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Mr. Molfino’s mother, Noemí Gianotti de Molfino, a 54-year-old Argentine, was a victim of Operation Condor, a plan devised by six South American military governments in the 1970s to hunt down and eliminate leftist dissidents across national borders.

In a landmark trial that spanned three years and involved the cases of more than 100 victims, a four-judge panel on Friday convicted and sentenced 14 former military officers for their roles in Operation Condor, a scheme of kidnappings, torture and killings.

For the first time, a court in the region ruled that the leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay had worked together in a regionwide criminal conspiracy against opponents, some of whom had fled to exile in neighboring countries, during an era of military dictatorships in the 1970s and ’80s.

The first evidence to raise significant questions about the Clovis model emerged in the late 1970s, when the anthropologist Tom Dillehay came across a prehistoric campsite in southern Chile called Monte Verde. Radiocarbon dating of the site suggested that the first campfires were lighted there, all the way at the southern tip of South America, well before the first Clovis tools were made

Professor Waters announced finding dozens of stone tools along a Texas creekbed. After using a technique that measures the last time the dirt around the stones was exposed to light, Professor Waters concluded, in a paper in Science, that the site was at least 15,000 years old — which would make it the earliest reliably dated site in the Americas.

Having compared the DNA of modern American Indians with that of groups living in Asia today, scholars have estimated that the last common ancestor of the two peoples probably lived between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. That figure doesn’t square with the arrival of the Clovis people from Asia only 13,500 years ago.

“In Moscow, rising incomes correlate with respondents’ saying discontent is rising,” Mr. Dmitriyev wrote. Moscow and other cities, he wrote, are incubating a hostile population, especially of young men. “These are five million individuals dangerously concentrated within a 10-mile proximity around the Kremlin,

Authoritarian leaders who pursue effective economic policies become victims of their own success, with General Pinochet in Chile being a prime example. In Russia, after a decade-long oil boom, about a third of the population is now considered middle class.

within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a more fair world, or a more unjust one?

Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced giant wealth for Europe and North America.

the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened even more, right up through about World War II.

What is a dictator, or an authoritarian?

in many cases the situation is not that simple and stark. In many cases the reality -- and the morality -- of the situation is far more complex.

Dividing the world in black and white terms between dictators and democrats completely misses the political and moral complexity of the situation on the ground in many dozens of countries. The twin categories of democrats and dictators are simply too broad for an adequate understanding of many places and their rulers -- and thus for an adequate understanding of geopolitics

What is wrong with the economies of the West—and with economics?

With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades—mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia—have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion—access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect.

The classical idea of political economy has been to let wage rates sink to whatever level the market takes them, and then provide everyone with the “safety net” of a “negative income tax,” unemployment insurance, and free food, shelter, clothing, and medical care

Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.

Paleontologists in Uruguay published findings in November suggesting that humans hunted giant sloths there about 30,000 years ago. All the way in southern Chile, Tom D. Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, has shown that humans lived at a coastal site called Monte Verde as early as 14,800 years ago.

Dr. Guidon, the Brazilian archaeologist who pioneered the excavations, asserted more than two decades ago that her team had found evidence in the form of charcoal from hearth fires that humans had lived here about 48,000 years ago.

These two Serbs start with the concepts of the American academic Gene Sharp, the Clausewitz of the nonviolent movement. But they have refined and added to those ideas. In a new book, “Blueprint for Revolution,” Popovic recounts Canvas’s strategies and how people use them.

Otpor’s methods and signature — a stylized graphic clenched fist — have been adopted by democracy movements around the world. The Egyptian opposition used them to topple Hosni Mubarak. In Lebanon, the Serbs helped the Cedar Revolution extricate the country from Syrian control. In Maldives, their methods were the key to overthrowing a dictator who had held power for 30 years. In many other countries, people have used what Canvas teaches to accomplish other political goals, such as fighting corruption or protecting the environment.

“We’re here to plan a war.” Nonviolent struggle, Djinovic explained, is a war — just one fought with means other than weapons. It must be as carefully planned as a military campaign.

“Anyone who studies the issue seriously understands that material poverty has continued to fall in the U.S. in recent decades, primarily due to the success of anti-poverty programs” and the declining cost of “food, air-conditioning, communications, transportation, and entertainment,”

Despite the rising optimism, there are disagreements over how many poor people there are and the conditions they live under. There are also questions about the problem of relative poverty, what we are now calling inequality

Jencks argues that the actual poverty rate has dropped over the past five decades – far below the official government level — if poverty estimates are adjusted for food and housing benefits, refundable tax credits and a better method of determining inflation rates. In Jencks’s view, the war on poverty worked.

Leaders Move to Convert Paris Climate Pledges Into Action

PARIS — Before the applause had even settled in the suburban convention center where the Paris Agreement was adopted by consensus on Saturday night, world leaders warned that momentum from the historic accord must not be allowed to dissipate.

With nearly every nation on Earth having now pledged to gradually reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases that are warming the planet

High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.

Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.

the Mahandzhar culture, which flourished there from 7,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C., could be linked to the older figures.

I think ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

But I think that same upper class was unwise to abandon an aristocratic self-conception in favor of a meritocratic one

Chacón-Duque and his colleagues pieced together the genetic record by sampling DNA from 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record.

This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain.

Geneticists have also noticed rare genetic diseases prevalent in Jews popping up in Latin America. “It’s not just one disease. It’s like, wow, this isn’t a coincidence,

The Benettons made occasional, bipartisan political donations but those did not explain the company’s influence. Autostrade could perform perfectly legal favors for politicians, like modernizing a stretch of local highway.

Several scholars say the skewed relationship resulted in a case of “regulatory capture,” the political scientists’ term for the situation when a watchdog bends to the interests of a company it is supposed to supervise.

When a center-left government took power in 2006, Autostrade’s contract came under scrutiny. The government blocked the company from selling itself to Abertis, a Spanish toll road operator, then signaled that Autostrade needed to be reined in

President Trump will make the first visit of his presidency to Latin America next month, the White House said on Saturday, traveling to Peru for a summit meeting of Western Hemisphere nations where he will convene with a group of leaders who have criticized his statements and policies on immigration.

As he has moved the United States toward a more protectionist stance on trade, Mr. Trump has abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes Mexico, Peru and Chile. The United States is also engaged in difficult negotiations with Mexico and Canada over changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

American presidents have attended the Western Hemisphere meeting, known as the Summit of the Americas, in previous years — Barack Obama made history there in 2015 by meeting with President Raúl Castro of Cuba — but few have stoked as much indignation as Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s promise of change, any change, was enough to sweep him into office with 55 percent of the vote in October. The language of his inaugural address — “I come before the nation today, a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, the inversion of values, statism and political correctness” — was music to the ears of his reactionary base, investors and Mr. Trump, who shares his values and his bluster. The stock market soared to record highs and the Brazilian real strengthened against the dollar.

Mr. Bolsonaro has drawn liberally on the playbook of the likes of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. He has also been dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics” for his outrageous remarks and political base of evangelical Christians, moneyed elites, craven politicians and military hawks.

While his economy minister, Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago-educated neoliberal economist who taught economics in Chile during the Pinochet era, promised to reform Brazil’s unwieldy pension system, Mr. Bolsonaro made unscripted comments suggesting a minimum retirement age well below what his economic team was mulling.

The good news is that much of the world is fed up with corruption. The bad news is that the way many are fighting corruption is ineffective. Too often, the remedy centers on finding and empowering an honest leader who promises to stamp out the problem. Worldwide, candidates for elected offices are running on highly personalized anti-corruption platforms, offering themselves as the solution. What countries really need, though, are smart laws that reduce the incentives and opportunities for corruption. They also need strong institutions that enforce those laws and deprive corrupt officials, and their private-sector accomplices, of impunity in their efforts to get rich at the public’s expense.

Societies that bet on an honest leader to solve their problems almost always lose out. Such leaders may turn out to have integrity, or they may not. Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chávez all came to power promising to stamp out corruption. And we know how that turned out.

The fight against corruption does not have to be corrupt, however. In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay, for example, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) is supporting “public innovation laboratories” that experiment with new methods of monitoring and controlling government conduct.

In late 2016, shortly after the U.S. presidential election, two Harvard political scientists posed a bleak question in The New York Times: “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” Now they’re out with an even more bleakly titled book—How Democracies Die—that seeks to answer that question by drawing on a year’s worth of evidence.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who have studied the collapse of democracy in Latin America and Europe, respectively, write that they are witnessing in the United States “the precursors of democratic crisis in other places.”

They contend that democratic norms were “coming unmoored” in America long before Trump’s ascent to power, hastened by political polarization. And they maintain that Trump himself—in rejecting democratic rules, denying the legitimacy of political rivals, tolerating political violence, and considering restrictions on the civil liberties of critics—tests positive as an “authoritarian.” Yet they note that “little actual [democratic] backsliding occurred in 2017” in the U.S.

Chilean officials have accused the World Bank of treating the country unfairly for several years. Foreign Minister Heraldo Muñoz, tweeted "fake news was becoming fake statistics".

"What happened with the World Bank's competitiveness rankings is very concerning, "said President Bachelet, whose four-year term ends in March. "Rankings that international institutions conduct should be trustworthy, since they impact on investment and a country's development." she said, asking for a formal investigation.Mr Muñoz called on Twitter for the bank to "calculate the possible loss in foreign investment because of the doubts caused by a lower competitiveness ranking during the administration of President Bachelet".

The world of illegal abortion today looks nothing like it did 45 years ago.

It is vastly safer than it was in the past, thanks to a revolution that has replaced back alleys with blister packs ordered online. But this revolution has come with unexpected consequences — for the doctor-patient relationship and for law enforcement.

Abortifacient drugs have become so readily available in places like Chile and El Salvador that today it is impossible to enforce abortion bans. That was also the case in Ireland, where by some accounts, before last week’s legalization vote, at least two Irish women a day were self-administering abortions using pills.