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Those who survive the perilous sea crossing between the Bahamas and the US describe a nightmarish odyssey of vomit, sweat and fear.“It’s suicide – Russian roulette,” one Brazilian migrant recalled in a 2017 interview after at least a dozen fellow countrymen vanished while attempting the same illegal voyage across the Florida Straits.

The Florida shipwreck is the latest humanitarian drama to expose the Covid-fuelled migration crisis gripping Latin America and the Caribbean, where the pandemic has killed more than 1.5 million people and wreaked economic havoc.

Last year more than 125,000, mostly Haitian migrants – among them elderly women and children - hiked through the Darién Gap, a snake-ridden jungle between Colombia and Panama, to reach the US after abandoning their homes in South America.

For centuries, jungle-covered mountains, swamps and poisonous snakes scared people away from the Darién Gap, the dense rainforest separating North and South America. It's still the only spot where the Pan-American Highway, that runs from Alaska all the way to the tip of South America, dissolves into mud. But thanks to the large numbers of migrants trying to get to the United States, the Darién Gap is no longer a no man's land.

In fact, when NPR first reached the region in September, birds singing and monkeys howling could not be heard. The main sound came from dozens of motorcycles. The passengers sitting on the back were migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, India and African countries. But because they lacked U.S. visas, they had to travel overland, first through South and Central America and then Mexico.

The hardest part is crossing the roadless, 60-mile-wide Darién Gap. To cover the first few miles, migrants can pay to ride on the back of motorcycles that navigate muddy trails. But soon the jungle thickens, and they must start walking.

Consumer prices across the 19 countries that use the euro currency are rising at a record rate as a result of a huge spike in energy costs this year, official figures showed Tuesday.

Consumer prices across the 19 countries that use the euro currency are rising at a record rate as a result of a huge spike in energy costs this year, official figures showed Tuesday.

Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, said the eurozone’s annual inflation rate hit 4.9% in November, the highest since recordkeeping began in 1997 and up from 4.1% in October, the previous high mark.

China’s “zero Covid” policy has a dedicated following: the millions of people who work diligently toward that goal, no matter the human costs.

They informed a woman who was eight months pregnant and bleeding that her Covid test wasn’t valid. She lost her baby.

Two community security guards told a young man they didn’t care that he had nothing to eat after catching him out during the lockdown. They beat him up.

Japan’s cabinet on Friday approved the country’s biggest increase in military spending in decades, as officials expressed growing concern about the possibility of being pulled into a conflict over Taiwan.

It also includes more than $51.5 billion for the military, reflecting a substantial increase in a defense budget far smaller than that of its ally the United States or of China, the regional giant.

Military spending in Japan has increased steadily since former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in 2012, promising to strengthen the country’s military forces and revise its pacifist Constitution.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a seismic event, perhaps the most significant one in international life since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This war marks the end of an age. But what can we say about the new one we are entering?

Most important, it is marked by the triumph of politics over economics.

The argument was amplified this week when gas prices hit at a record average of $4.17 per gallon and Biden announced a ban on US imports of Russian oil. He warned that while the move would hurt Vladimir Putin, “there will be a cost as well here in the United States”, and anticipated criticism by branding it “Putin’s price hike”.

the era when wars meant unity governments and a shared understanding that “politics stops at the water’s edge” is over. Republicans backed Biden’s ban on Russian oil imports but simultaneously went on an offensive that effectively absolved Putin of blame.

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the House, told a press conference: “These aren’t Putin prices. They’re President Biden’s prices.”

As inflation has plummeted while unemployment remains low, the president’s allies see not just a strong run of economic data but a new model for policymakers — proof of what is possible if the government is willing to be aggressive in fighting downturns.

Summers is the most prominent expert who disagrees. He blasted the administration’s $1.9 trillion 2021 stimulus law, the American Rescue Plan, for exacerbating inflation, arguing through 2022 that the U.S. economy would probably need a spike in unemployment for price hikes to fully abate and accusing President Biden’s team of the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in 40 years. Biden’s economic policies had overstimulated the economy, Summers said on cable TV, in op-eds and in interviews, as well as in private talks. And he maintained it would almost certainly take a major slowdown — and millions of lost jobs — for inflation to return to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

Biden last year instinctively rejected the notion pushed by Summers that taming inflation would require policies that would throw millions of people out of work, according to five people familiar with the president’s private remarks

It was only at the end of April that Russia cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, the first two victims of its energy-pressure campaign. But overall gas shipments are at less than one-third the level they were just a year ago. In mid-June, shipments through Nord Stream 1 were cut by 75 percent; in July, they were cut again.

“It is wartime,” Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia, told her colleague Jason Bordoff, a former adviser to Barack Obama, on an eye-opening recent episode of the podcast “Columbia Energy Exchange.”

I think there’s been a gradual and growing recognition that we are headed into the worst global energy crisis at least since the 1970s and perhaps longer than that.

Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Fisher’s plan hinged on recruiting blue-collar whites back into a reborn version of the March on Washington coalition. According to Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher, these votes could be won over with a platform that appealed to both the values and the material interests of working people. That meant shifting away from race-based initiatives toward universal economic policies whose benefits would, in practice, tilt toward African Americans — in short, “use class as a proxy for race.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher didn’t pretend that racism had been expunged from American life. “Precisely because America is a racist society,” they wrote, “we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions towards blacks over the long haul.”

Demanding that white Americans grapple with four centuries of racial oppression might be a morally respectable position, but it was terrible politics. “Those blacks who most fervently insist on the pervasiveness of white racism have adopted a strategy that depends on white guilt for its effectiveness,” they wrote, ridiculing the idea that whites would “one day wake up, realize the error of their ways, and provide blacks with wholesale reparations in order to expiate white demons.”

The company’s growing emphasis on third-party selling, a very different business model than the big-box stores’, has helped lift the tech giant while competitors are forced to offer big discounts.

While Amazon does sell some items directly, the company is predominantly an online marketplace like EBay Inc., meaning it collects commissions and fees when shoppers purchase things on the site without having to actually buy that inventory. In the three months ended June 30, 57% of all things sold on Amazon came from independent merchants who bear all the inventory risk—the highest that number has ever been.

when a merchant selling goods on Amazon cuts prices, Amazon still gets paid—even if that means the company takes a smaller commission on the sales, and even if the merchant loses money. 

Germany occupies a special place in the international imagination. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the difficulties of reunification, the country acquired a reputation as a leader of the free world. Economically prosperous, politically stable and more welcoming to immigrants than most other countries, the Germans — many thought — had really learned their lesson.

The past few months have been a bit of a rude awakening. The economy is stuttering and a constitutional court ruling has upended the government’s spending plans

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, fresh from success in two regional elections, is cementing itself as the country’s second-most-popular party.

Conakry, Guinea (Reuters)One person was killed in Guinea's capital late on Wednesday during protests over fuel price hikes, in the most serious unrest since a military junta took power last year.

Gunfire rang out in Conakry overnight as people barricaded streets and set tyres alight in protest over a 20% increase in the price of gasoline, a Reuters reporter and witnesses said.

Security Minister Bachir Diallo promised an investigation. "I energetically condemn the actions that led to the loss of life," he told reporters.

Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”

The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,

Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.

Altman told me that his decision to join Huffington stemmed partly from hearing from people who use ChatGPT to self-diagnose medical problems—a notion I found potentially alarming, given the technology’s propensity to return hallucinated information. (If physicians are frustrated by patients who rely on Google or Reddit, consider how they might feel about patients showing up in their offices stuck on made-up advice from a language model.)

I noted that it seemed unlikely to me that anyone besides ChatGPT power users would trust a chatbot in this way, that it was hard to imagine people sharing all their most intimate information with a computer program, potentially to be stored in perpetuity.

“I and many others in the field have been positively surprised about how willing people are to share very personal details with an LLM,” Altman told me. He said he’d recently been on Reddit reading testimonies of people who’d found success by confessing uncomfortable things to LLMs. “They knew it wasn’t a real person,” he said, “and they were willing to have this hard conversation that they couldn’t even talk to a friend about.”