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This fall, even as cases surged across Europe, Germany worked hard to keep schools open, prioritizing them over other aspects of daily life like restaurants and bars.

On Wednesday, German schools will close along with nonessential stores and services as part of a strict lockdown that will be in effect through Christmas.

“The numbers were so out of control that German leaders decided they had to lock everything down, even schools,” said Melissa Eddy, a Times correspondent in Berlin.

FOR MUCH of the past half-decade, the operative word in the energy sector was “abundance”. An industry that had long sought to ration the production of fossil fuels to keep prices high suddenly found itself swamped with oversupply, as America’s shale boom lowered the price of oil around the world and clean-energy sources, such as wind and solar, competed with other fuels used for power generation, such as coal and natural gas.

In recent weeks, however, it is a shortage of energy, rather than an abundance of it, that has caught the world’s attention.

Britain’s miffed motorists are suffering from a shortage of lorry drivers to deliver petrol. Power cuts in parts of China partly stem from the country’s attempts to curb emissions. Dwindling coal stocks at power stations in India are linked to a surge in the price of imports of the commodity.

In the euro zone annual inflation hit 3.4% in September, the highest rate in over a decade. Some economists worry that the world economy is entering a period of “stagflation”—weak growth and high inflation—reminiscent of the 1970s.Off the ChartsTaking you behind the scenes of our data journalismDirectly to your inbox every weekSign up

A recent paper by Dennis Bonam and Andra Smadu, two economists at the Dutch central bank, looks at the effect of pandemics on inflation and concludes that they typically lead to lower, not higher, price pressures.

Using data going back to the 14th century, covering six European countries and 19 pandemics, the authors find that such events have historically caused inflation to fall for more than a decade, on average, yielding an inflation rate about ​​0.6 percentage points lower than if the pandemic had not occurred.

In May of 1607, a hearty group of Englishmen arrived on the muddy shores of modern-day Virginia under orders from King James I to establish an English colony. But despite their efforts,

In December of 1606, the Virginia Company, under charter from King James I, sent an expedition to establish an English settlement in North America. When their ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, arrived near the banks of the James River on May 14, 1607, 104 men and boys set foot on what would soon become Jamestown. The initial group contained well-to-do adventurers, a handful of artisans and craftsmen, and laborers eager to forge a new home. Notably absent were members of the opposite sex. It would be another nine long months before any women arrived at the fledgling colony. 

While the terrain might have appeared ideal from the deck of a ship—unoccupied and ripe with natural resources—the Virginia Company established its settlement on a swath of swampy land with no source of fresh water. Soon after, the men began to perish. Only 38 of the 104 original settlers were still alive by January 1608. 

Also known as the Seven Years’ War, this New World conflict marked another chapter in the long imperial struggle between Britain and France.

William Pitt, the British turned the tide with victories at Louisbourg, Fort Frontenac and the French-Canadian stronghold of Quebec. At the 1763 peace conference, the British received the territories of Canada from France and Florida from Spain, opening the Mississippi Valley to westward expansion.

In the early 1750s, France’s expansion into the Ohio River valley repeatedly brought it into conflict with the claims of the British colonies, especially Virginia. In 1754, the French built Fort Duquesne where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers joined to form the Ohio River (in today’s Pittsburgh), making it a strategically important stronghold that the British repeatedly attacked. 

hy would a health insurance company study air pollution? Because, as Christian Horemans, an environment and health expert with the Belgian mutual insurer Mutualités Libres, explains: “It has an enormous impact on public health and an enormous cost for the Belgian compulsory health and disability insurance

The insurer’s recent study , carried out by a team that included Belgian and Dutch universities and research centres, compared health insurance claims from 1.2 million people in Belgium in 2019 with particle pollution in their neighbourhoods. The financial results were startling.

the study found associations between GP and hospital emergency visits and particle pollution (PM2.5), and when it applied the results to Belgium as a whole, researchers estimated that reducing air pollution to match the least polluted 25% of places in Belgium would have saved €43m (£37m) in GP and emergency hospital visits in 2019.

In the Netherlands, there are roughly 2.6 guns for every 100 people; there are more than 120 guns per 100 people in the United States.

“21% of state and 20% of federal prisoners said they possessed a gun during their offense.

In the Netherlands there are about 27 gun homicides a year. Not 27 per 100,000. Total

In a healthy society, the early-20th-century Dutch prime minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper observed, there are a variety of spheres, each with its own social function. There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc. Each of these spheres, he continued, has its own rules and possesses its own integrity and correct way of doing things. Each sphere is a responsible zone of flourishing.

ou can clarify what any particular sphere’s responsibility is by asking questions like: What is a school for? What is a science lab for? What is a baseball team for?

In our country, the business sphere has sometimes tried to take over the education sphere — to run schools like a business. But if you run a school or university on the profit-maximization mentality, you will trample over the mission of what a school is for — the cultivation of the student, the mission of pure research.

A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.

“In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”

The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.

uilt 4,500 years ago during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the pyramids of Giza are more than elaborate tombs — they’re also one of historians’ best sources of insight into how the ancient Egyptians lived, since their walls are covered with illustrations of agricultural practices, city life, and religious ceremonies. But on one subject, they remain curiously silent. They offer no insight into how the pyramids were built.

It’s a mystery that has plagued historians for thousands of years, leading the wildest speculators into the murky territory of alien intervention and perplexing the rest. But the work of several archaeologists in the last few years has dramatically changed the landscape of Egyptian studies. After millennia of debate, the mystery might finally be over.

For example, the Egyptians hadn’t yet discovered the wheel, so it would have been difficult to transport massive stones — some weighing as much as 90 tons — from place to place. They hadn’t invented the pulley, a device that would have made it much easier to lift large stones into place. They didn’t have iron tools to chisel and shape their stonework.

The rapid advent of artificial intelligence has set off alarms that the technology used to trick people is advancing far faster than the technology that can identify the tricks. Tech companies, researchers, photo agencies and news organizations are scrambling to catch up, trying to establish standards for content provenance and ownership.

The advancements are already fueling disinformation and being used to stoke political divisions

Last month, some people fell for images showing Pope Francis donning a puffy Balenciaga jacket and an earthquake devastating the Pacific Northwest, even though neither of those events had occurred. The images had been created using Midjourney, a popular image generator.

Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.

Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities

Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.

Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.

Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.

Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being

You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.

The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about

I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC.