a thing as Britain and act as though that is the case. Joseph Roth wrote that the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy died “not through the empty verbiage of its revolutionaries, but through the ironical disbelief of those who should have believed in, and supported, it.” In time, we might well say the same of Britain.

Outside the European Union, Britain’s collective experience becomes more national by definition. Its economy diverges from the EU, with separate trading relationships, tariffs, standards, and products. It will have its own British immigration system, border checks, and citizenship. For good or bad, Brexit means that Britain will become more distinct from the other nations of Europe.

Brexit is unlikely to be the decisive factor either way. Unless people in Scotland believe that they are also British and that the British government and state is their government and state, nothing else matters.

At the end of The Leopard, as the prince lies dying in his old age, he realizes that his youthful calm about the fate of his class and country had been misplaced—he had been wrong to think nothing would change. “The significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories,” he says to himself. But the revolution has swept away his family’s old aristocratic privileges and way of life. The meaning of his name, of being noble, had become, more and more, little more than “empty pomp.”

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains an unusual country, but its vital memories are dying. To survive, it must be more than empty pomp.

“It took something high profile to get people to understand, and it needed something in the media to make people aware,” Dr. Stewart said, referring to Benjamin’s death. “Even if it just means we’re preventing another Ben Robinson and not addressing dementia, that’s still very important. We’ve got to get things to change.”

Much of what Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart have accomplished is second nature in the United States, where concussions have been a growing part of the public dialogue for several years. Coaches and players in many sports are now taught that concussions, brain injuries resulting from a blow to the head or whiplash, can lead to headaches, memory loss, dizziness, sensitivity to light and other problems.

After an outcry from scientists, retired players and family members of injured and deceased athletes, the N.F.L. and other leagues have adopted protocols during games to detect concussions, pull players from the field, administer on-the-spot tests and detail when they can return to play.

hris Nowinski, a co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, an American nonprofit group that pushes for safe sports, said that concussion management in Britain lags five to six years behind the United States. Photo

“Scotland is a great example of a team of passionate advocates creating change in their community,” he said. “It’s a template that I hope others follow.”

Concussions were far from Mr. Robinson’s mind when his son joined his teammates from Carrickfergus Grammar School to play their rivals from Dalriada that day.

Soccer was Benjamin’s first love, but when he was 11, he took up rugby, which was mandatory at his new school. Initially, he did not enjoy the sport. But he warmed to it after winning the award for most improved player. He did strength and conditioning drills to add muscle, and arm wrestled with his father.

The night before the game, his son watched “Invictus,” the film about South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. He slept that night in his uniform. When his mother dropped him off at the field the next day, Benjamin flashed a thumbs-up sign.

As time ran down, Benjamin made a tackle and then collapsed. The game was stopped. Ms. Walton ran onto the field, where Benjamin’s teammate told her that he was out cold. He was rushed to Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.

But just minutes into the second half, Benjamin collided with another player, whose shoulder hit him in the chest, according to Mr. Robinson, who obtained a DVD of the match from the police. His son’s head whipped back, and he fell. The coach came to look at Benjamin, who was on the ground for about 90 seconds, and helped him to his feet. A doctor who was watching his son play for Dalriada briefly walked onto the field but then turned back.

When Mr. Robinson and his wife, Carol, arrived at the hospital, he knew the situation was dire from the faces of the staff. His son was on life support. The doctors said that his brain injury looked like it was sustained in a car accident and that he had a slim chance of surviving.

Initially, though, a police investigator deferred to the schools when it came to gathering comments from Benjamin’s teammates and opponents. Officials at Carrickfergus declined to discuss the case.

Ms. Walton and Mr. Robinson, though, had to piece together much of what happened on their own. One break came while Ms. Walton was visiting her son’s grave — which she said she did every day — and met one of his teammates, who was out jogging. He told her that Benjamin had been knocked out during the match, not just hit at the end, as had been contended.

The big break came when a police officer gave Mr. Robinson a copy of a video taken of the match by a student. Mr. Robinson watched the shaky footage repeatedly and confirmed that his son suffered not one big blow, but at least three, and that the coach attended to him several times.

Yet she effectively absolved the coach and referee, who were not “made aware of Benjamin’s neurological complaints,” even though the coach can be seen on the video checking on him after a hit during the match. She implied that Benjamin could have let them know about his condition, even though experts say concussion victims often cannot adequately communicate what they are experiencing.

Soon after, Mr. and Ms. Robinson, Dr. Stewart and James Robson, the chief medical officer of Scottish Rugby, met with Scotland’s sport and education officials to lobby for change. A concussion-awareness leaflet was produced at the beginning of 2014.

It has been an unlikely road for Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart, an avid bike rider with no experience as a sideline doctor. But about five years ago, even before Benjamin’s death, Dr. Stewart began to get calls from former professional players and had conversations with Scottish Rugby as it tried to address brain trauma and degenerative brain disease.

Still, some sports executives have anonymously challenged Dr. Stewart. In one match in April in London, Oscar, the Brazilian star player on Chelsea who is known by one name, collided violently with the goalkeeper yet was not immediately taken out of the game. There are no concussion spotters at Premier League matches, but team and league officials could watch a replay of the game later. That is why Dr. Stewart — an adviser to the Football Association — was dismayed that Oscar was in uniform three days later, violating the league’s return-to-play guidelines that require at least six days of rest.

“I don’t need to stand up in front of a conference of sports medicine and be personally criticized,” he said. “But then I’ll get a call from Peter, who is enthused about something we’ve done with the leaflets, or some research collaborators who are keen to move forward, and I say, ‘Ah, for all the small minds that are critical and obviously trying to deny the inevitable signs, there are a whole bunch of people who are having a positive effect on it.’

On a chilly evening in late October, with teenagers practicing on a nearby field, Lianne Brunton, the club’s physical therapist, showed off the test on a tablet computer. At the start of the season, hundreds of youth and adult players are timed as they read aloud a series of numbers on several screens. If a player is suspected of having a concussion during a match, he or she is taken off and asked to read the numbers again. Players who take longer are evaluated further.

The test, which is widely used in the United States, is another example of how the grass-roots campaign to improve safety standards after Benjamin’s death has changed attitudes.

It follows criticism over the clarity of government advice to date.

The number of people who have died with coronavirus in the UK has now reached 1,019, with a further 260 deaths announced on Saturday.

There are now 17,089 confirmed cases in the UK.

In the letter being sent to 30 million households at an anticipated cost of £5.8m, Mr Johnson writes: "From the start, we have sought to put in the right measures at the right time.

In his letter, Mr Johnson describes the pandemic as a "moment of national emergency", urging the public to stay at home to protect the NHS and save lives.

He also praises the work of doctors, nurses and other carers as well as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who have volunteered to help the most vulnerable.

Meanwhile, new powers, including fines of up to £5,000, to enforce guidelines on people staying at home and businesses staying closed came into force in Northern Ireland on Saturday evening.

The maximum fine will be reserved for businesses but individuals could face a fine of up to £960 if they do not comply.

Business Secretary Alok Sharma also announced insolvency rules would be changed to allow firms greater flexibility as they faced the coronavirus crisis.

He said a range of measures to boost the supply of personal protective equipment, such as face masks, to protect frontline NHS staff, were also being introduced.

Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack, is self-isolating after he developed coronavirus symptoms. He is said to be experiencing mild symptoms but has not been tested for Covid-19

Brexit was a political project based on the idea that identity politics could answer technocratic questions. If the technocratic question keeps proving problematic, you just need to have more faith in your identity. It was like trying to unlock a door with a slice of bread.

It said, in a not legally binding manner, that Parliament would back the Brexit deal if “alternative arrangements” were found for the backstop. What were these alternative arrangements? How do you promise to keep a border open while simultaneously not promising to keep a border open? Brady couldn’t say. Neither could the prime minister or any other member of her government. They had no idea what they were doing. They just needed some words, any words, that could win majority support in the Commons. The fact that the specific words they chose made no sense was an advantage: If the amendment had made sense, someone would have taken offense at its implications

There was a weird, and very un-British, quasi-religious undercurrent to all this — a sense that things would work if you just believed in them hard enough

Not only did Brady’s proposition have no meaning, it was common knowledge before it was voted on that it could not be delivered

That’s what made the debate so truly pitiful. It was a return to the world of fairy tales and hallucinations, of the kind of quasi-religious nationalist politics that have fueled the Brexit project from the start. British politicians were confronted with reality and given a chance to fix the problems with Brexit instead of pretending there weren’t any, and they once again fled back into mythmaking

The country is now on the verge of disaster. On March 29, unless something is done, Britain will fall out the European Union without a deal. That will affect every aspect of the economy. It’s likely to block cargo  at the border; pulverize agricultural exports; trigger shortages of food, medicine and radioactive isotopes; spark employment chaos by suddenly canceling the mutual recognition of qualifications between British and European institutions; halt the legal basis for data transfer overnight; and lead to massive and sudden flows of immigration in both directions. The list goes on and on. There is no part of society that is unaffected. And yet not only does the British political class not seem to understand the consequences of what it is doing, it is lost in populist fantasies instead of addressing the cold reality

Britain is one of the richest and most advanced democracies in the world. It is currently locked in a room, babbling away to itself hysterically while threatening to blow its own kneecaps off. This is what nationalist populism does to a country.

“So the notion that no deal somehow means that we can turn our backs on the EU and break all our ties is just nonsensical.”

He gave a speech on Monday warning that politicians should be thinking carefully about how to protect the union with Scotland and Northern Ireland after Brexit – deal or no deal.

“In those circumstances it’s very different to be lifting their eyes to a more distant horizon. How do we manage as a country, if and when we come out of the EU?

More to the point, though, the question of how the U.S. would respond reflects a myopia about the origins of Hamas shelling.

Israeli officials did not wake up one bright morning to find thousands of rockets raining down,” notes Sari Bashi, an Israeli human rights lawyer. “Israeli security forces, led by a prime minister desperate to stay in power to avoid jail on corruption charges, created a provocation by using violence and the threat of violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem. They stormed a sensitive religious site, used excessive force against demonstrators and threatened to forcibly transfer Palestinian families from their homes as part of an official policy to ‘Judaize’ occupied East Jerusalem, which is a war crime.”

So the question of how the United States would respond if Canada started shelling Seattle seems misplaced. After all, Israel deliberately nurtured Hamas in the first place (to create a rival to existing Palestinian groups), and the United Nations and most experts consider Israel to be occupying Gaza (because Israel controls it, even though it withdrew in 2005).

Similarly, the Irish Republican Army, with support from some in Ireland and the United States, bombed Britain’s Parliament, Harrods department store and the Conservative Party Conference, along with innumerable other targets. Yet Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did not bomb Dublin or Boston, nor did she bulldoze the offices of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.’s political wing.

In 2018, ETA announced it was disbanding, adding “we are truly sorry” for violence that claimed 800 lives. In Northern Ireland, where the conflict initially seemed even more intractable than the disputes in the Middle East do today, a negotiated peace was reached with the Good Friday accords of 1998.

As he signed papers to formally dissolve the foundation, Feeney, who is in poor health, said he was very satisfied with “completing this on my watch”.

From his small rented apartment in San Francisco, he had a message for other members of the super-rich, who may have pledged to give away part of their fortunes but only after they have died: “To those wondering about Giving While Living: try it, you’ll like it.”

Feeney, who gave most of his money away in secret, said he hoped more billionaires would follow his example and use their money to help address the world’s biggest problems.

“Wealth brings responsibility,” he often said. “People must define themselves, or feel a responsibility to use some of their assets to improve the lives of their fellow humans, or else create intractable problems for future generations.”

Oeschsli said Feeney would not criticise other people for not giving more “but he would be dumbfounded – what is all that wealth about if you’re not going to do good with it?”

he would scratch his head and say ‘how many yachts or pairs of shoes do you need? What is it all this wealth accumulation about, when you can look about you and see such tremendous needs’.”

“I have always empathised with people who have it tough in life,” Feeney said in a rare interview with Ireland’s RTE in 2010. “And the world is full of people who don’t get enough to eat.”

Feeney has lived a remarkably frugal lifestyle, not owning a car or home, and only one pair of shoes. He was known for flying only in economy class, even when members of his family and colleagues would travel in business class on the same plane.

The stories of his frugality are true: he does have a $10 Casio watch and carry his papers in a plastic bag. That is him. That’s what he felt comfortable with, and that’s really who Chuck has been.”

Feeney has given more than $3.7bn to higher education institutions, including almost $1bn to Cornell University, where he studied hotel administration for free under the GI bill after service as a US air force radio operator during the Korean war

eeney has also donated $870m to human rights groups (including $62m in grants to groups campaigning to end the death penalty in the US, and $76m to grassroots campaigns supporting the passage of Obamacare.)

The son of immigrants from County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, he has also donated $1.9bn to projects in the country, as well as the Republic, where he was instrumental in the founding of the University of Limerick. He also helped behind the scenes during the peace process.

Gates credited Feeney with creating a path for other philanthropists to follow. “I remember meeting him before starting the Giving Pledge,” Gates said. “He told me we should encourage people not to give just 50% but as much as possible during their lifetime. No one is a better example of that than Chuck. Many people talk to me about how he inspired them. It is truly amazing.”

Buffett described Feeney as “my hero and Bill Gates’ hero – he should be everybody’s hero”.