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Textiles feature almost as early as Pottery. Weights designed for spinning are common in neolithic sites, and fragments of fine woven cloth survive in graves at Catal Huyuk from as early as 5800 BC.

The other method, going back to at least 5800 BC, uses the thread in a rectangular criss-cross pattern to produce flat cloth. The vertical threads are stretched taut to form a grille; the horizontal threads are then interwoven between them. This is the process for all textiles of cotton, linen, silk or wool. It also produces tapestry

By 4000 BC deep shafts are cut into the hillside at Rudna Glava, in the Balkans, to excavate copper ore. This robbing of the earth's treasures is carried out with due solemnity.

The harnessing of draught animals is a major technological advance in agriculture as well as transport. The first to be harnessed is the ox, conveniently provided by nature with a fleshy hump above the shoulders

The first ploughs consist of a sharp point of timber, sometimes hardened in a flame or tipped with flint, projecting downwards at the end of a long handle.

The wheel is often quoted as the single most important advance in early technology. It is sometimes said to have evolved from the potter's wheel. Both are first known at approximately the same period, around 3000 BC. But they share no geographical origin and it is intrinsically unlikely that either form would suggest the other. Each is a natural solution to a very different problem.

Soros in particular has been the target of vicious hate, despite his tireless work to free Eastern Europeans from Soviet subjugation, save countless lives in Sarajevo during Yugoslavia’s civil war, and provide scholarships to black South Africans during the height of apartheid. This type of work should be lauded, yet Trump and his enablers are quick to cast Soros in the leading role of an imaginary plot to dominate global affairs.

“This is the longest-running anti-Semitic trope that we have in history, and the trope against Mr. Soros, George Soros, was also created for political purposes,” Hill noted. “It’s an absolute outrage.”

Simply put, Trump and his allies are so eager to double down on divisive politics that they will embrace anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Driving people at society’s fringes to believe that Jews are somehow detrimental to the nation helps pave the way to violent acts such as the mass shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, California in 2019.

It starts with toning down the rhetoric, condemning any dog-whistling as dead wrong, and not only remembering but emphasizing that we’re all Americans, even as we navigate the difficult waters of impeachment. Protecting and defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is expressly at odds with letting hate infiltrate our politics.

We respect and protect our neighbors and we reject prejudice. That’s not a partisan thing to do; it’s the human thing, the right thing to do.

Unlike the fall of earlier empires such as the Assyrian and Persian, Rome did not succumb to either war or revolution. On the last day of the empire, a barbarian member of the Germanic tribe Siri and former commander in the Roman army entered the city unopposed. The one-time military and financial power of the Mediterranean was unable to resist.

They believe the fall of Rome simply came because the barbarians took advantage of difficulties already existing in Rome - problems that included a decaying city (both physically and morally), little to no tax revenue, overpopulation, poor leadership, and, most importantly, inadequate defense.

Whatever the cause, whether it was religion, external attack, or the internal decay of the city itself, the debate continues to the present day; however, one significant point must be established before a discussion of the roots of the fall can continue: the decline and fall were only in the west. The eastern half - that which would eventually be called the Byzantine Empire - would continue for several centuries, and, in many ways, it retained a unique Roman identity.

that the fall was due to the fabric of the Roman citizen.

There are some who believe

Although Gibbon points to the rise of Christianity as a fundamental cause, the actual fall or decline could be seen decades earlier. By the 3rd century CE, the city of Rome was no longer the center of the empire

This massive size presented a problem and called for a quick solution, and it came with the reign of Emperor Diocletian. The empire was divided into two with one capital remaining at Rome and another in the east at Nicomedia; the eastern capital would later be moved to Constantinople, old Byzantium, by Emperor Constantine. The Senate, long-serving in an advisory capacity to the emperor, would be mostly ignored; instead, the power centered on a strong military. Some emperors would never step foot in Rome. In time Constantinople, Nova Roma or New Rome, would become the economic and cultural center that had once been Rome. 

the empire remained vulnerable to attack,

presence of barbarians along the northern border

This vulnerability became more obvious as a significant number of Germanic tribes, the Goths, gathered along the northern border. They did not want to invade; they wanted to be part of the empire, not its conqueror. The empire’s great wealth was a draw to this diverse population. They sought a better life, and despite their numbers, they appeared to be no immediate threat, at first. However, as Rome failed to act to their requests, tensions grew. This anxiety on the part of the Goths was due to a new menace further to the east, the Huns.

Although the Goths were mostly Christian many who joined them were not. Their presence had caused a substantial crisis for the emperor; he couldn’t provide sufficient food and housing. This impatience, combined with the corruption and extortion by several Roman commanders, complicated matters. Valens prayed for help from the west. Unfortunately, in battle, the Romans were completely outmatched and ill-prepared, and the Battle of Adrianople proved this when two-thirds of the Roman army was killed. This death toll included the emperor himself. It would take Emperor Theodosius to bring peace.

The Goths remained on Roman land and would ally themselves with the Roman army.

 one man, a Goth and former Roman commander,

sack Rome

His name was Alaric,

and while he was a Goth, he had also been trained in the Roman army. He was intelligent, Christian, and very determined. He sought land in the Balkans for his people, land that they had been promised.

Alaric sat outside the city, and over time, as the food and water in the city became increasingly scarce, Rome began to weaken. The time was now. While he had never wanted war but only land and recognition for his people Alaric, with the supposed help of a Gothic slave who opened the gates from within, entered Rome in August of 410 CE. He would stay for three days and completely sack the city;

Some people at the time viewed the sacking of the city as a sign from their pagan gods. St. Augustine, who died in 430 CE, said in his City of God that the fall of Rome was not a result of the people’s abandonment of their pagan gods (gods they believed protected the city) but as a reminder to the city’s Christians why they needed to suffer.

Although Alaric would soon die afterwards, other barbarians - whether Christian or not - did not stop after the sack of the city. The old empire was ravaged, among others, by Burgundians, Angles, Saxons, Lombards, and Magyars. By 475 CE Spain, Britain, and parts of Gaul had been lost to various Germanic people and only Italy remained as the “empire” in the west. The Vandals would soon move from Spain and into northern Africa, eventually capturing the city of Carthage.

Most of the causes, initially, point to one place: the city of Rome itself.

The loss of revenue for the western half of the empire could not support an army - an army that was necessary for defending the already vulnerable borders. Continual warfare meant trade was disrupted; invading armies caused crops to be laid to waste, poor technology made for low food production, the city was overcrowded, unemployment was high, and lastly, there were always the epidemics. Added to these was an inept and untrustworthy government.

The presence of the barbarians in and around the empire added to a crisis not only externally but internally.  These factors helped bring an empire from “a state of health into non-existence.” 

Rome’s fall ended the ancient world and the Middle Ages were borne. These “Dark Ages” brought the end to much that was Roman. The West fell into turmoil. However, while much was lost, western civilization still owes a debt to the Romans. Although only a few today can speak Latin, it is part of our language and the foundation of the Romance languages of French, Italian, and Spanish.  Our legal system is based on Roman law. Many present day European cities were founded by Rome.  Our knowledge of Greece comes though Rome and many other lasting effects besides.  Rome had fallen but it had been for so so long one of the history's truly world cities.

When my administration started, in 1993, no one felt certain that a post–Cold War Europe would remain peaceful, stable, and democratic.

in my view, whether it happened depended less on NATO and more on whether Russia remained a democracy and how it defined its greatness in the 21st century. Would it build a modern economy based on its human talent in science, technology, and the arts, or seek to re-create a version of its 18th-century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military?

In 1994, Russia became the first country to join the Partnership for Peace, a program for practical bilateral cooperation, including joint training exercises between NATO and non-NATO European countries.

Beginning in 1995, after the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War, we made an agreement to add Russian troops to the peacekeeping forces that NATO had on the ground in Bosnia. In 1997, we supported the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which gave Russia a voice but not a veto in NATO affairs, and supported Russia’s entry to the G7, making it the G8. In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian defense minister under which Russian troops could join UN-sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces.

Throughout it all, we left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO, something I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin.

Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia’s objections, but expansion was about more than the U.S. relationship with Russia.

Big questions remained about East Germany’s integration with West Germany, whether old conflicts would explode across the continent as they did in the Balkans, and how former Warsaw Pact nations and newly independent Soviet republics would seek security, not just against the threat of Russian invasion, but from one another and from conflicts within their borders.

Now Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary

The possibility of EU and NATO membership provided the greatest incentives for Central and Eastern European states to invest in political and economic reforms and abandon a go-it-alone strategy of militarization.

Neither the EU nor NATO could stay within the borders Stalin had imposed in 1945. Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom, prosperity, and security with the EU and NATO

As Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, tweeted in December 2021, “It wasn’t NATO seeking to go East, it was former Soviet satellites and republics wishing to go West.”

Or as Havel said in 2008: “Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.” To reject Central and Eastern European countries’ membership into NATO simply because of Russian objections would have been doing just that.

Enlarging NATO required unanimous consent of the alliance’s then-16 members; two-thirds consent of a sometimes skeptical U.S. Senate; close consultation with prospective members to ensure that their military, economic, and political reforms met NATO’s high standards; and near-constant reassurance to Russia.

Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine

She understood that the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build a Europe free, united, prosperous, and secure for the first time since nation-states arose on the continent. As UN ambassador and secretary of state, she worked to realize that vision and to beat back the religious, ethnic, and other tribal divisions that threatened it. She used every item in her famed diplomat’s toolkit and her domestic political savvy to help clear the way for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join NATO in 1999.

The result has been more than two decades of peace and prosperity for an ever-larger portion of Europe and a strengthening of our collective security.

At the time I proposed NATO expansion, however, there was a lot of respected opinion on the other side.

Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn’t an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice—in 2014 and in February—but rather the country’s shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home, and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath the Ukrainian soil.

And it is the strength of the NATO alliance, and its credible threat of defensive force, that has prevented Putin from menacing members from the Baltics to Eastern Europe.

Anne Applebaum said recently, “The expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful, piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years … We would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn’t done it.”

The failure of Russian democracy, and its turn to revanchism, was not catalyzed in Brussels at NATO headquarters. It was decided in Moscow by Putin.

In interviews with senior American and European officials in recent days, there is a consensus on one point: Just as the last two weeks revealed that Russia’s vaunted military faltered in its invasion plan, the next two or three may reveal whether Ukraine can survive as a state, and negotiate an end to the war.

And there is the possibility that Mr. Putin, angered by the slowness of his offensive in Ukraine, may reach for other weapons: chemical, biological, nuclear and cyber.

Mr. Sullivan said that Russia would suffer “severe consequences” if it used chemical weapons, without specifying what those would be.

Quietly, the White House and the senior American military leadership have been modeling how they would respond to a series of escalations, including major cyberattacks on American financial institutions and the use of a tactical or “battlefield” nuclear weapon by Mr. Putin to signal to the rest of the world that he would brook no interference as he moves to crush Ukraine.

Even with Ukrainians begging for more offensive weapons and American intervention, Mr. Biden has stuck to his determination that he will not directly engage the forces of a nuclear-armed superpower.

The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment,” Mr. Biden said in Philadelphia to the House Democratic Caucus on Friday, “and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say — that’s called ‘World War III.’ OK? Let’s get it straight here.”

A French government account of a call to Mr. Putin on Saturday by Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz termed it “disappointing with Putin’s insincerity: He is determined to continue the war.”

no evidence from the conversations so far that Mr. Putin has changed course; he remains “intent on destroying Ukraine.”

Despite his military’s logistical problems, Mr. Putin appears intent on intensifying his campaign and laying siege to Kyiv, the capital; Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city; and other Ukrainian urban centers.

“I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now,” Mr. Burns said. He is likely to “try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties,” he added.

Mr. Putin has demonstrated in past conflicts in Syria and Chechnya a willingness not only to bomb heavily populated areas but also to use civilian casualties as leverage against his enemies. Senior U.S. officials said the coming weeks could see a long, drawn-out fight with thousands of casualties on both sides, as well as among the roughly 1.5 million citizens remaining in the city.

“It will come at a very high price in Russian blood,” said retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander for Europe. That high cost, he added, could cause Mr. Putin to destroy the city with an onslaught of missiles, artillery and bombs — “continuing a swath of war crimes unlike any we have seen in the 21st century.”

Russian forces are still subjecting Mariupol to siege and bombardment, but are close to securing that strategic southern port city and, with it, a land bridge from Crimea in the south to the Donbas region in the east that has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.

And if Russia can seize Odessa, a pivotal Black Sea port city, and perhaps the remaining Ukrainian coast to the southeast, it would deprive Ukraine of important access to the sea.

“The most probable endgame, sadly, is a partition of Ukraine,” said Mr. Stavridis, pointing to the outcome of the Balkan wars in the 1990s as a model. “Putin would take the southeast of the country, and the ethnic Russians would gravitate there. The rest of the nation, overwhelmingly Ukrainian, would continue as a sovereign state.”

The fear now is that the war could expand.The more the fighting moves west, the more likely it is that an errant missile lands in NATO territory, or the Russians take down a NATO aircraft.

So far there are none of the procedures in place that American and Russian pilots use over Syria, for example, to prevent accidental conflict. And Mr. Putin has twice issued thinly veiled reminders of his nuclear capabilities, reminding the world that if the conflict does not go his way he has far larger, and far more fearsome, weapons to call into play.

This matters because there are few professions in this world where women are paid a lot more than men.

womenswear, for example, no longer exists as an idea. If you look up the shows on Vogue.com you will see there is only menswear, and ready-to-wear — the word “women” has literally been removed, possibly in order to paper over the fact that female models have been effectively booted off the catwalks and replaced largely with trans models and men.

There is ballet, of course, and porn. Unlike either of these, fashion is mainstream and acceptable: the one place where women can be seen, globally, to score big. But now half of the models I see at Paris and Milan are male. Not just men, but people who need the money the least: rich, famous men. Every time I see Kanye West modelling at what used to be a womenswear show, I see struggling Balkans model done out of a job.

Meanwhile the fashion disciples drink in the various “visions” as if they were gospel, explaining how important they are politically, without realising that nothing matters to them, politically, more than their status as women.

not only are women being physically removed from the one world they thought might be theirs, but are again being invited to diet themselves out of existence.

While Serbia is not an EU member state, it is part of an EU enlargement plan that also includes some of its neighbors.

"If concluded, the deal would dash hopes of those who saw an opportunity to reduce the Russian influence in the region," said Filip Ejdus, associate professor of international security at the University of Belgrade. 

Serbia is so big and important that it is crucial to the EU's enlargement project, which seeks to strengthen and expand European values, stability and security.

However, Serbia is also very reliant on Russia when it comes to gas. It is also militarily cooperative with Moscow. In short, Serbia benefits enormously from its relationship with Russia, and even if it obtains EU membership down the road, it will not want to burn its bridges with the Kremlin.

Steven Blockmans, director of research at the Centre for European Policy Studies, told CNN that ever since the start of the war, "the EU has been pressuring third countries, including China, to have a similar approach to sanctions. If even states currently trying to join the EU circumvent the sanctions, it lends credence to outliers within the bloc to withstand pressure from Brussels to support a strong common position on Russia."

"This whole situation is a major pain for us, because it ties in with the conversation about whether or not Ukraine should join the EU,"

Finally, some member states share a degree of Euroskepticism and would welcome another member state less enamored with calls from some countries, notably France, for the bloc to become more closely politically integrated.

The UK, no longer part of the EU, has worked well with its European allies and shown that -- despite Brexit -- it can still play a leading role in a united European front.

The EU has faced many difficulties since the Ukraine crisis began, and keeping all 27 of its member states on side has been no easy task.

They coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, apparently trading tools and sharing cultures. Some groups survived the Ice Age, while others vanished,

when farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago, they encountered the descendants of this long history, with light-skinned, dark-eyed people to the east, and possibly dark-skinned and blue-eyed people to the west.

“We lack still an understanding of why these movements were triggered. What happened here, why it happened — it’s strange.”

Modern humans arose in Africa and expanded to other continents about 60,000 years ago

These early Europeans have almost no genetic link to younger remains of hunter-gatherers. It appears that the first modern humans in Europe may have disappeared along with the Neanderthals

he oldest DNA of modern humans in Europe, dating back 45,000 years, undermines such a simple story. It comes from people who belonged to a lost branch of the human family tree. Their ancestors were part of the expansion out of Africa, but they split off on their own before the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians split apart.

About 33,000 years ago, as the climate turned cold, a new culture called the Gravettian arose across Europe. Gravettian hunters made spears to kill woolly mammoths and other big game. They also made so-called Venus figurines that might have represented fertility.

When the glaciers retreated, some descendants of the Fournol continued living in Iberia. But others expanded north as a new population, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called GoyetQ2. “It really seems like a peopling of Europe after the last glacial maximum,

Dr. Posth and his colleagues found DNA in Gravettian remains scattered across Europe. The scientists had expected all of the individuals to have come from the same genetic population, but instead found two distinct groups: one in France and Spain, and another in Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany.

“They were very distinct, and this was a very big surprise to us because they practiced the same archaeological culture,”

Dr. Posth and his colleagues named the western population the Fournol people, and found a genetic link between this group and 35,000-year-old Aurignacian remains in Belgium.

They called the eastern group Vestonice, and discovered that they share an ancestry with 34,000-year-old hunter-gatherers who lived in Russia.

That genetic gulf led Dr. Posth and his colleagues to argue that the Fournol and Vestonice belonged to two waves that migrated into Europe separately. After they arrived, they lived for several thousand years sharing the Gravettian culture but remaining genetically distinct.

It’s clear from the new study that they were not isolated entirely from each other. In Belgium, the scientists found 30,000-year-old remains with a mix of Fournol and Vestonice ancestry.

About 26,000 years ago, the two groups faced a new threat to their survival: an advancing wall of glaciers. During the Ice Age, from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, European hunter-gatherers were shut out of much of the continent, surviving only in southern refuges.

the refuge of the Iberian Peninsula, the region now occupied by Spain and Portugal, by studying DNA in the teeth of a 23,000-year-old man found in a cave in southern Spain. His DNA revealed that he belonged to the Fournol people who lived in Iberia before the Ice Age. The researchers also found genetic markers linking him to a 45,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Bulgaria.

When these groups arrived in Europe, Neanderthals had already been living across the continent for more than 100,000 years. The Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, perhaps because modern humans outcompeted them with superior tools.

The Vestonice, by contrast, did not survive the Ice Age. When the glaciers were at their most expansive, the Vestonice may have endured for a time in Italy. But Dr. Posth and his colleagues found no Vestonice ancestry in Europeans after the Ice Age. Instead, they discovered a population of hunter-gatherers that appeared to have expanded from the Balkans, known as the Villabruna. They moved into Italy and replaced the Vestonice.

For several thousand years, the Villabruna were limited to southern Europe. Then, 14,000 years ago, they crossed the Alps and encountered the GoyetQ2 people to the north. A new population emerged, its ancestry three parts Villabruna to one part GoyetQ2.

This new people, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called Oberkassel, expanded across much of Europe, replacing the old GoyetQ2 population.

another climate shift could explain this new wave. About 14,000 years ago, a pulse of strong warming produced forests across much of Europe. The Oberkassel people may have been better at hunting in forests, whereas the GoyetQ2 retreated with the shrinking steppes.

To the east, the Oberkassel ran into a new group of hunter-gatherers, who probably arrived from Russia. The scientists named this group’s descendants, who lived in Ukraine and surrounding regions, the Sidelkino.

in Iberia, there were no great sweeps of newcomers replacing older peoples. The Iberians after the Ice Age still carried a great deal of ancestry from the Fournol people who had arrived there thousands of years before the glaciers advanced. The Villabruna people moved into northern Spain, but added their DNA to the mix rather than replacing those who were there before.

When the first farmers arrived in Europe from Turkey about 8,000 years ago, three large groups of hunter-gatherers thrived across Europe: the Iberians, the Oberkassel and the Sidelkino. Living Europeans carry some of their gene

The Sidelkino people in the east had genes associated with dark eyes and light skin. The Oberkassel in the west, in contrast, probably had blue eyes and may have had dark skin

These three groups of hunter-gatherers remained isolated from each other for about 6,000 years, until the farmers from Turkey arrived. After this advent of agriculture, the three groups began mixing, the scientists found. It’s possible that the spread of farmland forced them to move to the margins of Europe to survive. But over time, they were absorbed into the agricultural communities that surrounded them.

every continent will likely have its own history of hunter-gatherer migrations.

it is now possible to extract human DNA from cave sediments rather than searching for bones and teeth.