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In California, the number of arson arrests jumped during the pandemic: 120 arson arrests were reported by Cal Fire in 2020 compared with 70 the year before. Arson offenses had been declining nationwide for the past few decades, but F.B.I. numbers show about 13 arson offenses per 100,000 people in 2020, about a 20 percent increase from the previous year.

Mr. Nordskog, who has interviewed more than 300 arsonists in his career, says it is a crime that crosses race and gender lines. The Hollywood portrayal of serial arsonists excited by fire and doing it for a thrill applies to a small subset of arsonists, he said

more common are people frustrated with their jobs or family life or suffering mental health crises. “Most arsonists are just angry people,”

Israeli prosecutors filed murder charges on Sunday against a man and a minor for an arson attack in the occupied West Bank that killed three members of a Palestinian family and helped fuel the fiercest eruption of street violence in years.

The attack on July 31 killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and his parents Saad and Riham.

Amiram Ben-Uliel, a 21-year-old from a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, was charged with three counts of racially motivated murder at Lod court near Tel Aviv. A second Jewish defendant, whose name was withheld due to his age, was charged as an accessory.

Jury acquits militia that occupied Oregon wildlife refuge — but the saga is far from over

In a stunning conclusion to a five-week trial, a jury acquitted seven defendants who faced a slew of conspiracy and weapons charges related to their armed takeover of a wildlife refuge earlier this year.

U.S. marshals tackled the attorney for the group’s leader and used a Taser on him.

Catherine Deneuve and others have publicly worried that the campaign to end sexual harassment has gone too far but the truth is there is no war on romance

The #MeToo backlash is here, and it’s very worried about your love life. Iconic French actress Catherine Deneuve says the movement is puritanical and men should be able to “hit on women”. New York Times writer Daphne Merkin wants to know “whatever happened to flirting?” The Hollywood Reporter bemoans that #MeToo could “kill sexy Hollywood movies” while Cathy Young at the Los Angeles Times believes it will end office romance. Ross Douthat is even worried that the push to end sexual harassment could stunt population growth.

Who knew that humankind’s very existence depended on women’s silence in the face of abuse?

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has warned that the country's stability is threatened by continuing clashes between police and anti-government protesters in the capital Kiev.

The authorities say police have the right to use firearms in self-defence.

Former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, who was injured in clashes earlier this month, is among four representatives of the opposition who will be taking part in the talks with the authorities, according to the website for Ukraine's Fatherland Party.

Investigators searching for cause of deadly explosion inside World War II-era tank

The blast occurred Tuesday afternoon at a public gun range east of Bend.

There was no word on what caused the explosion, but Nelson says video was being shot around when the blast occurred that could help investigators learn more about what happened.

Armed anti-government protesters have taken over a building in a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, accusing officials of unfairly punishing ranchers who refused to sell their land.

One of them is Ammon Bundy, the 40-year-old son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is well-known for anti-government action.

Asked several times what he and those with him want, he answered in vague terms, saying that they want the federal government to restore the "people's constitutional rights."

"One in three people arriving to Greece were children as compared to just one in 10 in September 2015

While more than 80,000 people crossed the Mediterranean safely -- more than 74,000 to Greece alone -- "near daily shipwrecks" had left at least 400 dead so far this yea

Some 36% of the migrants arriving in Greece so far this year have been children, and 21% were women, the U.N. says

The armed occupiers of a wildlife refuge in Oregon say they will turn themselves in on Thursday morning, hours after Cliven Bundy -- the father of protest leader Ammon Bundy -- was arrested by federal agents.

Cliven Bundy, who came to the national spotlight in a fight with the federal Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights for his cattle in 2014, was heading to Oregon earlier Wednesday.

After landing in Portland, Oregon, Bundy was taken into federal custody, the FBI said.Read MoreIt's not clear what he's been charged with. The FBI said authorities would make charging information available on Thursday morning.

For years Germany has been an outlier in Europe. While far-right agitators gained strength in neighboring countries, including France and Austria, German voters stuck solidly to their traditional postwar parties.

No longer. As Germany copes with an estimated 1.5 million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, anti-immigrant sentiment is soaring. New political movements, massive weekly protests and arson attacks on the homes of refugees highlight the nation's doubts and its divisions.

On New Year's Eve, hundreds of Arab and North African men allegedly molested and harassed German women in a plaza near Cologne's train station. Police were ineffectual and Germans, outraged

Those explosive — and arresting — hearings led to the 1970 passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, a law designed to allow prosecutors to go after enterprises that engaged in extended, organized criminality. RICO laid out certain “predicate” crimes — those that prosecutors could use to stitch together evidence of a corrupt organization and then go after everyone involved in the organization as part of an organized conspiracy. While the headline-grabbing RICO “predicates” were violent crimes like murder, kidnapping, arson and robbery, the statute also focused on crimes like fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering and even aiding or abetting illegal immigration.

What lawmakers heard Wednesday sounded a lot like a racketeering enterprise: an organization with a few key players and numerous overlapping crimes — not just one conspiracy, but many. Even leaving aside any questions about the Mueller investigation and the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen leveled allegations that sounded like bank fraud, charity fraud and tax fraud, as well as hints of insurance fraud, obstruction of justice and suborning perjury.

RICO was precisely designed to catch the godfathers and bosses at the top of these crime syndicates — people a step or two removed from the actual crimes committed, those whose will is made real, even without a direct order.

Whereas successful political movements used to have a single ideology, they can now combine several. Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: They do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favorable demographic. New political parties can now operate like that: You can bundle together issues, repackage them and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging — based on exactly the same kind of market research — that you know has worked in other places.

Opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to feminism and same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration, especially by Muslims; anger at corruption; boredom with mainstream politics; a handful of issues, such as hunting and gun ownership, that some people care a lot about and others don’t know exist; plus a streak of libertarianism, a talent for mockery and a whiff of nostalgia

All of these are the ingredients that have gone into the creation of Vox.

Clashes between Arab and Jewish mobs on the streets of Israeli cities gave way to warnings from Israeli leaders that the decades-old conflict could be careening toward a civil war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the scenes of arson and violence as “anarchy” and appealed for an end to “lynchings.”

Israel carried out more airstrikes against Hamas targets in Gaza, where the death toll rose on Thursday to 83 people since the fighting began early this week, according to the Gaza health ministry. Palestinian militants fired volleys of rockets that reached far into Israel, where seven have died.

Palestinian leaders, however, said the talk of civil war was a distraction from what they see as the true cause of the unrest — police brutality against Palestinian protesters and provocative actions by right-wing Israeli settler groups.

Protesters defied an emergency decree and confronted police in Chile's capital Monday, continuing violent clashes, arson and looting that have left at least 11 dead and led the president to say the country is "at war."

The unrest was triggered by a relatively minor increase in subway fares of less than 4% — but analysts have said the protests are fed by frustration from a long-building sense among many Chileans

Officials said it could take weeks or months to fully restore service.

The data showed how a single rumor pushing a false narrative could rapidly gain traction on Facebook and Twitter, generating tens of thousands of shares and comments. That has made the misinformation particularly hard for elections officials to fight.

1. False claims of ballot “harvesting”This misinformation features the unproven assertion that ballots are being “harvested,” or collected and dropped off in bulk by unauthorized people.

Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, was falsely accused last month of being engaged in or connected to systematic illegal ballot harvesting.

Facebook has been incredibly lucrative for its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who ranks among the wealthiest men in the world. But it’s been a disaster for the world itself, a powerful vector for paranoia, propaganda and conspiracy-theorizing as well as authoritarian crackdowns and vicious attacks on the free press. Wherever it goes, chaos and destabilization follow.

The most disturbing revelations from Zhang’s memo relate to the failure of Facebook to take swift action against coordinated activity in countries like Honduras and Azerbaijan, where political leaders used armies of fake accounts to attack opponents and undermine independent media. “We simply didn’t care enough to stop them,”

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” Zhang wrote. “I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,”

Days after outbursts of arson and vandalism struck downtown Washington following peaceful protests against police brutality, the largely deserted heart of the U.S. capital resembles a city girding for a hurricane.

For block after block, office buildings and windows of upscale restaurants that cater to lobbyists, lawyers and business executives are being sheathed in plywood. Traffic, thinned by a two-month coronavirus lockdown, remains sparse and the outdoor patios of sandwich shops and bars are empty of lunch-time crowds.

Near the White House, a row of scorched umbrellas, their fire-blackened ribs resembling huge fish skeletons, sit outside the shuttered Sofitel hotel, blocks from where thousands of demonstrators gather daily.

Responses by law enforcement authorities in the U.S. capital and in Flint, Michigan, to protests over the police killing of George Floyd illustrated starkly contrasting approaches to handling angry crowds on American streets and repairing relations with grieving communities.

Sheriff Christopher Swanson of Michigan’s Genesee County was keenly aware that some protests in other cities against police brutality after the May 25 death of Floyd, an unarmed black man, in police custody in Minneapolis had descended into arson and looting.

“We’ve had protests every night since then. ... Not one arrest. Not one fire. And not one injury,” Swanson said in a telephone interview.