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Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.

“He was called a Don Juan for years,” said Hélène Devynck, 55, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of raping her at his home when she worked as one of his assistants in the early 1990s.

“His ego is destroying him,” said Cécile Delarue, 43, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of engaging in sexual harassment when she worked with him two decades ago.

Mr. Poivre d’Arvor declined an interview request through Mr. Naepels, who said that at least one more woman could be included in the defamation suit.

According to the French news media, Mr. Poivre d’Arvor has been married for 50 years to the same woman, who has not commented publicly on the accusations.

On air, he appealed especially to a target audience of women under 50, Mr. Lévrier said.

He regularly invited young women to watch his live broadcasts before leading them to his private office, where several of the women say he assaulted them. He also pressed young female employees for sex, or sexually harassed them, according to former employees, including Ms. Devynck, the former assistant.

“I knew that, at the time, if I complained, he was the seducer and so I was the whore — I couldn’t say anything because of his power and the support he had,” said Ms. Devynck, who went on to a successful career at other channels.

“I’m of a generation that was raised with the idea that women and men were equal, and that it was through work that I would gain freedom — my mother told me often,” Ms. Delarue said. “But this man just saw me as a fresh piece of meat.”

A famous letter written by Catherine Deneuve and other prominent Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo as “puritanism” and defended “the freedom to importune” as part of French “gallantry.” Traditional French feminism — and its fierce rejection of #MeToo as an American aberration — was a “trap” that led women to believe that they could be free without worrying about sexual violence, Ms. Devynck said.

“His image was so powerful that people kept saying it’s not possible, he’s such a seducer, she should have been flattered,” Ms. de Blasi, 33, recalled. “I kept reading, ‘French charm, gallantry and seduction,’ when it wasn’t about that at all.”

“Little jokes about not wearing a décolleté, makeup or a skirt,” she recalled.

The great seducer is “such a part of our collective imagination,” she said. “And the problem is that part of French society still believes in it, or at least believed in it.”

His comments come as Russian forces continue their offensive in the Donbas region. The Donbas refers to the two eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk — a major strategic, political and economic target for the Kremlin.

Speaking at his general audience to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, he said the block should be lifted because many millions of people depend on wheat from Ukraine, particularly in the world’s poorest countries.

Scholz said Germany had been “delivering continuously since the beginning of the war”, pointing to more than 15 million rounds of ammunition, 100,000 grenades and over 5,000 anti-tank mines sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.

OPEC and non-OPEC countries are scheduled to discuss the next phase of production policy on Thursday.

Speaking in an evening address to the nation, Zelenskyy said the cities of Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, and Kurakhove are now at the epicenter of the confrontation.“Given the presence of large-scale chemical production in Sievierodonetsk, the Russian army’s strikes there, including blind air bombing, are insanity,” he said.“But on the 97th day of such a war, it is no longer surprising that for the Russian military, for Russian commanders, for Russian soldiers, any madness is absolutely acceptable.”

On average, more than 2 children are killed and more than 4 are injured every day in Ukraine due mostly to attacks using explosive weapons in populated areas, according to reports verified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.Civilian infrastructure critical for children, including 256 health facilities and hundreds of schools, have also been damaged or destroyed in the war.

U.S. officials have been hesitant to send MLRS to Ukraine over concerns that Russia may view it as an escal

The first missile launched on Wednesday by North Korea appeared to have been an ICBM, South Korean defense officials said. But it flew only 224 miles, the officials said, indicating that North Korea did not want to launch the missile on a full ICBM trajectory over the Pacific while Mr. Biden was in the air on his way back to Washington after a visit to Seoul and Tokyo.

The second missile launched on Wednesday apparently failed because it “disintegrated” after reaching an altitude of 12 miles, the South Korean officials said. The third projectile was a short-range ballistic missile.

The missile launches on Wednesday were a strong signal that North Korea was embarking on a new cycle of tensions in the Korean Peninsula despite the country’s first reported outbreak of the coronavirus. It also constituted North Korea’s public reaction to Mr. Biden’s trip to the region, where he met with the leaders of South Korea and Japan and vowed to step up measures, including joint military exercises, to help deter the growing nuclear and missile threat from the North.

But like his conservative predecessors, he attached an important caveat: Such economic largess would be possible only “if North Korea genuinely embarks on a process to complete denuclearization.”

In the same speech, he seemed to take a page from the playbook of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia when he warned that his nuclear arsenal was not just to deter foreign invasion, but also to be used “if any forces try to violate the fundamental interests of our state.”

“North Korea continues to improve, expand and diversify its conventional and nuclear missile capabilities, posing an increasing risk to the U.S. homeland and U.S. forces, allies, and partners in the region,” John Plumb, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month. “Most of North Korea’s ballistic missiles have an assessed capability to carry nuclear payloads.”

But in recent years, as the Tel Aviv area has increasingly become a target of rocket attacks, the building has been judged unsafe.

In addition, Israel sits on two seismic faults that in the event of a major earthquake would leave only the lobby of the existing center intact.

The vault, 50 feet down, is cocooned in concrete and steel, and has a separate air supply and filtering system. Moshe Noyovich, the engineer overseeing the project, said the inventory of blood components stored in the vault should suffice for four or five days of war.

But these measures have costs. Schooling time is cut short, so students learn less. People do not travel to their jobs, so work is less productive. The heat kept some farmers inside and stunted harvests, so crop yields fell and global food prices increased. Social life is disrupted.

The geography of poor countries — many are close to the Equator — is not the only reason climate change is such a burden for them. Their poverty is another factor, leaving them with fewer resources to adapt.

“Climate change is one of the most profound inequities of the modern era,”

There is a paradox to the climate crisis. Because India never fully industrialized, it has not released as many greenhouse gases as the U.S., European nations and other rich countries. But because it has not industrialized, it also has fewer resources to adapt than the richer, polluting nations.

Fewer than 10 percent of Indians have air-conditioning at home.

The rush for clean energy technologies, like solar and wind power, is an effort to break that tension — to give countries a way to industrialize without the planet-warming pollution. With climate disasters already hitting much of the world, that effort is in a race against time to prevent more crises like India’s.

Because, again, more often than not, the very faults we find so unbearable in them are apt to be versions of the same faults that we are more or less blind to in our ourselves.

On this day, my text luckily came from the great Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian minister, highly-decorated writer, and theologian.  I’ll let some of his words play us out. They might seem a bit preachy. But that’s to be expected, since they come from a book called Secrets In the Dark: A Life in Sermons.

some shit arrived in the mail. Not figuratively. A literal bag of shit, postmarked with a return P.O Box, but which came by way of an anonymous sender. My wife asked who would send such a thing to me. It’s hard to say – the suspect list is a mile long.  Irate subjects? Irate readers? My mom?

Forty-two percent of those survey respondents reported they themselves were angrier in the last year than they had been in the past

a 2019 NPR-IBM Watson Health poll found that a whopping 84 percent of survey respondents said Americans are angrier today than they were a generation ago.  (The other sixteen percent were presumably too angry to stay on the phone.)

According to The 19th, an Austin-based nonprofit news organization, in 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration initiated 183 investigations of unruly passenger behavior, well above average, even for a COVID year in which air travel was significantly diminished. By November of 2021, that number had increased to 990 investigations, after reports of 5,240 unruly incidents

It was the first time China had explicitly endorsed Russia’s demand for a halt to NATO expansion, though it had criticized previous NATO applications by individual countries, including Montenegro and North Macedonia.

The two leaders also vowed to resist American-led efforts to promote pluralistic democracy and said they would fight foreign influence under the guise of what both call “color revolutions,” after the popular uprisings in former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia.

The multinational response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that the demise of the global postwar rules-based order may not be inevitable.

But the reappearance of war in Europe is also an omen. With toddlers sheltering in subway tunnels, and nuclear power plants under threat, it is a global air raid siren — a warning that the American-led system of internationalism needs to get itself back into gear, for the war at hand and for the struggle against authoritarianism to come.

“The global system was built in the 1950s, and if you think of it as a car from those years, it is battered, out of date in some ways, and could use a good tuneup,”

“But it is still on the road, rolling along, and, ironically enough, Vladimir Putin has done more in a week to energize it than anything I can remember.”

Almost universally, from leaders in Europe and Asia to current and former American officials, Ukraine is being viewed as a test for the survival of a 75-year-old idea: that liberal democracy, American military might and free trade can create the conditions for peace and global prosperity.

Because the founder of that concept, the United States, continues to struggle — with partisanship, Covid and failure in distant war zones — many foreign policy leaders already see Ukraine in dire terms, as marking an official end of the American era and the start of a more contested, multipolar moment.

For at least a decade, liberal democracies have been disappearing. Their numbers peaked in 2012 with 42 countries, and now there are just 34, home to only 13 percent of the world population, according to V-Dem, a nonprofit that studies governments

In many of those, including the United States, “toxic polarization” is on the rise.

Mr. Biden, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, spoke bluntly of the future risk, saying, “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos.” He insisted that the free world was holding Mr. Putin accountable.

One lesson seems to be that alliances matter. But for many, the most important lesson echoes what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman concluded about World War II: America cannot retreat into isolationism; its own prosperity depends on actively trying to keep the world’s major powers at peace.

it is palpable: what happens in the UK and Europe doesn’t stay in the UK and Europe.

In the past couple of weeks, the UK and several countries in Europe, including Germany, France and Switzerland, are experiencing a new wave.

This is the sixth warning from the UK and Europe to the United States.

Wastewater surveillance is relatively sparse in the United States, but 15% of the 410 sites where it was conducted between 24 February to 10 March 2022 showed a greater than 1000% increase compared with the prior 15-day period

the BA.2 variant is gaining steam in the United States and is now accounting for more than 30% of new cases.

Rather than focusing on what precisely is driving the new wave, the imperative is to drive some preventive action.

As with the first five warnings from the UK and Europe, the United States did not take heed. Instead of proactively gearing up with non-pharmaceutical interventions (masks, quality of masks, distancing, air filtration, ventilation, aggressive testing, etc.), it just reacted to the surges when they were manifest.

Now we are at a point with very low vaccination and booster rates, only 64% of the populations has had two shots, and 29% three shots. That puts the United States at 65th and 70th in the world ranking of countries, respectively.

Not only is there a gaping hole in our immunity wall, but the $58bn budget of the American Pandemic Prepared Plan (AP3) advanced by the White House to comprehensively address the deficiencies was gutted by the Senate, reduced to $2bn, now threatening to cancel the order of more than 9.2m Paxlovid pills, the Test-to Treat program announced at the State of the Union address, along with better data, wastewater surveillance, efforts to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine, research on long Covid, and many other critical public health measures.

We haven’t even seen a new, major variant yet, but there are too many reasons to believe that is likely in the months ahead, owing to extensive animal reservoirs and documented cases of spillover to humans, a large number of immunocompromised people in whom the virus can undergo accelerated evolution, rare but increasingly seen co-infections, and lack of containment of the virus globally.

Unfortunately, we have a mindset that the pandemic is over, which couldn’t be further than the truth

dd to all this is what is happening in China, which has fully relied on a zero-Covid policy, resulting in very little natural immunity, and vaccines that have weak efficacy against Omicron

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”

Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses.

Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics — a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.

“He doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.

The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president. Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.

Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years — less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.

Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”

“I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”

The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.

Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta. He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for low-income people in Indiana later this month.

Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.

The Carters walk every day — often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.

“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”

“He’s a good ol’ Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.

Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents — Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”

He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”

They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have. “I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn. “And you?” “No, I’m happy,” she says.

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.

What Friedman believed in was capitalism, or what he called “economic freedom.” Political freedom might come — but capitalism, he said, could do just fine without it.

the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.

it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government

The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980

He and other observers are trying to make sense of what might happen next — and, befitting our current bewilderment, they offer a range of perspectives. Some, like Wolf, hope the relationship can be repaired; others argue that the pairing has always been fraught, if not impossible.

he has also read his Marx and Engels, looking askance at their solutions while commending them for how “brilliantly” they described capitalism’s relentlessness and omnivorousness. Left to its own devices, capitalism expands wherever it can, plowing its way through national boundaries and local traditions — making it marvelously dynamic or utterly ruinous, and not infrequently both.

In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment. Born in 1946 in postwar England, he recalls in his preface how “the world seemed solid as I grew up.” He describes the feelings of “confidence” in democracy and capitalism that flourished with the collapse of the Soviet Union

Yet the “democratic capitalism” that Wolf wants to preserve was, even by his own lights, short-lived. Democracy itself — or “liberal democracy” with universal suffrage, which Wolf says is the kind of democracy he means — is a “political mayfly.” Democratic capitalism ended, in his account, with the financial crisis of 2008

Robert Reich has offered another measure, arguing that democratic capitalism, at least in the United States, began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Reagan, when “corporate capitalism” took over.

The left-wing German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck stakes out a decidedly different position, suggesting that the tendency to equate “democratic capitalism” with a few decades of postwar plenty is to misinterpret a “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class

In “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016), Streeck argues that it’s not compromise but the cascade of crises following the postwar boom — inflation, unemployment, market crashes — “that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism.” Where Wolf wistfully invokes a “delicate flower,” Streeck writes contemptuously of a “shotgun marriage.”

the historian Gary Gerstle explores in his fascinating and incisive “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” (2022). Before the New Deal order started to falter in the late 1960s and ’70s, Gerstle writes, a majority of Americans believed that capitalism should be managed by a strong state; in the neoliberal order that followed, a majority of Americans believed that the state should be constrained by free markets. Each order began to break down when its traditional ways of solving problems didn’t seem to work

capitalism, according to Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has obtained the status of civic religion. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” the authors argue that industry groups and wealthy donors have engaged in a concerted campaign to promote “market fundamentalism” — “a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way.”

The main implication of “The Big Myth” seems to be that “market fundamentalism” is so horrifically egregious — enriching the few and despoiling the planet — that Americans had to be plied with propaganda to believe in it.

as Gerstle’s book shows, neoliberal ideas proved so seductive because they also happened to dovetail with the stories that Americans wanted to tell about themselves, emphasizing individuality and freedom.

A new generation of swashbuckling billionaires entertain the prospect of secession, using their money to realize fantasies of escape, whether through seasteading or spaceships. The book quotes one seasteading enthusiast declaring, “Democracy is not the answer,” but merely “the current industry standard.”

Slobodian’s excellent if discomfiting new book, “Crack-Up Capitalism” (forthcoming in April), explores other neoliberal evasions of the nation-state: tax havens, special economic zones, gated communities — enclaves that are “freed from ordinary forms of regulation.

in “Globalists” (2018) the historian Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals have found ways not just to liberate markets but to “encase” them in international institutions, thereby shielding capitalist activities from democratic accountability. He observes that neoliberals were especially alarmed after World War II by decolonization, adopting a condescending “racialized language” that pitted “the rational West,” with its trade rules and property laws, against a postcolonial South, “with its ‘emotional’ commitment to sovereignty.”

“In a properly functioning education system, that’s giving them really robust messaging about what it means to be a man, they would have antibodies to fight off the sick messaging that Tate is giving. All they see is the guy who’s got a Bugatti and joking about telling women to make him a sandwich.

“When teachers try to explain why Tate isn’t someone to look up to, the teenage boys ask them, ‘Well, what colour is your Bugatti?’

“The premise needs to be attacked directly, which is that ‘no, money isn’t the main index of masculinity’. Otherwise, we would all just be looking up to gangsters and criminals.”

Knowland, who teaches English and has forged a career as an online tutor, was sacked in 2020 after refusing to take down a video he made for his students called The Patriarchy Paradox, which repeated claims that women would revert to a primitive life without men.

Knowland believes the issues he was seeking to address in the lecture, which is still on his YouTube channel and has had 255,000 views, have only increased since his sacking.

The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) decided to take no action against Knowland after an inquiry. Eton College has previously said that the ruling did not undermine its decision to dismiss him.

The school reported the lecture to the TRA, which considered charges of undermining tolerance and failing to safeguard students but closed the case with no further action. In a statement, the school said: “This does not mean that Mr Knowland did nothing wrong or that Eton was not entitled to dismiss him.”

He added: “I think the most interesting part about the lecture and what resonated with my supporters was my stress on chivalry and the idea that a man’s strength should be put to the service of the weak and his family.

“Chivalry is the thing that we’re missing today and it’s become deformed and turned into machismo, which is masculinity without any sense of humility or meekness. I think this is what we need to return to. Some of the problems that Tate is addressing, things like men should be assertive, men should be competitive, men should be strong, etcetera, chivalry agrees with.

“But chivalry says, ‘Why do they need to be those things? Because it’s to serve the weak, not themselves.”

Knowland, 37, believes that Tate — who rose to infamy last year after videos of his diatribes led to him becoming the world’s most googled person — has tapped into a “malaise” among young men caused by the teaching of boys in schools.

As an example, last month Scotland had to pause movement of transgender prisoners after a row over whether a transgender female rapist should be imprisoned with biological women.

“For some, even saying that there are biological differences between men and women is offensive. That’s what my lecture said, that men are stronger,” Knowland added. “I don’t think that [women] should [compete in sport against transgender women]. I don’t think it’s safe.

The example I gave in the lecture [was] of the transgender fighter who fractured the woman’s skull, and could easily have killed her. I think there are good reasons why sporting bodies are moving towards and in some cases have already decided that there’s not going to be next events like that.”

During the Eton furore Simon Henderson, the head master of Eton, was criticised in some quarters for pursuing a “woke” culture at the school and his critics referred to him as “Trendy Hendy”. They pointed to pupils being asked to wear Black Lives Matter waistcoats and decolonising its curriculum as examples of the institution being captured by ideologues.

The content Knowland produces on his YouTube channel continues to be controversial. A recent video by the devout Catholic is entitled “Eight facts that killed evolution for me”.

“The lecture was addressing some very live issues at the time and it’s only got worse since then,” he said. “Women now feel that they haven’t got safe spaces to get undressed to go to a swimming pool. So those concepts in the lecture were hard hitting and provocative, because these are topics that are big ones that people have strong feelings about.”

While Knowland does not agree with the term transgender — “there are only two categories of sex, using the term transgender concedes too much ground” — he is alive to the issue of transphobic bullying. The issue has been in the spotlight this month after Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl, was stabbed to death in a park.

“People being subjected to transphobia is terrible,” he said. “People shouldn’t mistreat anybody just because they’ve got a mistaken idea that they are a woman. They need to be treated with compassion, not attacked or bullied.”

Knowland’s newfound career as an online tutor, as well as hosting a podcast, has eased some of the pressure he felt after his sacking. He said: “At Eton our family home was a benefit, so that was on my mind when I was leaving. I had to wait a couple of years after leaving to get a home because being self-employed, you have to get all the paperwork to get a mortgage.

“I’ve actually had parents get in touch because they supported me over what happened at Eton and wanted me to tutor their children.

“Losing my job was concerning but it gave me an insight into what it feels for someone to be cancelled. Fear is such a powerful weapon to stop people believing what they’re passionate about.

“People feel they can’t say anything, because consequences are going to be too severe, but now I’ve been through it I’ve actually found it freeing.”

They also died of covid at higher rates than other health-care workers, and they experience high rates of burnout, “an occupational syndrome characterized by a high degree of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work,” according to the World Health Organization

high stress and anxiety are the “antecedents” to burnout. But you know you’ve hit the nadir when you become emotionally detached from your work. “It’s almost like a loss of meaning,” she said.

In April 2020, Miller said the public was “exalting nurses as these superheroes and angels,” while nurses themselves were tweeting about “the horrible working conditions, enormous amount of death without any break … being mentally and completely worn down and exhausted.”

Miller said nurses are experiencing “collective trauma,” a conclusion she reached by studying their social media usage through the pandemic

Before the pandemic, between a third and half of nurses and physicians already reported symptoms of burnout. A covid impact study published in March 2022 by the American Nurses Foundation found this number had risen to 60 percent among acute-care nurses. “Reports of feeling betrayed, undervalued, and unsupported have risen,

Miller and Groves also found a fivefold increase in references to quitting between the 2020 study and the 2021 study. “Our profession will never be the same,” Miller told me. “If you talked to any nurse who worked bedside through the pandemic, that’s what they’ll tell you.” From this, she says, has grown a desire to be heard. “We feel emboldened. We’re not as willing to be silent anymore.”

then, in late February 2013, Duke was abruptly fired. She’d posted a photo on Instagram showing an ER where hospital staff had just saved the life of a man hit by a subway train. It looked like a hurricane had blown through. There were no people in the photo, but Duke titled the post, “Man vs. 6 train.” She told me she wanted to showcase “the amazing things doctors and nurses do to save lives … the f---ing real deal.”

Duke says her superiors called her an “amazing nurse and team member” before they told her that “it was time to move on.” Her director handed her a printout of the Instagram post. According to Duke, he acknowledged that she hadn’t violated HIPAA or any hospital policies but said she’d been insensitive and unprofessional. She was escorted out of the building by security. When the episode aired, it showed Duke crying on the sidewalk outside the hospital.

She’d reposted the photo, with permission, from a male doctor’s Instagram account. He faced no repercussions. She now admits her caption was rather “cold” — especially compared with the doctor’s, “After the trauma.” In hindsight, she said, she might have been more sensitive. Maybe not even posted the photo at all. And yet this frustrates her. Why shouldn’t the public see nursing culture for what it really is? Man vs. 6 Train. “That’s ER speak,” she told me. “We say ‘head injury in room five.’ We don’t say ‘Mr. Smith in room five. We talk and think by mechanism of injury.”

But this is at odds with the romanticized image of the nurturing nurse — which hospitals often want to project. In some cases, nurses are explicitly told not to be forthright with their patients. “I know nurses in oncology who are not allowed to say to a patient and their family, ‘This will be the fourth clinical trial, but we all know your family member is dying,”

“The most frequent question is, ‘Katie, I have to get out of the hospital, but I don’t know what else to do.’” Her advice: “You have to create your own definition of what being a nursing professional means to you.” She has a ready list of alternative jobs, including “med spa” owner, educational consultant and YouTuber.

first, what this is not.

It is not an argument against protest

I am not writing this thinking of right-wing America as my audience.

This is not merely a complaint.

Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy in missing the futility of “dialogue” with them. Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher.

our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it?

My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matte

We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence.

they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.

“The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction.

But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are

Following the religion means to pillory people for what, as recently as 10 years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all; to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists;

o pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism; and to almost hope that it doesn’t because this would deprive you of a sense of purpose.

There is a famous phrase, “4am Kyiv is bombed”. Every Ukrainian and Russian kid knows it. That’s how the announcement of the German bombardment of Kyiv in 1941 sounded.And here we are: 24 February 5am Kyiv is bombed by Russia.

I said that to my Russian colleague, and tried very hard not to show how my voice was trembling. She asked for forgiveness again.

A famous Russian independent journalist called me for a quote after Russia launched airstrikes all over Ukraine. We have never met but she started begging for forgiveness for what her country is doing and may do to mine. Both of us are experienced reporters and used to covering hard stories, conflicts. We talked, and we cried.

On Thursday, rescuers said they had found engine components, part of a wing and other “important debris” as they searched the mountainside in a rural part of the Guangxi region for a fourth day.

Mr. Zhang, who was born in 1963, was one of China’s most experienced pilots,

A day earlier, the workers had found a black box, believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, which could provide investigators with crucial details. Officials said it was damaged but that its memory unit was relatively intact. The plane’s second black box, which records flight data, has yet to be recovered.

Their past performance was “very good,” Sun Shiying, the chairman of China Eastern Airlines’ Yunnan branch, said on Wednesday. When reached by phone, an airline representative declined to answer further questions about the crew.

At the main crash site, a state broadcaster showed the workers digging with shovels around a large piece of wreckage that the reporter described as a wing, which bore part of the China Eastern logo and was perched on a steep, barren slope fringed by dense thickets of now-flattened bamboo. Heavy rains had left the roads slick and inundated the earth with muddy pools.

Over his career as a commercial pilot with China Yunnan, which later merged with China Eastern, Mr. Zhang flew four different models of aircraft and accumulated 31,769 hours of flight experience.

The airline commonly paired young pilots with older pilots, and Mr. Zhang had mentored more than 100, CAAC News said. Mr. Yang was one of them.

Experts said that investigating the crash, which involved a sudden dive from cruising altitude in good weather, would require a close look at both the aircraft and the pilots, including the possibility that the plane was deliberately brought down. But they stressed that the cause was far from determined.

“Certainly an intentional downing is always a part of any investigation, and especially with this particular flight profile,” said Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization created after World War II to promote aviation safety. But he cautioned that it was “premature to jump onto any possibilities.”

“If the captain were intending to commit suicide, they’d have to overcome the other flight crew members,” Mr. Marks said.

yet American politicians on the left sure seem incapable of drawing out this connection

In his State of the Union address shortly after Russia’s invasion, President Biden whiffed on a major opportunity to revive his stalled climate change agenda by underlining the geopolitical dangers of fossil fuels. His references to climate change — what he has previously called an “existential threat” to the planet — were buried under, rather than connected to, his comments about the war.

“This narrative has not been out there — that this war is why we need to get off of fossil fuels,”

This could have been a moment for moral clarity on the dangers of fossil fuels — but so far, Democrats have fumbled that message.

pundits on the right have had a field day with the notion that Russia’s invasion somehow points up the folly of focusing on climate change. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board blamed “the Biden Administration’s obsession with climate” for making “the U.S. and Europe vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s energy blackmail” and wrote that “the climate lobby has made Mr. Putin more powerful.”

“More groups need to be connecting the dots, making the case that true energy independence is about running on sunshine, because sunshine is free and abundant and cannot be controlled by dictators.

such a message is likely to resonate with people. A study she and a co-author published online in 2017 examined the political factors that led to clean energy policies. “What we found was, overwhelmingly, these policies were passed during energy crises,”

the Democrats have yet to aggressively make the case for their proposals in the new context of war — to point out that climate policy is not unrelated to foreign policy, and that freeing ourselves from other people’s fuels is the best long-term solution to skyrocketing energy prices.

the ways in which fossil fuels make energy prices far more volatile and put us at the behest of powers and leaders that can act in ways that are dangerous and unjust” has rarely been more obvious.

“I started to think about the parallels between climate change and this war and it’s clear that the roots of both these threats to humanity are found in fossil fuels,” Krakovska said in the interview. “Burning oil, gas and coal is causing warming and impacts we need to adapt to

And Russia sells these resources and uses the money to buy weapons. Other countries are dependent upon these fossil fuels; they don’t make themselves free of them. This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way; it will destroy our civilization.”

“No one believed me that working for Elon was the way it was until they saw how he operated Twitter,” Bernal said, calling Twitter “just the tip of the iceberg on how he operates Tesla.”

In April 2019, at a showcase dubbed “Autonomy Investor Day,” Musk made perhaps his boldest prediction as Tesla’s chief executive. “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware,” Musk told a roomful of investors. The software updates automatically over the air, and Full Self-Driving would be so reliable, he said, the driver “could go to sleep.”

Investors were sold. The following year, Tesla’s stock price soared, making it the most valuable automaker and helping Musk become the world’s richest person

To deliver on his promise, Musk assembled a star team of engineers willing to work long hours and problem solve deep into the night. Musk would test the latest software on his own car, then he and other executives would compile “fix-it” requests for their engineers.

Those patchwork fixes gave the illusion of relentless progress but masked the lack of a coherent development strategy, former employees said. While competitors such as Alphabet-owned Waymo adopted strict testing protocols that limited where self-driving software could operate, Tesla eventually pushed Full Self-Driving out to 360,000 owners — who paid up to $15,000 to be eligible for the features — and let them activate it at their own discretion.

Tesla’s philosophy is simple: The more data (in this case driving) the artificial intelligence guiding the car is exposed to, the faster it learns. But that crude model also means there is a lighter safety net. Tesla has chosen to effectively allow the software to learn on its own, developing sensibilities akin to a brain via technology dubbed “neural nets” with fewer rules, the former employees said. While this has the potential to speed the process, it boils down to essentially a trial and error method of training.

Radar originally played a major role in the design of the Tesla vehicles and software, supplementing the cameras by offering a reality check of what was around, particularly if vision might be obscured. Tesla also used ultrasonic sensors, shorter-range devices that detect obstructions within inches of the car. (The company announced last year it was eliminating those as well.)

Musk, as the chief tester, also asked for frequent bug fixes to the software, requiring engineers to go in and adjust code. “Nobody comes up with a good idea while being chased by a tiger,” a former senior executive recalled an engineer on the project telling him

Toward the end of 2020, Autopilot employees turned on their computers to find in-house workplace monitoring software installed, former employees said. It monitored keystrokes and mouse clicks, and kept track of their image labeling. If the mouse did not move for a period of time, a timer started — and employees could be reprimanded, up to being fired, for periods of inactivity, the former employees said.

Some of the people who spoke with The Post said that approach has introduced risks. “I just knew that putting that software out in the streets would not be safe,” said a former Tesla Autopilot engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “You can’t predict what the car’s going to do.”

Some of the people who spoke with The Post attributed Tesla’s sudden uptick in “phantom braking” reports — where the cars aggressively slow down from high speeds — to the lack of radar. The Post analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to show incidences surged last year, prompting a federal regulatory investigation.

The data showed reports of “phantom braking” rose to 107 complaints over three months, compared to only 34 in the preceding 22 months. After The Post highlighted the problem in a news report, NHTSA received about 250 complaints of the issue in a two-week period. The agency opened an investigation after, it said, it received 354 complaints of the problem spanning a period of nine months.

“It’s not the sole reason they’re having [trouble] but it’s big a part of it,” said Missy Cummings, a former senior safety adviser for NHTSA, who has criticized the company’s approach and recused herself on matters related to Tesla. “The radar helped detect objects in the forward field. [For] computer vision which is rife with errors, it serves as a sensor fusion way to check if there is a problem.”

Even with radar, Teslas were less sophisticated than the lidar and radar-equipped cars of competitors.“One of the key advantages of lidar is that it will never fail to see a train or truck, even if it doesn’t know what it is,” said Brad Templeton, a longtime self-driving car developer and consultant who worked on Google’s self-driving car. “It knows there is an object in front and the vehicle can stop without knowing more than that.”

Musk’s resistance to suggestions led to a culture of deference, former employees said. Tesla fired employees who pushed back on his approach. The company was also pushing out so many updates to its software that in late 2021, NHTSA publicly admonished Tesla for issuing fixes without a formal recall notice.

Tesla engineers have been burning out, quitting and looking for opportunities elsewhere. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, took a months-long sabbatical last year before leaving Tesla and taking a position this year at OpenAI, the company behind language-modeling software ChatGPT.

One of the former employees said that he left for Waymo. “They weren’t really wondering if their car’s going to run the stop sign,” the engineer said. “They’re just focusing on making the whole thing achievable in the long term, as opposed to hurrying it up.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s advisory commission on city monuments recommended leaving the names in place. The group’s report warned that “removal of the vestiges of past decisions risks leading to cultural amnesia.” It suggested keeping the markers “while re-contextualizing them in place to continue the public dialogue.

The commission got it right. One idea for providing that context could be plaques posted at eye level along the parade route, referring people to, say, the Downtown Alliance’s website, which tells us why we honored these individuals — and why we might regret having done so. In this way, we can tell the truth rather than hide it.

“We’re not going to recycle our way out of this,” Mr. Weiss of ClientEarth said.

Environmental groups also say that recycling has not proved effective at the scale necessary: Only 9 percent of all plastics ever made have been recycled, according to the United Nations, with most of the rest ending up in landfills and dumps.

The company said that it reduced its plastic consumption by 12 percent from 2018 to 2021, and that it has committed to use only reusable, recyclable or compostable plastic packaging by 2025. But Danone is not on track to reach that target, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which set up a voluntary program with the United Nations for big companies to address plastic pollution.

To sue Danone, the environmental groups have relied on the so-called duty of vigilance law, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that France passed in 2017. It requires large companies to take effective measures to identify and prevent human rights violations and environmental damages throughout their chain of activity.

The French duty of vigilance law, the first of its kind in Europe, has since inspired similar legislation in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as a proposed European Union directive.

There is nothing like a duty of vigilance law in the United States. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would require plastic producers to finance waste and recycling programs, and ban single-use plastic bags and the exporting of plastic waste to developing countries, is currently in committee.

“It’s often about streamlining existing practices,” said Pauline Barraud de Lagerie, a sociologist at University Paris Dauphine who published a book on corporate responsibility. She added that by suing companies, “N.G.O.s are trying to somehow bring back an obligation of result.”So far, around 15 legal cases based on the French law have been reported. Half of them have gone to court and are still awaiting judgment, which could take years.

The lawsuit is part of a wider trend of climate litigation that has gained momentum in recent years, expanding the climate fight beyond traditional demonstrations and civil disobedience initiatives.

The number of climate change lawsuits globally has more than doubled from 2017 to 2022, from about 900 to more than 2,000 ongoing or concluded cases, according to data from the Grantham Research Institute and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.