Group items tagged

In the first wave, nearly 1 million children, hundreds of thousands of teachers and half-a-million mothers with babies were evacuated. The teachers were assigned groups of kids to find spaces for when their trains arrived in smaller towns and villages.

In September 1940, the predicted Nazi bombing campaign known as “the Blitz” began, and the last wave of child evacuations took place. Many well-to-do families also arranged for their children to be sent overseas to countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States.

Accommodations varied wildly. Some children were virtually adopted by host families and given love and good care. Some lived in large manors housing dozens of children and run by teachers. Many of the urban children were seeing the countryside, agriculture and farm animals for the first time, finding it both inspiring and boring.

by January 1940, nearly half of parents had brought their children home, the museum said. The health ministry put up threatening posters to discourage this. One poster depicts a mother visiting her children in the country with a ghostly Adolf Hitler over her shoulder, tempting her like Satan to “Take them back! Take them back!”

For others, the evacuation was a nightmare. Their food rations from the government were confiscated by the families they ended up with; they were put to work in fields; many were physically and sexually abused. John Abbott told the BBC he was whipped by his host family whenever he spoke and was eventually rescued by local police, bruised and bleeding.

It was after this last wave, in October 1940, that Princess Elizabeth addressed the children of Britain.

When Elizabeth turned 18 in early 1945, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she trained as a truck mechanic and driver. To this day, she is the only female member of the royal family to have served in the military.

In 1940, she told the children — her contemporaries — “When peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”Now 93, she said Sunday: “I hope, in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.”“Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones,” she closed. “But now, as then, we know deep down that it is the right thing to do.”

That’s a large gamble based on very little scientific understanding.

Contrary to the popular understanding, Sweden has not done nothing. Social distancing is in place, people are to work from home where possible and to isolate when even mildly symptomatic. Steps have been taken to shield vulnerable citizens

WHO mortality data shows Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States all have higher death rates, despite having imposed significant mitigation and suppression protocols.

by traditional metrics of deaths/capita, cases/capita, or even crude case fatality rate, they ended up seemingly in a worse position than Sweden, where bars remain open and coffee culture is booming.

A strategy should be based on a broad empirically derived consensus which takes into account both what we know, and what we do not.

We don’t know how many people have a strong immune response to the virus.

From inside this tunnel we do not know how many people are now tied to the track. We do not know how far the line runs. Or even what the final destination looks like. Sweden’s strategic inaction was predicated on the hope that they might save lives in future by taking risks now and avoiding a shutdown.

We don’t know how many people have been infected and how those infections might manifest.

We don’t know how many individuals need immunity to produce effective herd immunity.

And we don’t know if immunity to the current strain would carry over to future strains.

Even more bracing: We are unlikely to find definitive answers to these questions in the near future.

One of the key perceived advantages of Sweden’s approach was the expected reduction in economic damage. But Sweden’s economy is projected to contract by 7 percent to 10 percent of GDP this year, only slightly better than its Nordic neighbors who shut down their societies and have far less morbidity and mortality

All of that said, it is unlikely that we’ll be able to say definitively whether or not Sweden’s choice was optimal any time soon. Even comparing key metrics like cases and deaths between countries is difficult because of methodological differences in collecting data

When we consider economic damages, long-term sequelae of infection and the differential impact across marginalized groups, direct comparisons becomes extremely challenging.

sometimes there are no good decisions; only less bad ones. Sweden may be on the road to herd immunity but even if they are in fact on the path, the road is neither swift nor smooth. And it is littered with friends and relatives.

But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City

overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.

But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.

we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one

you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.

Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.

Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S

he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take

Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.

If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.

At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.

The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing

These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response

The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute

According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes

the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.

Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).

Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.

even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases

In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.

there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.

That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me

The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology

Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding

Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.

he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”

the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses

“This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”

“This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.

The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption

But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.

Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown.

Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”

If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.

he proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.

how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.

Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.

Malthusianism slides easily into racism.

Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”

These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.

The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK

Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.

So a good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty.

Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind

Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?

Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.

Extravagant buffoons, building their power base through the visual media, displace the wooden technocrats who once dominated political life. Debate gives way to symbols, slogans and sensation. Political parties that once tolerated a degree of pluralism succumb to cults of personality.

Politicians and political advisers behave with impunity. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s lawyer argued, in effect, that the president is the nation, and his interests are inseparable from the national interest.

Trump shamelessly endorses nativism and white supremacy. Powerful politicians, such as the Republican congressman Steve King, talk of defending “western civilisation” against “subjugation” by its “enemies”. Minorities are disenfranchised. Immigrants are herded into detention centres.

Political structures still stand, but they are hollowed out, as power migrates into unaccountable, undemocratic spheres: conservative fundraising dinners, US political action committees, offshore trade tribunals, tax havens and secrecy regimes.

The bodies supposed to hold power to account, such as the Electoral Commission and the BBC, are attacked, disciplined and cowed. Politicians and newspapers launch lurid attacks against parliament, the judiciaryand the civil service.

Political lying becomes so rife that voters lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Conspiracy theories proliferate, distracting attention from the real ways in which our rights and freedoms are eroded

With every unpunished outrage against integrity in public life, trust in the system corrodes. The ideal of democracy as a shared civic project gives way to a politics of dominance and submission.

All these phenomena were preconditions for – or facilitators of – the rise of European fascism during the first half of the 20th century. I find myself asking a question I thought we would never have to ask again. Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?

It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing.

Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal

But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror

Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.

Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state.

Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.

Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal.

this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.

You're going to need money. You're going to need a career. You're going to need education. But do not view those things as idols. You use those things for something bigger than [your]selves. Love. Justice. Integrity.

my generation is a grand example of what it is to get caught in a commodified culture and think that it's all about success rather than greatness. This sense of: All I got to do is just become the first Black professor or Black mayor or Black president. That that, in and of itself, is a definition of service and success. No, don't confuse service and status. Once you get the status, then you start serving. What are you going to do with it?

“It doesn’t have to do with UV light, it has to do with dilution,” she told TPM, a subtle poke at President Trump. “What it appears with this virus is that though it’s highly contagious, to get a good infectious process going, you need to start with a substantive amount. Dilution disperses viral particles present in the physical area.”

That level of dispersion just doesn’t happen inside, she said, especially during the summer when air conditioners are recirculating the same air. 

Wen added that mask-wearing can reduce the risk of transmission “five-fold.”

“This should help to inform people even more about big decisions they can make in their own lives, to be doing as much as they can outdoors vs. indoors,”

The nationwide lack of spikes also speaks to the uniformity with which protesters donned masks at the demonstrations, per Hassig.

“It takes engagement with mask-wearing somewhere above 70 percent, at least 60, to really dampen down transmission,”

If the data holds, though, she pointed out how this knowledge could play into how people live their lives while the pandemic still lingers.

The problem with masks, Hassig said, is the psychological element. She called it a “normative behavior” much like littering. It’s hard to be the first person to drop a wrapper on the ground; it’s much less hard to do so if the pavement is already dotted with trash. That dynamic, she said, can go both ways — people are apt to feel uncomfortable if they’re the odd one out in a group either mostly wearing masks or mostly not. 

There is considerable uncertainty both in Paris and Berlin as to just how much the United States can be trusted any more. "Donald Trump has not fallen down from the sky out of nowhere," Jana Puglierin, head of the German office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) told me in a Zoom conversation from Berlin. "He has not taken half of the American population hostage and kind of brainwashed them. So there is a reason why he is there, and the reason remains even after he leaves."

Even more immediate and frightening for Europe than the US elections is the sudden resurgence of coronavirus infection for which the United States has been of little help and certainly no model for containment.

With France counting more than 270,000 new cases in the last week, President Emmanuel Macron told the French people in a nationwide address Wednesday evening that a second nationwide lockdown was coming Friday for a nation already approaching paralysis. Germany, too, headed for a second partial shutdown.

the increasingly intransigent belief that the will of the American electorate is so unpredictable

The ECFR found, in a continent-wide survey, that even if Joe Biden were elected, voters in France and Germany believe Europe should "maintain good relations with the US, [but] prepare for disengagement."

Should Trump win, however, voters in Belgium, Sweden, Austria and Croatia also believe preparation for disengagement would be necessary.

he French are still hoping for a more realistic military perspective from a Biden victory.

Yet Biden has pledged to leave residual forces in some key countries, particularly Iraq, to maintain stability and prevent the rise of terrorist groups that could be threats to American interests. "I think we need special ops capacity to coordinate with our allies," Biden told Stars and Stripes last month.

Leaders of both nations want the United States to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA), as well as the World Health Organization and assume a joint role in the battle against Covid-19 and the development of vaccines and treatments.

But when such crises occur during a sitting president's reelection campaign, voters have historically turned him out in favor of a challenger offering a new direction for the nation. In short, incumbents fail when they cannot convince the American people to stay the course.

Times were flush in America when the nation elected Hoover -- touted as the "Great Engineer" -- as president in 1928. Four years later, the country faced the worst economic crisis in its history, the Great Depression. The popular outcry against the president summoned new words into existence: "Hooverville" for a shantytown of the homeless and "https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Furldefense.proofpoint.com%2Fv2%2Furl%3Fu%3Dhttps-3A__nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com_-3Furl-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Furldefense.proofpoint.com-252Fv2-252Furl-253Fu-253Dhttps-2D3A-5F-5Fnam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com-5F-2D3Furl-2D3Dhttps-2D253A-2D252F-2D252Fwww.ushistory.org-2D252Fus-2D252F48d.asp-2D26data-2D3D04-2D257C01-2D257Cbalcerskit-2D2540easternct.edu-2D257Cf504669cb9cd421b19d308d87ba94456-2D257C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a-2D257C1-2D257C0-2D257C637395314221385811-2D257CUnknown-2D257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0-2D253D-2D257C1000-2D26sdata-2D3DZ-2D252BQzKDaHxQ2jYBKYrQvJuRk1RPwMeJOLvEB-2D252B7DyJGH4-2D253D-2D26reserved-2D3D0-2526d-253DDwMGaQ-2526c-253Dtq9bLrSQ8zIr87VusnUS9yAL0Jw-5FxnDiPuZjNR4EDIQ-2526r-253DfqdvyATuskufZZ6lHWLDX7rjOgtfuIwFFgyFWTSfNss-2526m-253DxIZtC-5FUtx-2DbHITyb6-2D8CwaYXg5eK-5Fmk9FWumiGu6d6M-2526s-253Dq96yS8DFGwSISOOmLLR5WbA0V2YS1apeWBDmpXUf00E-2526e-253D-26data-3D04-257C01-257Cbalcerskit-2540easternct.edu-257C8d842cd7f6654944dc0d08d87babf248-257C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a-257C1-257C0-257C637395325741251331-257CUnknown-257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0-253D-257C1000-26sdata-3DkRZ-252FoKQ05pJxDSHqKx2XgnLUHtWa-252BHnkZddOrHzzXfc-253D-26reserved-3D0%26d%3DDwMGaQ%26c%3Dtq9bLrSQ8zIr87VusnUS9yAL0Jw_xnDiPuZjNR4EDIQ%26r%3DfqdvyATuskufZZ6lHWLDX7rjOgtfuIwFFgyFWTSfNss%26m%3DPsd0YU3mz1QSXOmUwvnRXVoJyl9RuP_TWfEHJ0yDWxw%26s%3DqL37mqHWsBhBnO2QOtSnmsOuXDDjmapvvunVTxkoapo%26e%3D&data=04%7C01%7Cbalcerskit%40easternct.edu%7C0d8701f780904a7323f608d87bad4758%7C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a%7C1%7C

But Hoover's own actions made matters far worse. To combat the depression, he promoted voluntarism with limited government intervention.

In July 1932, Hoover ordered the US Army, under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, to clear out the "Bonus Army" encampment of World War I veterans. Then, as now, the optics were terrible.

Democratic challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt touted a "New Deal" for the American people.

The nation elected Bush with a wave of popular support in 1988. Like Hoover before him, Bush followed two terms of Republican control of the White House. But by 1992, a sharp recession had set in, leaving many Americans out of work and facing difficult times.

Political life in America reached a new low in 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned amid scandal. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned the ex-president, leaving him vulnerable to a Democratic challenger in 1976. Former Georgia Gov. Carter ran as an outsider and won a narrow victory.

By 1980, however, a global economic downturn had weakened the country. Oil shocks, rising inflation and industrial competition from abroad all took a toll. Abroad, the United States suffered a humiliating setback when Iranian militants took Americans hostage at the US embassy in Tehran.

In 1979, Carter described a "crisis in confidence" affecting the country.

To make matters worse, Carter asked for the resignation of his entire Cabinet, and five members acceded to the demand.

Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, by contrast, projected a sunny optimism, famously declaring recovery happens "when Jimmy Carter loses his" job.

As the 1970s yielded to the 1980s, the nation chose a new direction, handing Reagan a resounding victory over the incumbent Carter

An unprecedented 40 million Americans voted that November, yielding FDR an even larger popular victory than Hoover had won four years earlier.

With the government facing revenue shortfalls, Bush went against his own campaign rhetoric -- his "read my lips" promise to not raise taxes -- and increased taxes in 1991.

Political controversies also hurt. The nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, during which Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, rankled. When combined with domestic challenges, such as the Los Angeles riots in the spring of 1992, Bush was the definition of an embattled incumbent president.

Democratic challenger Bill Clinton proved popular, leading many to choose the younger candidate and informal motto: "It's the economy, stupid." Bush also likely lost votes to the third-party candidate Ross Perot. Although no candidate won a majority of the popular vote in November, Clinton secured enough electoral votes to become president.

Yet Bush could not win reelection in 1992 for similar reasons to his long-ago predecessor -- an economic downturn had soured the American people against him.

“Our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left.”

Trump’s statement, which his organization voluntarily emailed out, goes on with some bluster about the “disaster” of President Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the execution of a deal that Trump negotiated with the Taliban before he was voted out of office.

And perhaps it’s not at all surprising that Trump thinks of Lee (0-1 lifetime in civil wars) as a surefire victor. Because if there’s one thing Trump has proven he struggles to understand, it’s who is a winner, and who is a loser.

The government says it will get the Royal Navy to police the seas and send applicants away, reportedly to be processed in Ghana or Rwanda. None of that bluster survived the briefest encounter with reality.

This week the Tories took credit for the fact that Britain has the fastest annual growth rate in the G7 and that output regained its pre-pandemic level in November, ahead of forecasts. But they have not grappled with Brexit’s probable long-term hit to productivity, of about 4%.

unveiled plenty of big economy-boosting ideas, including levelling up prosperity across Britain, tearing down planning restrictions and making Britain a science superpower.

To get Brexit done, Mr Johnson agreed on a customs border in the Irish Sea and then proceeded to pretend he hadn’t.

He argued that Britain would escape the regulatory straitjacket of the European Union, but he has avoided doing much deregulating—which, however swashbuckling it sounds in a headline, tends in real life to be unpopular.

Mr Johnson has crumbled because he repeatedly failed to tell the truth to Parliament and the nation about Downing Street’s bacchanals.

almost half of Conservative Party members still believe that Mr Johnson’s account of Number 10’s revels is true, compared with just 13% of all voters in a poll published a few days earlier.

the excesses of Partygate have shown that the post-Brexit Tory party has lost touch with reality.

It is a strength of the parliamentary system that MPs can bring about a rapid change of direction. If the Conservative Party is to find its way, it will need a new leader. If reforms are to take root, they will need detailed planning and sustained application.

And waste produced by a nearby electricity plan and oil refinery has damaged the giant Berre lagoon in southern France.

When five tons of dead fish washed up in August near her house on the lagoon, she decided that she was ready to move.

Madrid says the responsibility lies at the local level.

“I unfortunately do think that political colors matter,” she said.

ut in September, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography published a report that rejected the idea that excessive summer heat helped kill the fish.

the contamination comes from water seeping into the lagoon from an aquifer in which toxic substances have accumulated over decades.

Laggards should get government incentives to invest in green technology rather than “stones thrown by people who have no knowledge of our modern irrigation systems,” he added.

She said at least 75 percent of the lagoon’s water contamination came from runoffs.

The lagoon was proof that “one of the major problems of Europe is the contamination of its waters by nitrates,” he said.

Mr. Morán said that his central government planned to use 300 million euros, or about $350 million, from the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund to protect the Mar Menor’s natural habitat and waters.

Mr. Raslan’s guilty verdict, they say, bolsters the ability of European courts to pursue similar cases while sending a message to war criminals around the world that they could one day face consequences.

This sends a clear message to the world that certain crimes will not go unpunished.

After more than a decade of war, Mr. al-Assad remains in power, and there appears little chance that he or his senior advisers or military commanders will stand trial soon.

Other potential avenues for justice have also been blocked. Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Russia and China have used their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council to prevent Syria from being referred to the court.

Germany is among a few European countries that have sought to try former Syrian officials for war crimes based on universal jurisdiction,

German prosecutors argued that his position gave him oversight of torture that included beating, kicking, electric shocks and sexual assault. Witnesses in the trial said they were fed inedible food, denied medical care and kept in overcrowded cells.

He entered Germany on a visa in 2014 and lived there legally until the German authorities arrested him in 2019.

But his past caught up with him in Germany, where he was tried for crimes against humanity.

When the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011 with protests seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Raslan was the head of interrogation at a security office in the capital, Damascus.

Beatings were common, the food was inedible, the cells were so crowded that some prisoners had to stand so others could lie down. German prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 killed under his authority there.

The verdict marks a watershed moment for an international network of lawyers, human rights activists and Syrian war survivors who have struggled for years to bring officials who sanctioned or participated in the violence to justice.

He was arrested in 2019, and his trial began the next year. On Thursday, Mr. Raslan was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison.

When Mahran Aoiun heard that a former Syrian intelligence officer had been sentenced on Thursday to life in prison for overseeing torture at a detention center, it brought back the joy he felt years ago when he was released from a brutal Syrian jail.

The verdict handed down by a court in Koblenz, Germany, against the former officer, Ansar Raslan, stirred complicated feelings among Syrians who were abused in Syrian prisons — some at the hands of Mr. Raslan himself.

Others hoped that Mr. Raslan’s conviction would draw attention to the many more crimes committed during the Syrian war that have not been prosecuted, and to the officials who committed them who are still free.

“Those who are torturing prisoners will think twice after the trial,” he said. “This is an achievement.”

New York Times photographers have covered Syria’s civil war and the humanitarian crisis it has unleashed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began nearly 11 years ago.

A Syrian doctor accused of torturing a detainee in a secret military prison will soon go on trial in Germany on charges of crimes against humanity and causing grievous bodily harm. The doctor, Alaa Mousa, was living in Germany as a refugee when he was arrested in 2020.

German prosecutors built their case with the help of hundreds of Syrian witnesses in Germany and beyond. They indicted Mr. Raslan using “universal jurisdiction,” a legal principle stipulating that in the case of crimes against humanity and genocide, normal territorial restraints on prosecutions do not apply.

The principle is not new. Israel used it during the 1960s trial of the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, as did Spain in 1998 when demanding that Britain arrest Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Previous universal jurisdiction cases in Germany have dealt with crimes committed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more recently, with the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq by former members of the Islamic State.

Germany has the legal basis to prosecute such crimes under the German Code of Crimes Against International Law, which came into effect in 2002, and it has been using it.

“For Germany, it’s also historically the continuation of what we learned from the Nazi period and what we learned about the importance of the Nuremberg trials and the Auschwitz trials for the way we dealt with our past and ultimately for who we are today,”

The Nuremberg trials went after the leading members of the Nazi regime, but also a range of individuals who played a role in Nazi repression, including doctors, business leaders, bureaucrats and propagandists, said Wolfgang Kaleck, a founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is representing victims in Mr. Raslan’s trial.

Raslan is the first ranking Syrian official to be convicted of war crimes, but he may not be the last.

But several other cases have already been tried or are pending.

Owing partly to its own history in World War II, Germany has become something of a go-to venue for prosecuting crimes against humanity, even if committed outside its own borders. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, putting it at the center of efforts to hold the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria accountable for war crimes.

Human rights lawyers concede that so far, the trials have targeted low- and middle-ranking Syrian officials or soldiers.

“If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence,” Mr. Kaleck said. “These cases are a way of building a stock of documents, witness statements, of understanding interconnections and gathering knowledge on which you can build future cases.”

Since the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian victims, human rights activists and others have filed more than 20 legal complaints against Syrian regime officials for war crimes and other violations of international law, according to Mr. Kaleck’s center.

This body of evidence, which has been growing for over a decade, could be used in different cases.“More has to come, that is clear,” Mr. Kaleck said. “But this is an important step.”

But the decade-long conflict has left the country shattered, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcing half of the population from their homes and reducing major cities to rubble. Most of those who remain have been left to live in poverty.

The rebellion that began in 2011 as an uprising against Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad, escalated into a civil war, but the splinted rebel movement failed to topple the government.

But the war was gruesome. The government employed poison gas, barrel bombs and suffocating sieges on rebellious communities, and waged a ruthless assault on civilian opponents, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy prisons where many were tortured and killed.

Some Arab countries have begun restoring ties with the government in an effort to move past the war, although strict sanctions by the United States and other Western countries have blocked most investment.

The United States initially provided covert military support to the rebels, but as the war splintered into multiple overlapping conflicts, America shifted its focus to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State, who at their peak controlled nearly a third of eastern Syria.

For Syrian civilians, there is less daily violence now than during the war’s earlier years, but the economy has been destroyed.

More than half of Syria’s prewar population fled their homes during the fighting, and most have not returned, including the 5.6 million refugees who largely live in destitution in neighboring Arab countries.

“Justice has not been fully accomplished,” he said. “This is a small slice of what we are talking about.”

this I also know: Gun rights carry with them grave responsibilities. They do not liberate you to intimidate. They must not empower your hate. They are certainly not objects of love or reverence. Every hair-trigger use, every angry or fearful or foolish decision, likely spills innocent blood.

Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion of gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land

Phoenix, our hottest city, endured 53 days above 110 degrees and suffered more than 300 heat-related deaths in 2020. But Phoenix exists as a major American city only because the popularization of air conditioning after World War II spurred a population explosion there — from fewer than 250,000 in 1950 to more than 4.5 million in 2022

We have to treat air conditioning like the necessity it’s become, making sure that everyone who needs it has access to it.

A few years ago, the federal Energy Star program recommended setting home thermostats to 78 degrees, a recommendation that was not well received. The consensus seemed to be that a warmer house wasn’t worth the savings on energy costs. But what if we thought of a little extra sweat as saving the planet — and ourselves — from the cost of energy?

“This is something that European politicians and consumers didn’t want to admit for quite a long time. It sounds terrible, but that’s the reality. In wartime the economy is mobilized. The decisions are made by the governments, not by the free market. This is the case for Europe this winter,” she said, adding that we may see forced rationing, price controls, the suspension of energy markets and shutdowns of whole industrial sectors. “We are not actually talking about extremely high prices, but we are talking about physical absence of energy resources in certain parts of Europe.”

It’s increasingly clear that Vladimir Putin is using gas as a weapon and trying to supply just enough gas to Europe to keep Europe in a perpetual state of panic about its ability to weather the coming winter.

Europe has been finding all the supplies that it can, but governments are realizing that’s not going to be sufficient. There are going to have to be efforts taken to curb demand as well and to prepare for the possibility of really severe energy rationing this winter.

If things become really severe this winter, I fear that you could see European countries start to look out for themselves rather than one another.

I think we could start to see governments saying, “Well, we’re going to restrict exports. We’re going to keep our energy at home.” Everyone starts to just look out for themselves, which I think would be exactly what Putin would hope for.

it would be wise to assume that Russia will use every opportunity it can to turn the screws on Europe.

I think you would see Russia continue to restrict gas exports and maybe cut them off completely to Europe — and a very cold winter. I think a combination of those two things would mean sky-high energy prices.

governments will have to ration energy supplies and decide what’s important.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine and maybe until very recently, I’ve had the sense that the European public and the public beyond Europe, as well as policymakers, have been a little bit sleepwalking into a looming crisis.

here was some unrealistic optimism about how quickly Europe could do without Russian gas. And we took too long to confront seriously just how bad the numbers would look if the worst came to pass.

I think there was continued skepticism that Putin would really cut the gas supply. “It might be declining. It might be a little bit lower,” people thought. “But he’s not really going to shut off the supply.” And I think now everyone’s recognizing that’s a real possibility.

Putin has the ability to do a lot of damage to the global economy — and himself, to be sure — if he cuts oil exports as well.

There’s no extra oil supply in the world at all, as OPEC Plus reminded everyone by saying: No, we’re not going to be increasing production much, and we can’t even if we wanted to.

For all the talk about high gasoline prices and the rhetoric of Putin’s energy price hike, Russia’s oil exports have not fallen very much. If that were to happen — either because the U.S. and Europe forced oil to come off the market to put economic pressure on Putin or because he takes the oil off the market to hurt all of us — oil prices go up enormously.

it depends how much he takes off the market. We don’t know exactly. If Russia were to cut its oil exports completely, the prices would just skyrocket — to hundreds of dollars a barrel, I think.

That’s because there’s just no extra supply out there today at all. There’s a very little extra supply that the Saudis and the Emiratis can put on the market. And that’s about it. We’ve used the strategic petroleum reserve, and that’s coming to an end in the next several months.

We’re heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand.

if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.

a lot of governments in Europe are putting in place those kinds of emergency plans right now.

if the worst comes to pass, governments will, by necessity, step in to say: Homes get the natural gas, and parts of industry get dumped. Probably they would set price caps on energy or massively subsidize it. So it’s going to be very painful.

Worryingly for the European economy, this may mean that factories that can’t switch fuels will go dormant.

Today, before winter comes, gas prices in Europe are around $60 per million British thermal units. That compares to around $7 to $8 here in the United States

if the worst comes to pass, the market, as a mechanism, simply won’t work. The market will break. The prices will go too high. There’s just not enough energy for the market to balance at a certain price.

don’t forget, the amount of liquid natural gas that Europe is importing today — Asia is competing for those shipments. What happens if the Asia winter is very bad? What happens if China and others are willing to pay very high prices for it?

I think we’re in a multiyear potential energy crisis.

one thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention and that I worry most about is the impact this is having on emerging markets and the developing economies, because it is an interconnected market. When Europe is competing to buy L.N.G. at very high prices, not to mention Asia, that means if you’re in Pakistan or Bangladesh or lower-income countries, you’re really struggling to afford it. You’re just priced out of the market for natural gas — and coal. Coal is incredibly expensive now,

I think that that is a real potential humanitarian crisis, as a ripple effect of what’s happening in Europe right now.

right now, the price of gas in Europe is about four times what it was last year. Russia has cut flows to Europe by two-thirds but is earning the same revenue as it did last year. So Putin is not being hurt by the loss of gas exports to Europe. Europe’s being hurt by that.

this situation could last for several years.

Could the energy crisis bring about a change of heart, in which European countries withdraw some of their support or even begin to pressure Ukraine to negotiate a settlement? Is it possible that could even happen in advance of this winter?

you would imagine that, over time, when you don’t see Ukraine on the front page each and every day, eventually people’s attention wanes a bit and at a certain point the economic pain of high energy prices or other economic harms from the conflict reach a point where support may start to fracture a bit.

Whether that reaches a point where you start to see the West put pressure on Ukraine to capitulate, I think we’re pretty far away from that now, because everyone recognizes how outrageous and unacceptable Putin’s conduct is.