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If Ukraine were a NATO member, the alliance would be obligated to defend it against Russia and other adversaries.

we will not slam the door shut on NATO’s open door policy

But France and Germany have in the past opposed Ukraine’s inclusion, and other European members are wary

housing prices nationwide were 19.2 percent higher in January 2022 than January 2021.

to put that average 19.2 percent figure in perspective, a house that sold for $600,000 a year ago would typically go for about $715,000 now.

Incomes have not kept pace, rising an average of 5.5 percent over the same time period.

In his interview, Zhong optimistically appeared to suggest a return to pre-pandemic life in China within months.“I was asked when our lives can return to where we were in 2019. My view is that in the first half of next year after March,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Seemingly in response, many of those restrictions have been abruptly shelved. Videos spread on social media showed abandoned quarantine centres and testing sites, littered with the refuse of the former policy. State media and health messaging has pivoted to emphasising the low severity of Omicron, and urging individual responsibility. One official video which shows people removing their face masks with apparent relief was criticised over its suggestion to ease mask wearing just as Covid begins to spread uncontrolled.

There’s an important lesson here, applicable to pyramid schemes, politics, and a host of cultural challenges where people find hope and purpose in all the wrong places. You can’t fact-check a person out of hope and purpose. They’ll resent you even if you’re right.

Instead, it’s always preferable, if at all possible, to replace something bad with something better. That’s a key reason Trump is losing altitude now.

That beaver was simply doing what beavers do: altering their surroundings to create a more hospitable place for themselves.

beavers share something rare with humans. We build; they build. We change the landscape; they change the landscape. “Beavers,” she writes, “are the only animals apart from man that radically transform their environment.”

Indigenous people may have hunted beavers for their meat and their fur, but they maintained taboos against overhunting, and some tribes, like the Blackfeet, considered them sacred animals that must never be harmed.

The federal bail system’s presumption of release makes it better and more humane than most state systems

But you can still see the impact of wealth. First, because Sam Bankman-Fried broke the law by (allegedly) stealing billions of dollars instead of by being paid a hundred bucks to transport half a key of black tar heroin, there was no presumption he should be detained. That reflects society’s values. Moreover, rich people are more easily able to satisfy elaborate bail conditions. They have stable families in whose homes they can live, their families can post substantial home equity, they can afford the cost of home monitoring, they can afford to travel back and forth from home to court, they have rich friends who will sign bonds pledging money. Poor people don’t have those things, and so the magistrate judge finds that no combination of conditions — that is, no combination of conditions that this defendant can meet — will assure they won’t be a flight risk or a danger.

We cannot continue to offer healthcare free at the point of use. Those (like me) who can pay should be charged. We cannot expect to inherit our elderly parents’ houses and so require the state to pay for their old-age care. We middle classes have no right to enjoy rail travel vastly subsidised by the general taxpayer. I have no right to an old person’s London travel card saving me thousands a year when young people on a tenth of my salary must pay — nor to a winter fuel allowance.

The taxpayer should not be subsidising public-school education for the small minority who benefit from it. Pensioners should not, regardless of our wealth, expect increases in our pensions that exceed the increases working people get. Britain should not be merrily promising substantial increases in defence spending when we already shoulder a disproportionate burden in the defence of freedom.

Year on year we are loading bigger national bills on to the ever-smaller proportion of the population who are actually working. People are retiring earlier then demanding to be kept expensively alive for longer

Jon Kelly, a co-founder of Puck, said subscription newsletters were part of a new model for publishing, comparing them to magazines in their heyday.

“If you take a look back to the history of the magazine industry, it was a business that had a total addressable market that ranged in the tens of billions of dollars focused on affinity-based creative products that people subscribed to because they absolutely loved them,” he said.

Mr. Kelly said Puck’s paid subscriptions had grown an average of 20 percent each mont

“I felt so off the grid, and it almost went hand in hand, using a camera that wasn’t connected to a phone,” she said. When her digital camera broke last summer, Ms. Strosser said she was “so upset.” She later started using her grandmother’s Sony Cyber-shot, which had “such a different character.” Meanwhile, she said, if her iPhone broke, “I couldn’t care less.”

the story of FTX should also trigger some deep soul-searching among the rest of us. In a better world, people would not behave so irresponsibly — but nor would it be possible for someone this stupid to accumulate the kind of money and political influence that accrued to Bankman-Fried.

“It will be financial chaos,” predicted Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, when asked about a potential brush with default. “Our fiscal problems will be meaningfully worse. … Our geopolitical standing in the world will be undermined.”

Womack and other Republicans acknowledged that the “real question” is if their own party can shore up the 218 votes needed in the House to pass a bill. With tensions simmering among the GOP’s far-right and moderate ranks — and only four votes to spare in a narrow majority — Republicans said they need to show progress if they hope to put new pressure on Democrats.

More than a decade later, some Republicans in Washington acknowledged that it may well take a more severe economic disruption just to force a resolution to the country’s fiscal standoff.“You can’t rule that out,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative advocacy group, as he echoed the need for drastic action to reduce the federal debt. “Both sides are dug in. They’ve shown no signs of moving. Something has to change the landscape to incentivize the White House and Congress to move.”

The conventional wisdom of 1968 was that Humphrey lost to Nixon because he couldn’t find the courage to break with Johnson on a war that a majority of Americans had come to oppose.

That’s almost certainly wrong: Disaffected liberals ultimately came back, but disaffected blue-collar voters, who largely supported the war and abhorred the chaos in the streets, defected to Nixon or to George Wallace. (A Harris Poll found that two-thirds of respondents supported the Chicago cops’ tactics.)

The shrunken Democratic base that emerged from the election is very much the one the party relies on today: Blacks and well-educated white liberals.

reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context