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Trees can lower summer daytime temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study.

If we continue on this path, "cities will become warmer, more polluted and generally more unhealthy for inhabitants,"

The study placed a value on tree loss based on trees' role in air pollution removal and energy conservation. The lost value amounted to $96 million a year.

Goodman calls herself a “domestic historian,” and has participated in the kinds of British re-enactment-of-history series that have made her a celebrity. On shows with names like “Victorian Pharmacy” and “Tudor Monastery Farm,” she has spent months working, dressing, eating, bathing — and more important, not bathing — like her 19th-century ancestors

If you want to understand how Victorians thought, you read Walter E. Houghton’s classic “The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870.” But if you want to know how they looked, sounded, felt and smelled, there is no better guide than this one.

What’s most striking is the amount of effort it took just to stay warm, clean and fed. If Charles Dickens’s hearth scenes were indescribably delicious, that may be because he and his fellow Victorians spent so much time being so damn cold — the poor out of economy, the wealthy out of the belief that without a constant stream of cold fresh air the body is essentially poisoned.

A second illusion of those who marched proudly into battle in 1914 was that they would be shooting at the enemy, but that he would not be shooting back, or at least not effectively

The Europeans were so enraptured by the power the machine gun gave them over colonial rebels that they never bothered to plan seriously for facing the weapon themselves.

Yet another illusion on both sides in 1914 was that a key force would be the cavalry

“By one terrific blow the British on June 7, 1917, smashed the strong German salient south of Ypres [Belgium], where for two-and-a-half years the Allied armies had held the enemy in check, but where all that time they had been harassed by German guns on the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge,” the Mid-Week Pictorial said a century ago this week, as it offered readers some of the most amazing pictures yet of the Great War.

“The artillery fire was the most intense of the whole war, a fact which heightens the interest of the photograph,” the text continued. “That is one of the most vivid pictures yet taken by the camera, for it caught the half-undressed artillerymen working their guns at a crucial moment in the roar and haze of battle. Through the mist of smoke the big gun is plainly seen.”

Contrasting the picture of the gunners was a full-page photo essay about British troops bathing on the front lines. “A tin-lined ammunition box has been converted into a not very comfortable looking tub,” the text said. “The other tub is apparently an old iron water tank.”

Jean-Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer.

With the arrest of the king in August of that year, Marat was elected as a deputy of Paris to the Convention.

By 1793, Charlotte Corday, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and an ally of the Girondists in Normandy, came to regard Marat as the unholy enemy of France and plotted his assassination.

statements

For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears.

But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the Senate, Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to publicly distance themselves from the president.

In their 1978 book, “Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture,” the British and British American anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner imagine pilgrimage as two roads, one inbound and one outbound — one sacred, the other profane. The road in is a spiritual journey, “exteriorized mysticism,” to use the Turners’ phrase. The road out is less about faith and more about travel itself — that radical business of leaving the safety of one’s home to journey

The word “pilgrim” itself derives from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “one from abroad” — a foreigner

I was interested in this other human side of pilgrimage — the road out, as it were. I imagined it to be full of danger and fun, populated with bawdy characters such as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. I had chosen three faiths that were at odd angles to my own background — my father was Muslim, but not Shiite; my paternal grandmother was Christian, but not Catholic; my mother was Sikh, which made her part of the Indic fold, but not Buddhist

“We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated,” Mr. Mujica said

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”

Before Mr. Mujica became a gardener of chrysanthemums, he was a leader of the Tupamaros, the urban guerrilla group that drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution, carrying out armed bank robberies and kidnappings on Montevideo’s streets.

American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa, but in Iraq it is an entirely different story: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group.

On the outskirts of Falluja, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, police officers and Shiite militiamen backed by Iran are preparing for an assault on the Sunni city, raising fears of a sectarian blood bath

But the United States has long believed that Iran’s role, which relies on militias accused of sectarian abuses, can make matters worse by angering Sunnis and making them more sympathetic to the militants.

The comparison was inflammatory, to say the least. Former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts equated Donald J. Trump’s immigration plan with Kristallnacht, the night of horror in 1938 when rampaging Nazis smashed Jewish homes and businesses in Germany and killed scores of Jews.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the United States.

In Hungary, an authoritarian government has clamped down on the news media and erected razor wire fences to keep out migrants.

I think the 1960s were definitely a net positive for America and Americans. Civil rights and women's rights were unequivocal triumphs, as was the newly heightened awareness of what we then called "ecology." The greater tolerance for different kinds of people and for weirdness were excellent changes. Pop music had its awesome big-bang moment, as you say, and movies and visual art were transformed in interesting ways, and we middle-aged people now get to wear blue jeans and sneakers and go to rock concerts and generally behave as if we're young until we die. But we threw some baby out with the bath water. The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition. We got carried away with the idea of victimhood, so that now white people and Christians and Wall Street guys cast themselves categorically as victims of bigotry. The latent American tendency toward self-righteousness and apocalyptic thinking got ratcheted up. The idea of one's "own truth" started propagating, and that solipsism is now pandemic. And as I recently argued in a Times op-ed which bugged a lot of of '60s-romanticizers on the left and libertarians on the right, I think the "if it feels good do it"/"do your own thing" paradigm of the 1960s also helped enable the greed-is-good hypercapitalism and general selfishness that grew and grew afterward.

the first animals evolved about 750 million years ago.

But it’s not until around 520 million years ago that many major groups of living animals left behind their first fossils.

For decades, scientists have searched for the trigger that set in motion this riot of diversity in the animal kingdom.

Things came to a head in December 1970, when Sheik Mujib-ur-­Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali leader, and his party, the Awami League, won the elections on the promise of autonomy for East Pakistan.

Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, egged on by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second-place finisher, arrested Rahman and ordered the army to crush the Bengalis. Dominated by Punjabis, the army moved brutally, shooting and detaining Bengali leaders, intellectuals and anyone who opposed them.

Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. It’s hard to overstate just how earth-changing Nixon and Kissinger regarded their trips to China — and how important they thought they were for bringing them about.

He was one of the most extraordinary liberation leaders Africa, or any other continent, ever produced. Not only did he lead his people to triumph over the deeply entrenched system of apartheid that enforced racial segregation in every area of South African life; he achieved this victory without the blood bath so many had predicted and feared.

And as South Africa’s first president elected by the full democratic franchise of all its people, he presided over a landmark Truth and Reconciliation

strength of character steeled him for his long struggle and ultimate victory over apartheid.

His baldness bathed in gold, his body pooled in shadow, Kurtz murmurs: “Are my methods unsound?” And Willard — filthy, hollow-eyed, stunned by what he’s seen — replies: “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

This is basically how reasonable people should feel about the recent conduct of the House Republicans.

there is still something well-nigh-unprecedented about how Republicans have conducted themselves of late. It’s not the scale of their mistake, or the kind of damage that it’s caused, but the fact that their strategy was such self-evident folly, so transparently devoid of any method whatsoever.

While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced

Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels

they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe

Bath, England — “France’s fascist uprising” screamed the front-page headline of a London newspaper following the National Front’s victory in the first round of the regional elections on Dec. 6. “Trump is a fascist,” asserts the combative neocon commentator Max Boo

“the word ‘fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” So has it acquired any more useful meaning in the 70 years since? The latest evidence suggests not.

Since then we have been warned about “Islamofascism,” and Al Qaeda and ISIS are denounced by Western politicians and commentators as “fascists.” Although Mideastern zealots have picked up the hate-filled anti-Jewis

Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation — a strange new energy field switched on. That energy suffused space with a kind of cosmic antigravity, delivering a not-so-gentle boost to the expansion of the universe.Then, after another 100,000 years or so, the new field simply winked off, leaving no trace other than a speeded-up universe.

astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In a bold and speculative leap into the past, the team has posited the existence of this field to explain an astronomical puzzle: the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should be.

The cosmos is expanding only about 9 percent more quickly than theory prescribes. But this slight-sounding discrepancy has intrigued astronomers, who think it might be revealing something new about the universe.

Trump is a marvelously efficient acid bath, stripping away his supporters’ surfaces, exposing their skeletal essences

some Republicans want Trump to slink away, allowing Pence to float to the top of the ticket and represent Republicanism resurrected. This idea ignores a pertinent point: Pence is standing next to Trump. He salivated for the privilege of being Trump’s poodle, and he expresses his canine devotion in rhetorical treacle about “this good man.” What would a bad man look like to pastor Pence?

Trump should stay atop the ticket, for four reasons. First, he will give the nation the pleasure of seeing him join the one cohort, of the many cohorts he disdains, that he most despises — “losers.” Second, by continuing to campaign in the spirit of St. Louis, he can remind the nation of the useful axiom that there is no such thing as rock bottom. Third, by persevering through Nov. 8 he can simplify the GOP’s quadrennial exercise of writing its post-campaign autopsy, which this year can be published Nov. 9 in one sentence: “Perhaps it is imprudent to nominate a venomous charlatan.” Fourth, Trump is the GOP’s chemotherapy, a nauseating but, if carried through to completion, perhaps a curative experience.