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Like their predecessors did at Columbine in 1999 and Aurora in 2012, some of Colorado’s top elected officials gathered Tuesday to mourn victims of a mass shooting.

Ten people, including one Boulder police officer, were killed at King Soopers in the city Monday. It’s not clear exactly how many witnesses, now survivors, were in the store, though video footage showed at least a dozen being escorted out.They now join the thousands of people that have survived shootings at schools and other public places in the Denver metro since Columbine. More than 1,800 students attended Columbine in 1999, plus staff. Thousands more, collectively, were at other such shootings, like Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Deer Creek Middle School in 2010, a movie theater in Aurora in 2012, a Walmart in Thornton in 2017, and STEM School in Highlands Ranch in 2019. 

A 2019 Denver Post analysis found that the Denver metro has the third-most mass shootings, per capita, of the country’s largest metro areas since 1999. Survivors and experts say there’s a cumulative effect to so many shootings: the circle of survivors, who may face a lifetime of recovery, grows larger with each incident. 

This year, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports, under the guise of protecting women and girls. Bills have already passed in Mississippi and Idaho.

The quest to block trans girls from competition has some prominent supporters.Former President Donald Trump embraced female athletes in February, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was “so important” to “protect women’s sports.”

The cause is catching on: One recent Politico poll found that 46 percent of women support a ban on transgender athletes (as do 43 percent of young adults born since 1997).

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain offered a first detailed glimpse of what a post-pandemic society in England might look like on Monday, announcing free twice-weekly coronavirus tests and Covid status certificates that would allow people with immunity into crowded nightclubs and sporting events.

“I will be going to the pub myself and cautiously but irreversibly raising a pint of beer to my lips,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference at 10 Downing Street, as he listed the next round of relaxed restrictions.

Trying to strike a balance between public health and personal liberties, he said Britain would design a system to certify the Covid status of anyone seeking to enter higher-risk settings.

Winston Churchill supposedly said: “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” In his new book, Andrew Bacevich goes far towards proving the second half of that sentence and casts doubt on the first, without offering much in the way of alternatives.

Yet he defines America’s supposed post-cold war consensus as “globalized neoliberalism”, “global leadership”, “freedom” (as the expansion of personal “autonomy, with traditional moral prohibitions declared obsolete and the removal of constraints maximizing choice”), and “presidential supremacy”. The 2016 election, he writes, presented the “repudiation of that very consensus”.

In 2016, he writes, “financial impotence was to turn into political outrage, bringing the post-cold war era to an abrupt end. As for the people who shop for produce at Whole Foods, wear vintage jeans and ski in Aspen, they never saw it coming and couldn’t believe it when it occurred.”

The underlying theme of capitalism is the use of wealth to create more wealth.

With the rapid development of European trade and prosperity in the 13th century, cities in Italy and the Netherlands witness a creation of wealth which is capitalist in kind - because any merchant is in essence a capitalist, risking his pot of money each time he buys in one place to sell in another

Florence in the 14th century demonstrates more familiar indications of capitalism. It has its great banking families, engaging in transactions across the breadth of Europe.

In particular, Philadelphia has been a focus for Trump; four years ago, only 15% of the city's voters picked him. Trump has claimed — with little evidence — that the local election system is corrupt. His critics say the president is trying to suppress turnout in the city.

There have been issues, including technical hiccups on the first day of early, in-person voting. A laptop used to program voting machines was stolen. A reporter for NPR member station WHYY got inside a warehouse where voting machines are stored, although city officials beefed up security after that.

A new state law has made it much easier to vote early and by mail.

Desmond M. Tutu, the cleric who used his pulpit and spirited oratory to help bring down apartheid in South Africa and then became the leading advocate of peaceful reconciliation under Black majority rule, died on Sunday in Cape Town. He was 90.

“a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.”

the archbishop remained unhappy about the state of affairs in his country under its next president, Jacob G. Zuma, who had denied Mr. Mbeki another term despite being embroiled in scandal.

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

“White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.

Several rural scholars whose research was included in the book immediately denounced it

Ms. Lunz Trujillo excoriated the book in an opinion piece for Newsweek as “a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing” people unlike them.