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Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.

Hawking told the audience that Earth's cataclysmic end may be hastened by humankind, which will continue to devour the planet’s resources at unsustainable rates

“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”

“I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Hawking told the BBC in a 2014 interview that touched upon everything from online privacy to his affinity for his robotic-sounding voice.

“You shouldn’t be outside! Don’t know you know there’s a ‘shelter in place’?”

Nineteen workers—the first responders to this emergency— narrowly escaped death at the scene of the accident. As the conflagration continued, a towering plume of toxic smoke spiraled up and then over much of downwind Richmond, reaching several other East Bay communities as well.

Chevron fire was judged to be a Level 3 incident, the highest level of danger

Sometime early last fall, John Dean says he began having nightmares about a Trump presidency. He would wake in the middle of the night, agitated and alarmed, struggling to calm his nerves

Few people are more intimately acquainted than Dean with the consequences of an American presidency gone awry. As White House counsel under President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, he was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history.

“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean, who is now 78, told me. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.”

“Were the United States and China to wage war on one another, the whole world would divide itself,” the People’s Daily newspaper argued in a commentary, paraphrasing Henry Kissinger

Fears of a potentially calamitous trade war, or even a military clash between the two nuclear powers, have been building since Trump’s shock election win last November.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s influential chief strategist, was last week reported to have warned last year that war between the US and China in the resource-rich waterway was inevitable.

Game Change the movie shows a Palin of almost unfathomable ignorance. Staffers discover that she has never heard of the Federal Reserve and does not know why there are two Koreas; she answers a prep question about the military alliance with Britain by saluting John McCain’s excellent relationship with Queen Elizabeth. Efforts to instruct her send Palin into what one staffer describes as a “catatonic stupor.” And when Palin emerges, she is seized by the grievances that defined her public message from the autumn of 2008 onward. In those dying days of the campaign, she discovered the idea that would shape the final month of the campaign and the rest of her career: the divide between the “real” America—the America-loving America—and the despised rest of the country.

By luck or by some deep political instinct, Palin launched her attack on the credentialed urban elite at exactly the hour that this elite was discrediting itself as at no time since the urban crisis of the 1960s.

It was the mighty brains of Wall Street who first enabled the financial crisis—and then escaped scot-free from the disaster, even as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes, and savings. Palin was speaking to and for constituencies who had steadily lost ground through the previous decade—and who now confronted personal and national disaster. Meanwhile, the people asking for bailouts—and the people deciding whether to grant bailouts—boasted résumés that looked a lot like Obama’s private school/Columbia/Harvard Law School pedigree. That is, when they weren’t outright Obama supporters and donors. And at the same time, the position of America in the world—and of the white majority within America—seemed in question as never before. There, too, Obama could be made to represent every frightening trend: the flow of immigrants (12 million of them between 2000 and 2008, half of them illegal); the rise of non-Western powers like China and India; the deadly threat of terrorism emanating from people with names like “Barack,” “Hussein,” and—give or take a consonant—“Obama.”

the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado, announced that the Arctic sea ice had reached a new low. The sea ice shrinks in the summer and grows again during winter’s long polar night. It usually reaches its minimum extent in mid-September. On September 16, 2012, the N.S.I.D.C. reported, the sea ice covered 1.3 million square miles. This was just half of its average extent during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly twenty per cent less than its extent in 2007, the previous record-low year.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this development. We are now seeing changes occur in a matter of years that, in the normal geological scheme of things, should take thousands, even millions of times longer than that. On the basis of the 2012 melt season, one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic ice cap, Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, has predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer by 2016. Since open water absorbs sunlight, while ice tends to reflect it, this will accelerate global warming. Meanwhile, recent research suggests that the melting of the Arctic ice cap will have, and indeed is probably already having, a profound effect on the U.S. and Europe, making extreme weather events much more likely. As Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Rutgers, observed recently in a conference call with reporters, the loss of sea ice changes the dynamics of the entire system: “It’s like having a new energy source for the atmosphere.”

Representative Paul Ryan’s fitness routine—he’s a big fan of what’s known as the P90X workout plan—has received three times as much television coverage as the ice loss

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.

While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities

They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

The United Nations appealed Tuesday for $301 million in emergency assistance to help millions of people in the Philippines affected by the typhoon that struck on Friday.

Hampered by impassable roads, obliterated seaports and severely damaged airstrips, international aid groups mobilized to rush food, water and sanitation equipment to the region.

United Nations officials in Geneva said more than 11 million people were in need of assistance and around 670,000 people had been displaced.

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.

By every metric that mattered, HP was in far worse shape when she was fired than when she was hired. The company’s stock price dropped more than 50 percent during her tenure, compared to a 7 percent drop in the S.&P. 500. And net earnings dropped to $2.4 billion from $3.1 billion during that same time. The Compaq merger, meanwhile, was a misguided fiasco; today, virtually all remnants of it have disappeared from HP. Fiorina’s me-me-me leadership style demoralized the company and its shareholders. When she walked out the door in February 2005 — with a $21 million severance package — the stock jumped nearly 7 percent.

As for the casino bankruptcies, Trump likes to characterize them as shrewd business moves, and stresses that he never filed for personal bankruptcy. But those corporate bankruptcies were costly; he wound up having to give up many of his real estate holdings, and was even put on a monthly budget for a time.

if, in 1988, he had simply put his money in a stock index fund, it would be worth $13 billion today. In effect, his post-1988 business career has cost him $5 billion.

The Pacific Northwest is so beautiful because of the still-active tectonic forces that have shaped it. But this summer, The New Yorker published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared. The collective anxiety has not gone away.

The larger question, from Seattle to Sagamore Hill, is how we fit disaster into our daily lives — a pact with the known unknown. There is no such thing as a safe place on this earth.

More than 90 percent of Americans live in an area with at least a moderate risk of tornadoes, or wildfires, or hurricanes, or floods, or earthquakes

In the United States, we experienced more than 80 “billion-dollar” climate and weather disasters in the last decade, and several have cost much more. The regularity of these episodes and the resulting damage shows that we are not prepared for the current climate, let alone a changing one that portends more weather extremes.

We are not arguing that the drought has been caused by climate change alone, or that all weather disasters have a link to climate change. However, the evidence is clear that many areas of the globe are experiencing increasing risks from weather and climate hazards. As with the California drought, climate change is an important thumb on the scale, increasing the odds of particular extremes in specific places.

In California, we can expect warmer winters and hotter summers, drier dry years and wetter wet years, and less water storage from snowpack in the mountains, which also controls flooding. This means more years with extreme fire danger, critically overdrawn groundwater, legal water rights that exceed the amount of water available and challenges to balancing trade-offs among water storage, flood control and environmental protection.

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To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.”

In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.”

Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.

It’s become a predictable pattern: One act of violence in the world overshadows a similar, concurrent violent act, inviting a backlash against this imbalance in scrutiny, sympathy, and grief. But that predictability doesn’t make the pattern any less distressing. Each time there’s a major terror attack in an American or European city—New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Paris again—it captures the attention and concern of Americans and Europeans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do. Seldom do events line up so neatly, offering a clear comparison, as the bombings in Beirut and the rampage in Paris.

Onepotential explanation is simple: There were three times more deaths in Paris than in Beirut. Beyond that are a host of other, intertwined reasons. Perhaps chief among them is familiarity. Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than to Beirut—or to Cairo, or to Nairobi, or to any number of cities that have experienced bloody attacks. If they haven’t traveled to the French capital themselves, they’ve likely seen a hundred movies and TV shows that take place there, and can reel off the names of landmarks. Paris in particular is a symbol of a sort of high culture.

There is also a troubling tribal, or racial, component to this familiarity factor as well: People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.

"The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."

But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?

On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)