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"It's such a sad situation and so disrespectful to the families," Mayor Bill de Blasio told CNN Friday. "That was an avoidable situation... There were lots of ways that the funeral home could have turned to us for help.

The grim struggle to keep up with death was highlighted on Wednesday, when four trucks with as many as 60 decomposing bodies were discovered on a busy street outside a Brooklyn funeral home

In Hindu tradition, bodies are typically cremated a day or two after death, Amith Mooliya said. His father, a devout man who prayed before and after his subway station shifts, was cremated on April 27.

earning the island until 2015 a spot on the US State Department's list of countries that support terrorism.

Cuba hosted Colombian peace talks that in November led to a deal between Colombia's government and guerrillas

Castro was also "a good friend" to revolutions across Africa

the two countries that most defined Cuba's international relations, will be conspicuously absent during the memorials

In the centuries that followed, Buddhism in Japan developed robustly. During the 7th through 9th centuries, Buddhism in China enjoyed a "golden age" and Chinese monks brought the newest developments in practice and scholarship to Japan.

Six schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan in the 7th and 8th centuries and all but two of which have disappeared. These schools flourished mostly during the Nara Period of Japanese history (709 to 795 CE). Today, they are sometimes lumped together into one category known as Nara Buddhism.

After the Nara period, five other schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan that remain prominent today. These are Tendai, Shingon, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.

Tendai is best known for two distinctive features. One, it considers the Lotus Sutra to be the supreme sutra and the perfect expression of the Buddha's teachings. Second, it synthesizes the teachings of other schools, resolving contradictions and finding a middle way between extremes.

Shingon is the only non-Tibetan school of Vajrayana. Many of the teachings and rituals of Shingon are esoteric, passed orally from teacher to student, and not made public. Shingon remains one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan.

Very simply, Pure Land emphasizes faith the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Butsu in Japanese) through which one may be reborn in the Pure Land and be nearer to Nirvana. Pure Land is sometimes called Amidism.

After some years of study at Mount Hiei and other monasteries, Nichiren believed that the Lotus Sutra contained the complete teachings of the Buddha.

Nichiren also believed fervently that all of Japan must be guided by the Lotus Sutra or lose the protection and favor of the Buddha. He condemned other schools of Buddhism, particularly Pure Land.

The Buddhist establishment became annoyed with Nichiren and sent him into a series of exiles that lasted most of the rest of his life. Even so, he gained followers, and by the time of his death, Nichiren Buddhism was firmly established in Japan.

After Nichiren, no new major schools of Buddhism developed in Japan. However, the existing schools grew, evolved, split, fused, and otherwise developed in many ways.

 Japanese Buddhist culture flourished in the 14th century and Buddhist influence was reflected in art, poetry, architecture, gardening, and the tea ceremony.

In time, this favoritism led to a partisan rivalry, which sometimes became violent.

The influence of Buddhism declined, however. Buddhism faced competition from Shinto -- the Japanese indigenous religion -- as well as Confucianism. To keep the three rivals separated, the government decreed that Buddhism would have first place in matters of religion, Confucianism would have first place in matters of morality, and Shinto would have first place in matters of state.

The Meiji Restoration in 1868 restored the power of the Emperor. In the state religion, Shinto, the emperor was worshiped as a living god.

The Emperor was not a god in Buddhism, however. This may be why the Meiji government ordered Buddhism banished

Temples were burned or destroyed, and priests and monks were forced to return to lay life.

Buddhism was too deeply ingrained in Japan's culture and history to disappear, however. Eventually, the banishment was lifted. But the Meiji government was not done with Buddhism yet.

In 1872, the Meiji government decreed that Buddhist monks and priests (but not nuns) should be free to marry if they chose to do so. Soon "temple families" became commonplace and the administration of temples and monasteries became family businesses, handed down from fathers to sons.

Today, the government of Japan recognizes more than 150 schools of Buddhism, but the major schools are still Nara (mostly Kegon), Shingon, Tendai, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.

In more recent years, several news stories have reported that Buddhism is dying in Japan, especially in rural areas.

For generations, the many small "family owned" temples had a monopoly on the funeral business and funerals became their chief source of income. Sons took over temples from their fathers out of duty more than vocation. When combined, these two factors made much of Japanese Buddhism into "funeral Buddhism." Many temples offer little else but funeral and memorial services.

Japanese living in urban centers are losing interest in Buddhism.

The reason essentially was because he didn’t have any power.

Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas, both to differing degrees autocratic monarchs, had gone to strenuous lengths to ignore aspects of the political landscape they didn’t like or found offensively modern

Nicholas, meanwhile, did everything he could to avoid having to engage with the modern world in any shape or form, terrified that any change would threaten his control over Russia. He regarded autocracy as a sacred trust handed down to him that must be kept intact whatever.

As for the workers and peasants

Nicholas simply never encountered them

The king and his secretaries believed the British royal family must sell itself to the nation, justify its existence and seem entirely unthreatening.

Of the seven kings at Edward’s funeral, only three others kept their thrones: Belgium, Norway and Denmark. All three were constitutional monarchies.

The government “feels [it is better] to calm down the situation than to be stubborn,” explained Mustafa. “They are afraid of a lot of things. Things are unstable [in the country.] The hostility towards [President] Sissi is increasing.”

The Egyptian government, fearing a hashtag campaign could erupt into another 2011-style uprising, is apt to respond to such campaigns before they evolve into something big

So Mustafa—who asked not be named, to protect himself from reprisals—got together with a few others and started a hashtag campaign on Twitter and Facebook. #letAymanburyhisfather soon swept across thousands of Egypt’s screens.

Over the past week, as national outrage grew louder, the government detained four police officers on suspicions on police brutality, an unusual concession by a government that considers police a protector of fragile order and apt to ignore such claims.

Last month alone, in addition to Taweel and Moussa’s cases, there was a campaign for an Alexandria groom swiped by a swarm of police at his wedding (#theykidnappedthegroom), and a prominent investigative journalist and human-rights advocate summoned by military intelligence (#freehossambaghat).

Social media “is the only solution we have now because if you protest, it is a crime. And if you don’t speak about it, no one will do anything about it. So social media is the only way out,” al Attar explained to The Daily Beast while attending Moussa’s father’s funeral.

Three days before Bush’s death, Obama met with the former president at his home in Houston and “rekindled what was already a very warm friendship” in the words of a spokesman for Bush.

“It’s impossible to be in this job without feeling a special bond with the people who have gone before,” Clinton said in 1994 following the death of Richard M. Nixon, who in many ways represented Clinton’s polar opposite. From a darkened White House just hours after Nixon’s death, Clinton thanked the former president for his “wise counsel.”

He may be the last U.S. president who wasn’t despised by a big chunk of the American public. Some of that may have to do with the era in which Bush governed. He rose up through the Republican Party at a time when both parties were big tents, consisting of liberal and conservative wings, before Americans had sorted themselves out into warring ideological camps

“He was the epitome of preparation, process and due diligence,” said Peter Feaver, who served in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “He believed in the importance of establishment expertise.”

Bush’s desire to include Trump at his funeral suggests that the president didn’t want his final send-off to be about the current occupant of the Oval Office, but rather about his life, his presidency and his country.

The recovery of Orleans and the coronation of Charles VII at Reims on July 17th, 1429 mark a turning point for the future also because, by that time, a real national feeling and the concept of patriotism had gained ground

Furthermore, the result of Henry V's and Bedford's policy of granting newly conquered land to the English soldiers, was that those who had nothing in England stayed in France to defend and increase their new possessions. For those who already had land in England, the time came when holding estates on both sides of the Channel became impossible and they had to make their choice.

Never did Henry VI acknowledge the Duke of Burgundy's claims on the French monarchy and, for his part, the Duke obstinately refused to meet Henry VI during the period the latter was in France from April 1430 to February 1432. Excluded from any participation in the control of the government of France, Philip the Good was able, at leisure and under cover of this alliance, to increase his possessions in the Low Countries

In an article published in England and her Neighbours 1066-1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais edited by M.C.E. Jones and M.G.A. Vale (Hambledon Press, 1989), Maurice Keen offers a stimulating explanation of the English disaster in the 1450s.

Armstrong has drawn attention to the close cultural links between England and Burgundy in the early fifteenth century and has shown that the real instigator of the treaty of Troyes was Philip the Good. For his part, Andre Legay (Poitiers colloquium) developed the idea that, if the Anglo-Burgundian alliance did last until the reconciliation of Charles VII and Philip the Good at the treaty of Arras (September 21st, 1435), it remained nevertheless fragile and limited

After Formigny (April 15th, 1450) and Castillon (July 17th, 1453), the inglorious truce agreed upon by Edward IV and Louis XI at Picquigny on August 29th, 1475, was yet another injury to England's pride. However, as Charles Ross in Edward IV (Methuen, 1974) points out, 'the days when England, even in alliance with Burgundy, could seriously challenge the most powerful and wealthy state in Europe were long since past

The very title of the colloquium, 'La France de la Fin du XV' siecle: Renouveau et Apogee' (published in 1985 by Editions du CNRS), shows to what extent the fundamental research carried out over the last twenty years has improved our understanding of the kingdom of Louis XI, Charles VIII and Louis XII, and has altered the old image of a France lacking any real identity and torn between the waning of the Dark Ages and the emergence of modernity

The incorporation of the ducal apanage of Burgundy was one of the major preoccupations of Louis XI

Therefore, Louis XI and Charles VIII had to battle against a real state, which had its own institutions and an efficient and organised army, and which was the mainstay of all the French and foreign oppositions (particularly English) to the progression of the French monarchy. It was only at the end of the 1487-91 war, and after the marriage of the Duchess Anne to Charles VIII (December 6th, 1491) and later to Louis XII (January 8th, 1499) that Brittany was united with France

The custom was first followed in France in the case of the funeral of Charles VI, a few weeks after the funeral of Henry V of England where this practice had been followed, and it is likely that the English presence in Paris influenced French custom in this respect

The failure of Richard II who, in the 1390s, instead of building up a retinue which reflected, and therefore drew strength from the realities of local politics, 'tried to establish local power-structures which reflected the image of his own court', is similar to the one Richard lII suffered in 1483-85

The monarchs were able to rely on a more numerous and permanent administration, loyal to the continuation of the State, and therefore they were less dependent upon their network of patronage. Peter Lewis (Tours colloquium, 1983) refutes the idea that Louis XI's pensioners could have formed a royal clientage: 'they did not represent a monarchical clan, but were para-administrators carrying out para-administrative tasks

a group of men, most of them closely related, who monopolised the most eminent functions and offices and who behaved as the masters of the realm (Recherches sur le personnel du Conseil du Roi sous Charles VIII et Louis XII, Librairie Honori Champion, 1980)

“It’s been shocking for a society to face a situation only known to those who remember Spain coming out of the war,” said Cristina Monge, a professor of sociology at the University of Zaragoza. For many others, she added, “this kind of scenario was until now pure science fiction.”

As a result, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has faced criticism for not prohibiting mass gatherings sooner, and for not stockpiling medical equipment as soon as the number of cases reached several hundred in northern Italy in late February.

Even as Italy locked down its northern regions on March 8, Spain’s first coronavirus cluster had already emerged among participants of a funeral service. Mr. Sánchez’s government did not put the country under the highest level of alert and impose a nationwide lockdown until March 14.

Italy, Britain and France, he noted, declared their own lockdowns only once they had more infections than Spain. He stressed that International Women’s Day, when 120,000 gathered in Madrid on March 8, had also been celebrated on the streets of Brussels, Berlin, Vienna and Paris.

The event has widely been blamed for catapulting the spread of the virus in the capital. Three Spanish government ministers who led the women’s rally later tested positive for the virus, as did Mr. Sánchez’s wife and mother.

the government’s response to the virus was complicated by the diffuse nature of Spain’s political system, in which the country’s 17 regions progressively gained more autonomy, including the management of hospitals, after Spain adopted a new Constitution in 1978.

The gap between regional and national decision-making also encouraged many wealthy Madrid residents to hurry to their seaside homes, once all Madrid schools had been shut, at the risk of further spreading a virus that was already firmly embedded in Spain’s capital.

“A new and fragmented government starts with a huge disadvantage in this kind of crisis situation, because it requires quick and forceful decisions to be taken without constantly worrying about whether somebody else is gaining a political advantage,”

As a measure of the difficulties, Quim Torra, the separatist leader in northeastern Catalonia, refused even to sign a joint declaration with Madrid on coordinating the lockdown with the national government.

an epidemiologist and university professor, said Spain should not be judged harshly over its response to a pandemic that every government had passively watched unfold in a neighboring country “as if watching a movie.”

Spain watched Italy, he acknowledged, but with the mitigating factor that many scientists believed until recently that asymptomatic people were probably not contagious.

Even so, Spain’s main neighbor has fared much better so far. Despite sharing a 750-mile border with Spain, Portugal passed 200 coronavirus deaths last week just as Spain reached 10,000.

There, another Socialist minority government leader, Prime Minister António Costa, has seen opposition politicians close ranks behind him. Mr. Costa has been warning that Portugal could face more pain, but Dr. Rodríguez Artalejo said that Portugal so far deserved admiration.

The same solidarity has been sorely missing in Spain. As Madrid accounted for half of the nationwide death toll, Salvador Illa, the health minister, made “a call for solidarity with the Madrid region.”

“I think each region has acted independently, and that makes any coordination or solidarity initiative very difficult,”

The procurement of emergency equipment has been especially dire. The problem was highlighted when the health ministry acquired, via an undisclosed Spanish intermediary, 640,000 test kits from a Chinese company whose initial shipment proved unusable.

Even so, about 15 percent of Spain’s population is estimated to already have been infected — by far the highest proportion among 11 European countries

The biggest victims of the confused response, beyond those left sickened or dead by the virus, are Spain’s doctors and nurses, who themselves have been infected in staggering numbers.

“This crisis is likely to strengthen the horizontal bonds in our society, between citizens who are making big sacrifices, while weakening further the vertical one with the leadership at the top,”

almost two-thirds of people accused the government of hiding information about the epidemic.

“No politician can be held responsible for creating this crisis,’’ Mr. Michavila said. “But some probably will be blamed for pouring oil rather than using a bucket of water to put out the fire.”

The cases were the court’s first on L.G.B.T. rights since the retirement last year of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

For the most part, the justices seemed divided along predictable ideological lines on Tuesday. But there was one possible exception: Justice Neil M. Gorsuch

Justice Gorsuch is an avowed believer in textualism, meaning that he considers the words Congress enacted rather than evidence drawn from other sources.

But he added that he was worried about “the massive social upheaval” that would follow

Title VII outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and, notably, sex. The question for the justices was how broadly to read that last term.

the justices considered a host of flash points in the culture wars involving the L.G.B.T. community — including sports, dress codes, religious objections to same-sex couples and, especially, bathrooms.

Justice Alito suggested that it would be absurd to conclude that when Congress passed Title VII, it intended to protect gay people. “You’re trying to change the meaning of what Congress understood sex to mean and what everybody understood,”

“When an employer fires a male employee for dating men but does not fire female employees who date men,” Ms. Karlan said, “he violates Title VII.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that firing a member of a gay couple was no different from firing a Catholic for marrying a Jew.

“There are many people, at least in the religious context,” he said, “who are against intermarriage and are not against Catholics or Jews. That’s not an unrealistic example.”

A lawyer for the employers in the sexual-orientation cases, Jeffrey M. Harris, argued that if Congress had meant to cover L.G.B.T. people, there would have been no need for states to address the question in their own laws, which some two dozen have done.

The cases concerning gay rights are Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., No. 17-1618, and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623. The case on transgender rights is R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

They reveal that in the first six months of the project, more than 10,000 volunteers spent a total of some 30,000 hours (the equivalent of 3.4 years) scanning the images, which covered a total of roughly 2,300 square miles of land.

narrowed the list to only 100 accessible locations, and a field team verified 55 of those with archaeological significance

That’s an astonishing failure — one that stands out in a year of astonishing failures. The situation is made grimmer by how familiar the underlying narrative is: Poor coordination at the federal level, combined with a lack of funding and support for state and local entities, has resulted in a string of avoidable missteps and needless delays.

The implementation of these shots is complicated by a number of factors, including cold-storage requirements, which in turn necessitate special training for nurses and doctors. Training takes time and money, both of which are in short supply in most states. Some hospitals have said they don’t know which vaccine they are going to receive, or how many doses, or when.

Think about the lives lost.Think about the teachers.Think about the children.They were family, friends, and loved ones.And a gun killed them all.It was only last week that we posted a similar prompt in response to the racist massacre in Buffalo. Like all of our student forums, this one will be moderated.

Students might find their own ways to respond, perhaps through writing or art. It may also be helpful to look at how victims of other tragedies have been memorialized, in ways big and small. For example: The 26 playgrounds built to remember the children of Sandy Hook; the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing, with its “field of chairs,” including 19 smaller ones for the children who lost their lives; and the New York Times Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Here are more examples, from the El Paso Times. In what ways can your students or school respond, individually or collectively?

What is it like to be a student in the shadow of this violence? How have repeated mass shootings shaped young people? We invite your students to reflect on these questions in this writing prompt, and post their answers to our forum if they would like to join a public conversation on the topic.To help students think about the issue from different angles, we invite them to read the article “A ‘Mass Shooting Generation’ Cries Out for Change,” which was published in 2018 following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Then we ask questions such as:

The authors of the 2018 Times article described how the Parkland shooting moved students around the country to become more involved in activism. Do you think something similar will happen in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas? Why or why not? How do you think school shootings are shaping the generation of students who are in school right now?Invite your students to weigh in here.

Democrats moved quickly to clear the way for votes on legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers. Republicans, even as they expressed horror about the shooting, did not signal that they would drop their longstanding opposition to gun safety measures. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas pointed the blame at Uvalde’s lack of mental health care, even though the suspect had no record of problems.

Which efforts might be the most effective? Students might also take a look at the forum on guns we posted during the 2016 election as part of our Civil Conversation Challenge in which we invited teenagers to have productive, respectful conversations on several issues dividing Americans. We received more than 700 responses to the questions we posed about gun rights, the Second Amendment and more.

This article takes on three of the most prominent rumors that have spread via online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit and explains why they are false. What rumors are your students seeing in their feeds, and what steps can they take to find out the truth? From double-checking via sites like Snopes to learning habits like lateral reading, this article (and related lesson plan) has suggestions.

While the town of Uvalde grapples with the aftermath of the shooting, community members, local leaders and organizations have mobilized. Two local funeral homes said in social media posts that they would not charge families of victims for their funeral services. Volunteers have lined up to give blood for the shooting victims.

“We don’t have a body that we’re missing a heart from. So I guess it’s an unusual occurrence, is what you would say. It’s what’s listed on our report. We hope to be able to classify it as something else and close this out,” he said

“It could have come from a funeral home, an autopsy. There’s endless possibilities,” Fulton said.

When it was found, the heart had just started to decompose, so it could have been frozen or fresh, officials say. Fulton told WOIO they’re making the story public now in the hope of getting some public help identifying the heart.

That means history is best kept on a tight leash.

The unstated reason for Xi’s unwillingness to disavow the Mao era is that Mao is not just China’s Stalin. The Soviet Union was able to discard Stalin because it still had Lenin to fall back on as its founding father. For the Communist party of China, Mao is Stalin and Lenin combined; attack Mao and his era and you attack the foundations of the Communist state.

on a broader level, history is especially sensitive because change in a communist country often starts with history being challenged.

Building on the work of his predecessors, especially Hu Jintao and his call for a Taoist-sounding “harmonious society” (hexie shehui), Xi’s ideological programme includes an explicit embrace of traditional ethical and religious imagery.

efforts to commemorate the past are often misleading or so fragmentary as to be meaningless. Almost all plaques at historical sites, for example, tell either partial histories or outright lies

The Communist party does not just suppress history, it recreates it to serve the present. In China, this has followed the party’s near self-destruction in the Cultural Revolution, which led to a desperate search for ideological legitimacy. At first, this was mainly economic, but following the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the party began to promote itself more aggressively as the defender of Chinese culture and tradition.

One way it has begun to do this has been to position itself as a protector of “intangible cultural heritage”, a term adopted from Unesco, which keeps a country-by-country list of traditions important to specific nations. As opposed to world heritage sites, which are physical structures such as the Great Wall or Forbidden City, intangible heritage includes music, cuisine, theatre, and ceremonies.

As late as 1990s China, some of these traditions were still labelled “feudal superstition”, a derogatory term in the communist lexicon synonymous with backward cultural practices. For example, traditional funerals were widely discouraged, but now are on the government list of intangible culture. So, too, religious music that is performed exclusively in Taoist temples during ceremonies.

the country’s urban centres are built on an obliterated past, which only sometimes seeps into the present through strange-sounding names for streets, parks, and subway stops.

In 2013, according to a news report on 5 December of that year, Xi visited Confucius’s hometown of Qufu, picked up a copy of The Analects – a book of sayings and ideas of the great sage – as well as a biography of him, and declared: “I want to read these carefully.” He also coined his own Confucianesque aphorism – “A state without virtue cannot endure.” The next year, he became the first Communist party leader to participate in a commemoration of Confucius’s birthday.

The China Dream was to be Xi Jinping’s contribution to national sloganeering – every top leader has to have at least one

Xi’s idea was simple to grasp – who doesn’t have a dream? The slogan would become associated with many goals, including nationalism and China’s surge to global prominence, but domestically, its imagery was almost always linked to traditional culture and virtues

Liu spoke freely, without notes, for 90 minutes about something that might seem obscure but that was slowly shaking China’s intellectual world: the discovery of long-lost texts from 2,500 years ago

The texts we were here to learn about had been written a millennium later on flat strips of bamboo, which were the size of chopsticks. These writings did not describe the miscellanea of court life – instead, they were the ur-texts of Chinese culture. Over the past 20 years, three batches of bamboo slips from this era have been unearthed. Liu was there to introduce the third – and biggest – of these discoveries, a trove of 2,500 that had been donated to Tsinghua University in 2008.

The texts stem from the Warring States period, an era of turmoil in China that ran from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BC. All major Chinese schools of thought that exist today stem from this era, especially Taoism and Confucianism, which has been the country’s dominant political ideology, guiding kings and emperors – at least in theory – until the 20th century.

“It’s as though suddenly you had texts that discussed Socrates and Plato that you didn’t know existed,” Sarah Allan, a Dartmouth university professor who has worked with Liu and Li in the project, told me a few months before I heard Liu speak. “People also say it’s like the Dead Sea scrolls, but they’re more important than that. This isn’t apocrypha. These texts are from the period when the core body of Chinese philosophy was being discussed. They are transforming our understanding of Chinese history.”

One of the surprising ideas that comes through in the new texts is that ideas that were only alluded to in the Confucian classics are now revealed as full-blown schools of thought that challenge key traditional ideas. One text, for example, argues in favour of meritocracy much more forcefully than is found in currently known Confucian texts

Until now, the Confucian texts only allowed for abdication or replacement of a ruler as a rare exception; otherwise kingships were hereditary – a much more pro-establishment and anti-revolutionary standpoint. The new texts argue against this. For an authoritarian state wrapping itself in “tradition” to justify its never-ending rule, the implications of this new school are subtle but interesting. “This isn’t calling for democracy,” Allan told me, “but it more forcefully argues for rule by virtue instead of hereditary rule.

“They beat me. They did terrifying things,” he said quietly in a recent interview. “I don’t want to remember that day.”

Martini is, in some ways, typical: mostly apolitical but firmly opposed to Assad’s regime and to the Islamist groups that are vying with other armed opposition groups for control of rebel-held areas.

Now, he lives alone in makeshift quarters in the offices of the aid organization he helped found in this Turkish border town. He heads the group’s relief operations in northern Syria and the Turkish border regions, overseeing the delivery of medical care to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.

Martini is deeply skeptical of peace talks scheduled for this month in Geneva, which are supposed to facilitate negotiations between Assad’s government and rebel groups.

“We must keep working. Whether the time is long or short, this regime will fall,” Martini said. “Then we must rebuild our country.”

. Then he crossed the border into Jordan, which aid agencies say shelters more than 563,000 refugees.

When he left Syria, Martini said, he lost everything. The government seized all nine of his houses, along with his bank accounts, a clinical laboratory and 2,000 olive trees. The loss of the olive grove seems to have stung particularly; Idlib is known for its production of the bitter fruit.

In Jordan, the doctor briefly treated patients in the Zaatari refugee camp. Then he fled the difficult conditions to join his wife and youngest child in the United Arab Emirates. His older children escaped Syria, too, and are studying medicine in the United States.

At first, the effort paid for treatment for Syrians in Turkish hospitals. Operations were soon expanded to include the building of a 144-bed medical unit in the city of Antakya, near the Syrian border. Then hostility from Antakya’s Alawites — many of whom support Assad, who is also Alawite — prompted Orient to move the facility to Reyhanli. Alawites are members of a Shiite-affiliated sect.

Orient’s medical ventures expanded into rebel-held areas of Syria, where it now runs 12 hospitals and several rehabilitation centers and employs more than 400 doctors. Facilities in Turkey include a day clinic, a school for displaced Syrians and a sewing workshop that trains and provides work for many Syrian women.

It is an unusual arrangement for an organization of Orient Humanitarian Relief’s size — staff members said Orient programs and facilities helped nearly 400,000 people last year. But the setup offers a strategic advantage. A member of an aid organization working with Orient said it is able to move faster than any of its peers, making quick decisions unhampered by complicated bureaucracies and approval processes.

The many doctors and surgeons in the Martini clan are scattered across Europe and the United States. One uncle founded Martini Hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where fighting between rebels and government forces has been sustained and brutal. Ammar Martini worked at that hospital, now heavily damaged, for 10 years.

When his father died recently in Syria, Martini was not able to return home to attend the funeral.

A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.

I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus

to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.

The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system

the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in.

every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!

There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making,

depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast.

When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”

While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies

the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house

fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students

It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row

the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster

The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify

The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus

But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses

the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today

during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light.

Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.

This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D. Bickel and Peter F. Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?

The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.

American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school.

Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten.

Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene

In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.

These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor

Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers

, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities

lawsuits began to pour in.

Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies.

For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members.

comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.

you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual

the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.

there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it.

these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.

But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem.

Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?

“I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance

, the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years

the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright

“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.”

the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.

So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?

I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.

the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.”

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power.

Adam Phillips writes suggestively of human helplessness as opposed to the sense of protectedness that religious faith supposedly brings us, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the tortured and executed corpse of a suspected political criminal.

he suspects that Christian faith is other-worldly in the sense of despising material things. Material reality, in his view, is what art celebrates but religion does not. This is to forget that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit. It is also to misunderstand the doctrine of Creation

What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient.

The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.

Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.

If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus.

Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place

Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.