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EARLY IN DECEMBER China announced that it had eradicated extreme poverty within its territory.

some 800m people in China have escaped penury in the past four decades.

Never before in the country’s history has destitution come anywhere close to being eliminated.

To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.

Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.

The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.”

Delhi’s air is so filthy that on November 13th the government decreed an indefinite closure. One rarely mentioned reason for the pollution also plays a part in a host of other troubles: subsidies.

Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.

She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.

From the vantage point of informed democratic decision making, it’s a haunting tale about how a sustained political campaign can succeed despite — or perhaps as a result of — being divorced from reality.

Scientists have revealed a surprisingly complex origin of our species, rejecting the long-held argument that modern humans arose from one place in Africa during one period in time.

By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent.

“There is no single birthplace,”

ara Menker runs a private company, Gro Intelligence, that uses data and AI to make predictions about climate change and food security, but when she appeared before the U.N. Security Council on May 19, she sounded more like an advocate. Gro’s data has found that, because of rising food prices around the world, 400 million people have become food insecure in the last 5 months alone. (Food insecurity, as Gro defines it, means people living on $3.59 a day or less.)

Menker, 39, who was chosen as one of TIME’s Most Influential People in 2021, was born in Ethiopia, attended college at Mount Holyoke, worked as a commodities trader on Wall Street, and left to start Gro to use technology to tackle challenges like hunger and climate change. Today, Gro works with governments and big food companies, analyzing hundreds of trillions of data points from satellites, governments, and private sources, to forecast the supply of agricultural products globally.

In recent months, as the war in Ukraine raged on, Gro’s systems started flagging problems that were putting a growing number of people at risk of going hungry. Some were worsened by the war, but many others have been building for longer, caused by the actions of other governments banning exports or imposing tariffs. Menker talked to TIME shortly after briefing the U.N.

India has contributed little to climate change: Home to 18 percent of the world’s population, it has emitted just 3 percent of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is happening right now: Over the past three months, a heat wave has devastated North India and neighboring Pakistan. Temperatures surpassed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so hot that overheated birds fell out of the sky in Gurgaon, India, and a historic bridge in northern Pakistan collapsed after melting snow and ice at a glacial lake released a torrent of water.

Indians have responded by staying indoors as much as possible, particularly during the afternoon hours. The government has encouraged this, pushing schools to close early and businesses to shift work schedules. The measures have kept down deaths — with fewer than 100 recorded so far, an improvement from heat waves years ago that killed thousands.

When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement.

But few know the story of what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war.

For generations, the descendants of enslaved people paid the descendants of their former slave masters, with money that could have been used to build schools, roads, clinics or a vibrant economy.

Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead - formed by the creation of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River - is the largest reservoir in the United States and provides water to 25 million people across three states and Mexico. Here, the stunning scale of a drought in the American west has been laid plain for all to see.

Californians have been told to conserve water at home or risk mandated water restrictions as a severe drought on the West Coast is expected to get worse during the summer months.

People have been told to limit outdoor watering and take shorter showers. In Los Angeles, many are being asked to cut their water use by 35%. The restrictions come after California recorded the driest start to the year on record.

. The Chinese government stunned environmentalists this year by reviving plans to build a series of hydropower dams on the upper reaches of the Nu,

Critics say the project will force the relocation of tens of thousands of ethnic minorities in the highlands of Yunnan and destroy the spawning grounds for a score of endangered fish species. Geologists warn that constructing the dams in a seismically active region could threaten those living downstream.

Among the biggest losers could be the millions of farmers and fishermen across the border in Myanmar and Thailand who depend on the Salween,

he Republican Party’s technological deficiencies barely begin to explain why the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The party brand — which is to say, its message and its messengers — has become practically abhorrent to emerging demographic groups like Latinos and African-Americans, not to mention an entire generation of young voters.

I flew with Anderson to Columbus, Ohio, to watch her conduct two focus groups. The first consisted of 10 single, middle-class women in their 20s; the second, of 10 20-something men who were either jobless or employed but seeking better work. All of them voted for Obama but did not identify themselves as committed Democrats and were sufficiently ambivalent about the president’s performance that Anderson deemed them within reach of the Republicans.

“I’m going to write down a word, and you guys free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she wrote was “Democrat.” “Young people,” one woman called out. “Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More science-based.” When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”

In the years before Hillary Clinton announced she would run again for president, her top aides expressed profound concerns in internal emails about how foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton’s own moneymaking ventures would affect Mrs. Clinton’s political future.

The emails, obtained by hackers and being gradually released by WikiLeaks this month,

personal income from some foundation donors and “gets many expensive gifts from them.”

before researchers could start analyzing that genetic material, they had to get it. DNA degrades over time, so extracting it from ancient human remains is difficult and costly.

In the end, they had data from 51 individuals — a tenfold increase over the measly four that once gave researchers their only glimpses into this period.

"Trying to represent this vast period of European history with just four samples is like trying to summarize a movie with four still images," Reich said. "With 51 samples, everything changes; we can follow the narrative arc; we get a vivid sense of the dynamic changes over time.

There’s been great thirst this election cycle for insight into the psychology of Trump voters

J.D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” offers a narrative about broken families and social decay. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,”

white voters feel the American Dream is drifting out of reach for them, and they are angry because they believe minorities and immigrants have butted in line.

There is a law that governs the relations between the Jews and the rest of the world.

That law was articulated in one form at the time of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when the great Jewish thinker Gershom Scholem faulted Hannah Arendt for falling short of “ahavat Israel” — for showing insufficient “love of the Jewish people.”

The essential thing is that President Trump thinks they did, that he seems to see Jews as the caricature of the New York establishment that, for decades, took him for an agreeable but vulgar showman.

Donald Trump has begun carrying out his campaign pledges to undo America's trade ties -- starting Monday with executive action to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"Great thing for the American worker, what we just did," Trump told reporters

Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a 12-nation deal that had been negotiated under former President Barack Obama.

roughly 50 percent of all produce in the United States is thrown away—some 60 million tons (or $160 billion) worth of produce annually, an amount constituting “one third of all foodstuffs.”

Wasted food is also the single biggest occupant in American landfills

the great American squandering of produce appears to be a cultural dynamic as well, enabled in large part by a national obsession with the aesthetic quality of food.

in these years, we’ve morphed into the planet’s invading aliens.

Think about it. Over the last half-century, whenever and wherever the U.S. military “deploys,” often to underdeveloped towns and villages in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, it arrives very much in the spirit of those sci-fi aliens. After all, it brings with it dazzlingly destructive futuristic weaponry and high-tech gadgetry of all sorts (known in the military as “force-multipliers”). It then proceeds to build mothership-style bases that are often like American small towns plopped down in a new environment. Nowadays in such lands, American drones patrol the skies (think: the “Terminator” films), blast walls accented with razor wire and klieg lights provide “force protection” on the ground, and the usual attack helicopters, combat jets and gunships hover overhead like so many alien craft. To designate targets to wipe out, U.S. forces even use lasers.

In the field, American military officers emerge from high-tech vehicles to bark out commands in a harsh “alien” tongue. (You know: English.