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GM’s view contrasts with other auto-making giants, including Toyota Motor Corp. TM 0.93% and Ford Motor Co. F -0.32% , which are working on full electrics but also expanding their U.S. hybrid offerings

Last week, Continental AG, one of the world’s biggest car-parts makers, said it would cut investment in conventional engine parts because of a faster-than-expected fall in demand—yet another sign the industry is accelerating the shift to electric vehicles.

Today, auto companies generally lose money on each electric car they sell, mostly because of the high cost of lithium-ion batteries. Concerns about the battery range, along with a lack of places to plug in, also deter buyers from considering electric vehicles. Those factors make going straight to all-electric cars a risky strategy

Hybrids, which were popularized by Toyota’s Prius last decade as a social statement, accounted for about 3% of U.S. sales in 2018, according to research firm LMC Automotive. Sales of plug-in electric vehicles were around 1% of the total market—mostly thanks to the success of Tesla Inc.’s offerings.

pouring investment into both hybrids and electrics strains car-company finances, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said. “It’s time to pick a path and commit to it,”

VW and GM are focused on all-electric cars largely because of China, where new regulations require car companies to sell a minimum number of zero-emissions vehicles to avoid financial penalties.

VW plans to use its electric-car expansion in China to build scale and drive down prices faster in the U.S., said Scott Keogh, VW’s U.S. chief.

Auto companies are spending $225 billion to develop more than 200 new plug-in vehicles through 2023, a figure that doesn’t include hybrids

For now, both hybrids and electric cars are more expensive to produce than comparable gas-powered vehicles. A hybrid system can add roughly $2,000 to a vehicle’s cost, while a fully electric version costs an additional $6,000 to $10,000,

Toyota’s sales chief for North America, said that with U.S. electric-vehicle sales expected to lag behind Europe and China, the company needs a nearer-term remedy. “That’s why we feel so confident in hybrids

The kunga is the first known instance of a human-engineered hybrid of two species, a production far beyond the traditional processes of the domestication of animals, the researchers found.

Like mules, which are hybrids between horses and donkeys, and which were created much later, the kungas were sterile. Each new kunga was a one-off, a mating between a wild ass stallion and a donkey.

The stallions had to be captured and kept in captivity, even though they were highly aggressive, as modern records have indicated.

Kungas held their high status for at least 500 years, Dr. Geigl said. Horses did not appear until around 4,000 years ago to take their place in battle and ceremony, and to contribute to the creation of other hybrids. Before the current research, the oldest known hybrid was a mule from a site in Turkey dating to 3,000 years ago. Members of the same team reported on that find in 2020.

the “results were very convincing,” showing that people “were experimenting with hybrid equids long before the arrival of the horse.”

Fiona Marshall, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who has researched the prehistory of donkeys and their domestication, said the study was “enormously significant” partly because it showed that the breeders had clear intentions. The early process of domestication was always murky — probably part accident, part human intervention — but this research showed what the ancient Syrians were after.

“People wanted the qualities of a wild animal,” she said. Donkeys might have been tamer than their ancestors, the African wild ass, but the breeders in Mesopotamia wanted to back breed to other wild asses for strength and speed — and perhaps size.

the team sequenced DNA from numerous sources, including modern donkeys, horses and several species of wild asses, and museum samples.

Of particular importance were the bones of 44 kungas interred at a rich burial site in Syria called Umm el-Marra. Those skeletons had earlier led Dr. Weber and others to hypothesize that they were hybrids and that they were the kungas described in tablets and represented in art.

Their teeth showed bit marks and indicated they had been fed a special diet.

Donkeys are plentiful, of course, but the last known Syrian wild asses died in the late 1920s.

“The recipe for making the kunga was unknown for thousands of years,” Dr. Bennett said. “And we finally decode it not even 100 years since one element has become extinct.”

Volvo, owned by Geely Holding of China, has been ahead of larger rivals in converting to electric power. All the models it sells in Europe are either hybrids or run solely on batteries. But some of the Volvos are so-called mild hybrids, which have an electric motor that assists the gasoline engine but are not capable of running solely on battery power. Hybrids have better fuel economy than conventional vehicles, but they may not be much better for the climate or for urban air quality if drivers do not use the electric abilities

In another break from the practice of traditional carmakers, Volvo’s electric models will be sold exclusively online

The decision to go all electric is still a leap of faith for Volvo, which has only one battery-powered car on the market now, a version of its XC40 S.U.V.

Meanwhile, Facebook said that if COVID-19 numbers in Menlo Park, Calif., the home of its headquarters, continues to decline, up to 10% of its workforce can go back to the office on May 10. Similarly, offices in Fremont and Sunnyvale can open a little later — May 17 and May 24, respectively. And the San Francisco office is slated to open its doors on June 7. All three companies say they intend to abide by all local health protocols and safety guidelines that have been developed in coordination with experts.

Uber added, "Employees returning to the workplace need to take a virtual training, sign a COVID-19 Precautions & Acknowledgement form, and take a daily health screening (including temperature check) at home to qualify for return."

A sprawling study by Microsoft on the impact of forced work-from-home policies due to the coronavirus pandemic revealed that "flexible work is here to stay" and that employers who want to retain talented employees should accept the idea of hybrid work even after the current health crisis. The report, titled "The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work — Are We Ready?" advises business leaders to accept that "the past year has fundamentally changed the nature of work.

When surveyed, 73% of workers said they want flexible remote options. The study also found remote job postings on LinkedIn increased more than five times during the pandemic. But people are also working a lot more and having a hard time, the report says. Around the world, people are spending more than twice as much time in meetings and "over 40 billion more emails were delivered in February of this year compared with last." People are also crying with the coworkers a lot more. One is six report having cried with a colleague in the past year.

Ong’s great scholarly focus was the transition of human society from orality to literacy: from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text, and printed media

orality treats words as sound and action, only; that it emphasizes memory and redundancy; that it stays close to the “human lifeworld.”

In literate cultures, on the other hand, words are something you look up; language can stray more abstractly from objects; and speech, freed from memorable epithets like “the wine-dark sea,” can become more analytic.

To describe oral communication that was filtered through high technologies like radio and TV—technologies that could not exist without literacy—he coined the term secondary orality. To Ong, secondary orality was one of the great media phenomena of the 20th century.

we chat, we type, we text. One of the key attributes of orality is its instantaneousness: There’s no delay between utterances

How do you describe this odd mix of registers: literate culture that has all the ephemerality of oral culture? During his life, Ong suggested a new term, secondary literacy. I’ve also seen it referred to as a hybrid literacy

on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.”

Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.” This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to.

It’s not quite context collapse, because what’s collapsing aren’t audiences so much as expectations. Rather, it’s a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations. It’s a consequence of the oral-literate hybrid that flourishes online. It’s conversation smoosh.

This tension also explains, to me, why the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi, but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh. Visual conversations have stayed chatty, in other words.

At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.

Tom Edsall made a vital point yesterday in the New York Times, citing a new study. In America, a center-right country, those with “fixed views” are 42 percent of the electorate; those with “fluid views” are 32 percent; and those hybrids in the middle (which is where I find myself) are 26 percent. More to the point, the hybrids “are more like the fixed than they are the fluid.”

The Italian leftist, Antonio Gramsci, famously wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

He was being deliberately provocative in his original remarks: “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.” He suggested “we have to do something about them,” and referred to the “Muslim ban” as an analogy. It’s a dumb analogy, since it’s about immigrants from a select number of Muslim-majority countries, while “white men” is clearly about American citizens. But the Muslim analogy works in another way. We go out of our way — and rightly so, in my view — not to associate Islamist terrorists with American Muslims. And we do so because it’s grotesquely unfair to generalize from a tiny few to an entire population. If it’s unfair to do that for Muslims, why is it okay for “white men”?

On the facts, he insisted, he is not wrong about domestic terrorism. Right-wing terror is at least as dangerous as Islamist terror, maybe more: “Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, far-right violent extremists have killed 106 people in 62 attacks in the United States, while radical Islamist violent extremists have killed 119 people in 23 attacks.” He’s right about that — and, with Pittsburgh, there are now 11 more victims on the far-right side of the ledger

At what point is it legitimate to make sweeping negative generalizations about whole classes of people?

it seems to me important to keep the denigration of entire classes of people in check. It’s morally wrong, and it’s politically counterproductive. The issue is not the far-right terrorists’ whiteness or their maleness, but their extremism and psychology.

In a liberal society, we don’t judge the individual by the group or the group by the individual. It’s worth resisting the urge to do so when you feel it (as we all do from time to time). Especially when you believe your motives are good ones

The most striking thing about Max Boot, the former neocon who has become one of the most passionate Never Trumpers, is his naïveté. After decades of diligence in the ranks of the conservative movement, it took the emergence of Trump to make him see that almost everything he previously trusted and believed in could disappear overnight. I’m glad he has seen the light on this, and enjoyed his book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, as a memoir of that naïveté

He’s a first-generation immigrant, just like me. And we tend to idolize America. Unlike most people, we chose it. For us, America will always be an escape and a vision of a life made new. We look past its flaws, blur over its past, miss the racial backstory, rationalize foreign interventions in ways many native-born Americans would balk at. We immigrants are the ultimate American idealists

If you are also a conservative, and came here in the twilight of the Cold War, you will also have been swept away by what appeared to be the triumph of your set of ideas, the total defeat of Soviet Communism, the collapse of collectivism, and the spread of freedom around the world. And the last two decades of the 20th century, when Boot and I came of age, were as intoxicating for a conservative immigrant to America as the first two decades of the 21st have been profoundly disillusioning

My breaking point was the revelation that the GOP backed the brutal torture of prisoners, the total abnegation of a politics of freedom. If you didn’t recognize the barbarism that lay just beneath the Republican surface then, you were blinded by something pretty powerful.

But there’s a danger to Damascene moments. It’s so very tempting to replace one tribe with another, one fixed ideology for its opposite, and to make that conversion the central part of your identity.

The many levels of The Little Mermaid’s disturbed and disturbing identity were brought to mind this week with the emergence in the news of a fresh image of assault that the statue suffered on the 30 May, this time at the hands of anti-whaling activists

Beneath the veneer of red paint, the statue’s bronze surface burns through, giving the work a lustrous haemoglobin glow, as if the mermaid were herself drenched in blood. Under a veil of vandalism, the hybrid creature can be perceived as both the perpetrator and the victim of the violence – an eerie ambiguity that transforms Eriksen’s statue from a totem of fairytale wonder into something haunting and ominous.

For electric cars, lower maintenance costs and the lower costs of charging compared with gasoline prices tend to offset the higher upfront price over time. (Battery-electric engines have fewer moving parts that can break compared with gas-powered engines and they don’t require oil changes. Electric vehicles also use regenerative braking, which reduces wear and tear.)

The cars are greener over time, too, despite the more emissions-intensive battery manufacturing process. Dr. Trancik estimates that an electric vehicle’s production emissions would be offset in anywhere from six to 18 months, depending on how clean the energy grid is where the car is charging.

The new data showed hybrid cars, which run on a combination of fuel and battery power, and can sometimes be plugged in, had more mixed results for both emissions and costs. Some hybrids were cheaper and spewed less planet-warming carbon dioxide than regular cars, but others were in the same emissions and cost range as gas-only vehicles.

With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued,One thing that may occur is that disinvestment in city downtowns will alter the spatial distribution of these elements in cities — i.e. in which neighborhoods or areas of a city is crime more likely, and homelessness more visible. Urban downtowns are often policed such that these visible elements of poverty are pushed to other parts of the city where they will not interfere with commercial activities. But absent these activities, there may be less political pressure to maintain these areas. This is not to say that the overall crime rate or homelessness levels will necessarily increase, but their spatial redistribution may further alter the trajectory of commercial downtowns — and the perception of city crime in the broader public.

“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,may be how this changes cities in terms of economic and racial segregation. One urban trend from the last couple of decades is young white middle- and upper-class people living in cities at higher rates than previous generations. But if these groups become less likely to live in cities, leaving a poorer, more disproportionately minority population, this will make metropolitan regions more polarized by race/class.

the damage that even the perception of rising crime can inflict on Democrats in a Nov. 27 article, “Meet the Voters Who Fueled New York’s Seismic Tilt Toward the G.O.P.”: “From Long Island to the Lower Hudson Valley, Republicans running predominantly on crime swept five of six suburban congressional seats, including three that President Biden won handily that encompass some of the nation’s most affluent, well-educated commuter towns.

In big cities like New York and San Francisco we estimate large drops in retail spending because office workers are now coming into city centers typically 2.5 rather than 5 days a week. This is reducing business activity by billions of dollars — less lunches, drinks, dinners and shopping by office workers. This will reduce city hall tax revenues.

Public transit systems are facing massive permanent shortfalls as the surge in working from home cuts their revenues but has little impact on costs (as subway systems are mostly a fixed cost. This is leading to a permanent 30 percent drop in transit revenues on the New York Subway, San Francisco Bart, etc.

These difficulties for cities will not go away anytime soon. Bloom provided data showing strong economic incentives for both corporations and their employees to continue the work-from-home revolution if their jobs allow it:

First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.

three other experts in real estate economics, Arpit Gupta, of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, Vrinda Mittal, both of the Columbia Business School, and Van Nieuwerburgh. They anticipate disaster in their September 2022 paper, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.”

“Our research,” Gupta wrote by email,emphasizes the possibility of an ‘urban doom loop’ by which decline of work in the center business district results in less foot traffic and consumption, which adversely affects the urban core in a variety of ways (less eyes on the street, so more crime; less consumption; less commuting) thereby lowering municipal revenues, and also making it more challenging to provide public goods and services absent tax increases. These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.

the three authors “revalue the stock of New York City commercial office buildings taking into account pandemic-induced cash flow and discount rate effects. We find a 45 percent decline in office values in 2020 and 39 percent in the longer run, the latter representing a $453 billion value destruction.”

Extrapolating to all properties in the United States, Gupta, Mittal and Van Nieuwerburgh write, the “total decline in commercial office valuation might be around $518.71 billion in the short-run and $453.64 billion in the long-run.”

the share of real estate taxes in N.Y.C.’s budget was 53 percent in 2020, 24 percent of which comes from office and retail property taxes. Given budget balance requirements, the fiscal hole left by declining central business district office and retail tax revenues would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.

Since March 2020, Manhattan has lost 200,000 households, the most of any county in the U.S. Brooklyn (-88,000) and Queens (-51,000) also appear in the bottom 10. The cities of Chicago (-75,000), San Francisco (-67,000), Los Angeles (-64,000 for the city and -136,000 for the county), Washington DC (-33,000), Seattle (-31,500), Houston (-31,000), and Boston (-25,000) make up the rest of the bottom 10.

Prior to the pandemic, these ecosystems were designed to function based on huge surges in their daytime population from commuters and tourists. The shock of the sudden loss of a big chunk of this population caused a big disruption in the ecosystem.

Just as the pandemic has caused a surge in telework, Loh wrote, “it also caused a huge surge in unsheltered homelessness because of existing flaws in America’s housing system, the end of federally-funded relief measures, a mental health care crisis, and the failure of policies of isolation and confinement to solve the pre-existing homelessness crisis.”

The upshot, Loh continued,is that both the visibility and ratio of people in crisis relative to those engaged in commerce (whether working or shopping) has changed in a lot of U.S. downtowns, which has a big impact on how being downtown ‘feels’ and thus perceptions of downtown.

The nation, Glaeser continued, isat an unusual confluence of trends which poses dangers for cities similar to those experienced in the 1970s. Event#1 is the rise of Zoom, which makes relocation easier even if it doesn’t mean that face-to-face is going away. Event#2 is a hunger to deal with past injustices, including police brutality, mass incarceration, high housing costs and limited upward mobility for the children of the poor.

Progressive mayors, according to Glaeser,have a natural hunger to deal with these problems at the local level, but if they try to right injustices by imposing costs on businesses and the rich, then those taxpayers will just leave. I certainly remember New York and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, where the dreams of progressive mayors like John Lindsay and Jerome Patrick Cavanagh ran into fiscal realities.

Richard Florida, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, stands out as one of the most resolutely optimistic urban scholars. In his August 2022 Bloomberg column, “Why Downtown Won’t Die,”

His answer:

Great downtowns are not reducible to offices. Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations; they have survived far worse. Continual works in progress, they have been rebuilt and remade in the aftermaths of all manner of crises and catastrophes — epidemics and plagues; great fires, floods and natural disasters; wars and terrorist attacks. They’ve also adapted to great economic transformations like deindustrialization a half century ago.

Florida wrote that many urban central business districts are “relics of the past, the last gasp of the industrial age organization of knowledge work the veritable packing and stacking of knowledge workers in giant office towers, made obsolete and unnecessary by new technologies.”

“Downtowns are evolving away from centers for work to actual neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs titled her seminal 1957 essay, which led in fact to ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ ‘Downtown Is for People’ — sounds about right to me.”

Despite his optimism, Florida acknowledged in his email thatAmerican cities are uniquely vulnerable to social disorder — a consequence of our policies toward guns and lack of a social safety net. Compounding this is our longstanding educational dilemma, where urban schools generally lack the quality of suburban schools. American cities are simply much less family-friendly than cities in most other parts of the advanced world. So when people have kids they are more or less forced to move out of America’s cities.

What worries me in all of this, in addition to the impact on cities, is the impact on the American economy — on innovation. and competitiveness. Our great cities are home to the great clusters of talent and innovation that power our economy. Remote work has many advantages and even leads to improvements in some kinds of knowledge work productivity. But America’s huge lead in innovation, finances, entertainment and culture industries comes largely from its great cities. Innovation and advance in. these industries come from the clustering of talent, ideas and knowledge. If that gives out, I worry about our longer-run economic future and living standards.

The risk that comes with fiscal distress is clear: If city governments face budget shortfalls and begin to cut back on funding for public transit, policing, and street outreach, for the maintenance of parks, playgrounds, community centers, and schools, and for services for homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, then conditions in central cities will begin to deteriorate.

There is reason for both apprehension and hope. Cities across time have proven remarkably resilient and have survived infectious diseases from bubonic plague to cholera to smallpox to polio. The world population, which stands today at eight billion people, is 57 percent urban, and because of the productivity, innovation and inventiveness that stems from the creativity of human beings in groups, the urbanization process is quite likely to continue into the foreseeable future. There appears to be no alternative, so we will have to make it work.

the authors argue that the first job of a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right. Those who have succeeded include Gerald Templer, who became Britain’s high commissioner for Malaya in 1952 and whose reference to winning “the hearts and minds of the people,”

“remains the most succinct explanation for how to win a counter-insurgency.”

By contrast, the nationalist forces in China, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam got the big ideas wrong and paid a steep price.

On the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan’s government troops, who had been so expensively trained and equipped under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, Mr. Petraeus remarks that “the troops were brave enough—the 66,000 dead Afghan soldiers killed during the war attest to that. But they fought for an often corrupt and incompetent government that never gained the trust and confidence of local communities, which had historically determined the balance of power within Afghanistan.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 serves as the book’s case study on how badly Goliath can stumble against David

Elon Musk’s control of the Starlink satellite internet system, they note, gave him a unique veto power over Ukrainian operations in Crimea. “With individual tycoons such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos wielding such extraordinary power,” the authors tell us, “wars of the future will have to take their influence into account.”

The final chapter teases out the contours of future conflicts. Artificial intelligence, strategic mineral monopolies and “hybrid wars”—where weapons include deepfake disinformation, political manipulation, proxy forces and cyberattacks—cap an incisive look at the next phase of warfare. “Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries,”

. And with the line between limited and total wars growing fuzzier every year, the combatant of the next war might be a woman sitting at a drone desk, a computer geek hacking into a power grid or a robotics designer refining directed-energy weapons systems.

“Conflict” is, in some ways, an extension of Mr. Roberts’s thesis in “The Storm of War” (2009)—that dictatorships tend to crack under the stress of a sustained war against popular democracies. While autocracies enjoy some advantages at war’s outset—they are nimble and can achieve true strategic surprise, for instance—if the sucker punch doesn’t end the fight quickly, democracies, shocked into action, may bring to bear more motivated, more efficient and often larger forces to turn the tide.

Both men see modern military history as a succession of partnerships created to counter violent challenges from nationalists, terrorists and dictators.

"China has really been at the forefront of success in conversion of all vehicles to electric vehicles, especially buses," says Heather Thompson, chief executive officer of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a non-profit focusing on sustainable transport solutions. "The rest of the world is trying to do the same, but I think China is really out ahead."

At the time of China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organisation, the international automotive industry was dominated by European, US and Japanese brands. These companies had spent decades perfecting internal combustion engine technology. To compete, Beijing decided to find a new track for its auto industry: making cars that did not use conventional engines.

That same year, the central government launched the so-called "863 plan" for EV research and development. There were numerous practical challenges, however, in the way of mass electrification. Not many manufacturers were making new energy vehicles, buyers were few and there was a lack of charging infrastructure in existence. The answer? Buses.

"The Chinese government adopted a very smart strategy," says Liu Daizong, ITDP's East Asia director. "They realised quite early on that they should drive [the EV industry] through electric buses," he notes, since their public service status meant Beijing "could have a strong hand on their electrification".

"Bus routes were fixed. This means when an electric bus finished a round, it could return to the depot to recharge," explains Xue Lulu, a mobility manager at the World Resources Institute (WRI) China. The typical daily mileage of a Chinese bus ­– 200km (120 miles) – was a realistic range for battery makers to meet.

The following year, the country began its large-scale rollout of new energy buses, with the "Ten Cities and Thousand Vehicles" programme. Over three years, the programme aimed to provide 10 cities with financial subsidies to promote 1,000 public-sector new energy vehicles in each, annually. Its goal was to have 10% new energy vehicles in the country by the end of 2012.

Strong policy support from both central and regional governments "gave manufacturers confidence in setting up production lines and stepping up research efforts," says Liu.

Together, these strong and consistent government signals encouraged Chinese manufacturers to expand their EV production capacity, bring down costs and improve their technologies. One such company was Build Your Dream, better known as BYD. The Shenzhen-based firm, the world's largest EV maker in 2022, ballooned its business a decade before by supplying electric buses and taxis for China's EV pilot cities.

"Back then, most buses used diesel, which was a main source of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions," says Xue, referring to the air pollution that smothered Beijing and other Chinese cities in the early 2010s. Yet in 2013, a new plan from central government cited tackling air pollution as one of the reasons for rolling out EVs.

This addition proved to be critical: it not only connected EV uptake with people's health, it also indirectly tied the e-bus campaign to local officials' political performance, as the central government would soon hand air-quality targets to all provinces.

The years 2013 and 2014 proved to be important for China's EV push. For the first time, the central government made EV purchase subsidies available to individual consumers, not just the public sector, opening the floodgate to private ownership. Additionally, it offered discounted electricity tariffs to bus operators to make sure the cost of running electric buses would be "significantly lower than" that of their oil or gas-powered equivalents.

The new economic push, plus local government's determination to battle air pollution, generated great enthusiasm for e-buses. By the end of 2015, the number of EV pilot cities rocketed from 25 to 88. In the same year, the central government set a target of 200,000 new energy buses on the road by 2020 and announced a plan to phase out its subsidies for fossil-fuel-powered buses.

To further stimulate the market, many cities devised various local policies on top of national incentives. For example, Shenzhen, a southern city with a population of more than 17 million, encouraged government agencies to work with private companies to create a full range of renting mechanisms for bus operators

Different cities' bus operators also designed different charging strategies. "Buses in Shenzhen had bigger batteries, so they normally charged overnight," says Xue, of WRI China. Between 2016 and 2020, Shanghai, another electric bus hub, subsidised the electricity e-buses used -- regardless of the hours of the day -- to give them more flexibility in charging.

Generous financial support did lead to problems. In 2016, an EV subsidy fraud shook China, with some bus operators found to have exaggerated the number of e-buses they had purchased. So that same year Beijing shifted its EV subsidy rules so bus operators could only receive financial support when a bus's mileage reached 30,000km (19,000 miles).

one year later, the government announced the so-called "dual-credit" policy. This allowed new energy vehicle makers to rake up credits which they could sell for cash to those needing to offset "negative credits" generated from making conventional cars.

it wasn't only China's buses that had benefitted.China's e-bus campaign helped create a big and stable market for its wider EV industry, brought down the costs and created economies of scale. In 2009, the year the e-bus campaign was rolled out, the total number of new energy vehicles sold stood at 2,300; by 2022, it was 6.9 million, analysis by Huang Zheng,

By 2022, the country had also built the world's largest EV charging network, with 1.8 million public charging stations – or two-thirds of the global total – and 3.4 million private equivalents. This means that on average, there is one charging pillar for every 2.5 of China's 13.1 million new energy vehicles.

Cold weather is a problem, too, as it can make a battery's charging time longer and its range shorter. The reason China has not achieved 100% electrification for its buses is its northern regions, which have harsh winters, says Xue.

To make e-buses truly "green", they should also be charged with renewable power, Wang says. But last year coal power still accounted for 58.4% of China's energy mix, according to the China Electricity Council, a trade body..

Globally, however, China is now in a league of its own in uptake of e-buses. By 2018, about 421,000 of the world's 425,000 electric buses were located in China; Europe had about 2,250 and the US owned around 300. A

But earlier this year, the European Commission announced a zero-emission target for all new city buses by 2030. And some countries are increasing their overall funding for the transition.

In 2020, the European Commission approved Germany's plan to double its aid for e-buses to €650m (£558m/$707m), then again in 2021 to €1.25 billion euros (£1.07m/$1.3bn). And the UK, which last year had the largest electric bus fleet in Europe with 2,226 pure electric and hybrid buses, has announced another £129m ($164m) to help bus operators buy zero-emissions fleets.

Countries have thus responded to China's manufacturing lead in divergent ways. "While the US has opted for a more competitive angle by fostering its own e-bus production, regions like Latin America are more open to trade with China due to a more friendly trading setup through [China's] Belt and Road Initiative,"

In order to avoid direct competition from Chinese manufacturers, the US has come up with a "school-bus strategy", says Liu. The Chinese don't make the iconic yellow vehicles, so this could ignite American e-bus manufacturing and create a local industry chain, he suggests. Backed by the US Environmental Protection Agency's $5bn (£3.9bn) Clean School Bus Programme, the national effort has so far committed to providing 5,982 buses.

In contrast, many Latin American cities, such as the Colombian capital of Bogota and the Chilean capital of Santiago, are greening their traditional bus sectors with the help of Chinese manufacturers, who are the largest providers to the region. In 2020, Chile became the country that had the most Chinese e-buses outside of China, and this year Santiago's public transport operator announced it has ordered 1,022 e-buses from Beijing-based Foton Motor, the biggest overseas deal the firm had received.

Chinese manufacturers are likely to receive a lot more orders from Chile and its neighbours in this decade. According to latest research by the global C40 Cities network, the number of electric buses in 32 Latin American cities is expected to increase by more than seven times by 2030, representing an investment opportunity of over $11.3bn (£8.9bn)

In June 2023, BloombergNEF forecast half of the world's buses to be entirely battery-powered by 2032, a decade ahead of cars. And by 2026, 36% and 24% of municipal bus sales in Europe and the US, respectively, are expected to be EVs as they begin to catch up with China

To meet the global climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, simply switching the world's existing bus fleets might not be enough. According to ITDP, the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from urban passenger transport globally must stay below the equivalent of 66 gigatonnes CO2 between 2020 and 2050 for the world to meet the 1.5C temperature goal. This emissions limit will only be possible when the world not only adopts electric buses, but goes through a broader shift away from private transport

"We can't just focus on [replacing] the buses that exist, we need to actually get many, many more buses on the streets," Thompson adds. She and her team estimate that the world would need about 10 million more buses through 2030, and 46 million more buses cumulatively through 2050, to make public transport good enough to have a shot at achieving the Paris Agreement. And all those buses will need to be electric.

In China therefore, even though EVs are being sold faster than ever, its central government has instructed cities to encourage public transport use, as well as walking and riding bikes.

In Wang's hometown, meanwhile, which has just over three million residents, the local government has gone one step further and made all bus rides free. All citizens need to do is to swipe an app, with no charge, to get onto the bus. "My aunt loves taking buses now," says Wang. "She says it is so convenient."

it turns out that the way we move largely determines the way we live.

gadgets cumulatively contribute only a fraction of what we save by living in a walkable neighborhood. It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.

“gizmo green”; the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.

study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts more than walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.

because it’s better than nothing, LEED — like the Prius — is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”

10 to 20 units per acre is the density at which drivable suburbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.

“We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to

The average New Yorker consumes roughly one-third the electricity of the average Dallas resident, and ultimately generates less than one-third the greenhouse gases of the average American.

New York is our densest big city and, not coincidentally, the one with the best transit service. All the other subway stations in America put together would not outnumber the 468 stops of the MTA. In terms of resource efficiency, it’s the best we’ve got.

New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half, as does Sydney — and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half, and you end up with Hong Kong

Paris is one place that has determined that its future depends on reducing its auto dependence. The city has recently decided to create 25 miles of dedicated busways, introduced 20,000 shared city bikes in 1,450 locations, and committed to removing 55,000 parking spaces from the city every year for the next 20 years. These changes sound pretty radical, but they are supported by 80 percent of the population.

increasing density from two units per acre to 20 units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from 20 to 200.

the American anti-urban ethos remained intact as everything else changed. The desire to be isolated in nature, adopted en masse, led to the quantities and qualities we now call “sprawl,” which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.

most communities with these densities are also organized as traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, the sort of accommodating environment that entices people out of their cars. Everything above that is icing on the cake.

unless we hit a national crisis of unprecedented severity, it is hard to imagine any argument framed in the language of sustainability causing many people to modify their behavior. So what will?

The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the 10 categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.

the top 10 cities always seem to include a bunch of places where they speak German (Vienna, Zurich, Dusseldorf, etc.), along with Vancouver, Auckland, and Sydney. These are all places with compact settlement patterns, good transit, and principally walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, there isn’t a single auto-oriented city in the top 50. The highest-rated American cities in 2010, which don’t appear until No. 31, are Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, and Seattle.

Our cities, which are twice as efficient as our suburbs, burn twice the fuel of these European, Canadian, and Aussie/Kiwi places. Yet the quality of life in these foreign cities is deemed higher than ours by a long shot.

if we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been done,

On some issues, General Mattis appeared to take a starker view of the dangers faced by the United States than Mr. Trump

he asserted that the United States needed to maintain its influence there long after Mosul was captured from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “Our principal interest in Iraq is to ensure that it does not become a rump state of the regime in Tehran,”

he described the fighting as a major threat to American national security interests, offering a more alarming view of the crisis than the Obama administration and, at times, than Mr. Trump.

“The brutal civil war in Syria has destabilized the Middle East, contributed to the destabilization of Europe and threatened allies like Israel, Jordan and Turkey, all while ISIS, Iran and Russia have profited from the chaos

“Challenges posed by Russia include alarming messages from Moscow regarding the use of nuclear weapons; treaty violations; the use of hybrid warfare tactics to destabilize other countries; and involvement in hacking and information warfare,”

Mr. Trump said during the campaign that it might be necessary to “take out” terrorists’ families to win the war against the Islamic State. General Mattis categorically opposes such an approach. “The killing of noncombatants in a war against a nonstate enemy violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions,” he wrote.

he opposed military exchanges or security cooperation with Raúl Castro’s Cuba.

“We all remember what it felt like on 9/11 and 9/12,” he wrote. “We should do what is necessary to prevent such an attack from occurring again.”

General Mattis said he saw Iran as an increasing threat. “Iranian malign influence in the region is growing,”

He said the alliance “enormously” benefits American security. “The alliance must harness renewed political will to confront and walk back aggressive Russian actions,”

“Legal questions aside, it is my view that such actions would be self-defeating and a betrayal of our ideals.”

“Having demonstrated 40 years of loyalty to the principle of civilian control and to the U.S. Constitution, I know what to expect from the uniformed leadership,”

“Furthermore, I understand what is required of the civilians tasked with leading our military services.”

what Chinese schoolchildren are encouraged to think of as the longstanding natural speech of the common people is in fact an artificial hybrid, only a few decades old, although it shares a name—Mandarin—with the language of administration from imperial times. It’s a designed-by-committee camel of a language that has largely lost track of its past.

The idea of a national Chinese language began with the realization by the accidentally successful revolutionaries of 1911 that retaining control over a country speaking multiple languages and myriad dialects would necessitate reform. Long-term unification and the introduction of mass education would require a common language.

Whatever the province they originated from, the administrators of the now-toppled Great Qing Empire had all learned to communicate with one another in a second common language—Guanhua, China’s equivalent, in practical terms, of medieval Latin

To understand this highly compressed idiom required a considerable knowledge of the Chinese classics. Early Jesuit missionaries had labeled it Mandarin,

The committee decided that the four-tone dialect of the capital would be the base for a new national language but added a fifth tone whose use had lapsed in the north but not in southern dialects. The result was a language that no one actually spoke.

After the Communist victory of 1949, the process began all over again with fresh conferences, leading finally to the decision to use Beijing sounds, northern dialects and modern literature in the vernacular (of which there was very little) as a source of grammar.

This new spoken form is what is now loosely labeled Mandarin, still as alien to most Chinese as all the other Chinese languages.

A Latin alphabet system called Pinyin was introduced to help children learn to pronounce Chinese characters, but today it is usually abandoned after the first few years of elementary school.

The view that Mandarin is too difficult for mere foreigners to learn is essential to Chinese amour propre. But it is belied by the number of foreign high-school students who now learn the language by using Pinyin as a key to pronunciation —and who bask in the admiration they receive as a result.

Since 1949, the Chinese government, obsessed with promoting the image of a nation completely united in its love of the Communist Party, has decided that the Chinese people speak not several different languages but the same one in a variety of dialects. To say otherwise is to suggest, dangerously, that China is not one nation

Yet on Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic in a Hunan accent so thick that members of his audience subsequently differed about what he had said. He never mastered the Beijing sounds on which Putonghua is based, nor did Sichuanese-speaking Deng Xiaoping or most of his successors.

When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced. “At last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!” One leader down, only 400 million more common people to go.

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes.

as few as six couplings all those tens of thousands of years ago might have led to the current level of ancient immune alleles.

This means that our modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive,

Were they romantic couplings? More likely they were aggressive acts between competing human groups, Dr. Stringer said. For a model, he pointed to modern hunter-gatherer groups that display aggressive behavior among tribes.

The value of the interbreeding shows up in the immune system, Dr. Parham’s analysis suggests. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived in Europe and Asia for many thousands of years before modern humans showed up and had developed ways to fight the diseases there

When modern humans mated with them, they got an injection of helpful genetic immune material, so useful that it remains in the genome today. This suggests that modern humans needed the archaic DNA to survive. The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.

little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes.

crowding, especially in bigger cities, is one of the downsides of a government-run health care system. On the upside, had I managed to book a bed in one of the public wards, my birth would have been completely free, paid for entirely by the government’s Assurance Maladie. Everyone pays into Assurance Maladie through charges that are taken directly from their paycheck

From the sixth month of pregnancy to 11 days after a child’s birth, the government covers a woman’s medical expenses in full.

transparency in the price of medical care is a legal requirement in France. The government sets what they consider fair prices for all appointments and procedures, and then reimburses these for everyone at 70 percent. This is not unlike Medicare and Medicaid in the U.S., but because the French government system covers the entire population, it has more bargaining power to keep prices low

t’s not uncommon in the bigger cities, particularly in Paris, for a doctor to charge more than the government’s recommended price. But these overages, called dépassements, don’t come anywhere near what an American specialist might charge. In fact, under French law, a doctor must issue a receipt explaining any dépassement above 70 euros before beginning the test or appointment.

In the U.S., meanwhile, it’s often impossible to get a price for a delivery out of a hospital. Estimates vary by orders of magnitude: This California study of 100,000 complication-free deliveries showed that new mothers were charged anywhere from $3,296 to $37,227, with no clear medical reason for the massive discrepancy.

By contrast, for my complication-free delivery and five-day stay in a private clinic, my total out-of-pocket cost was 400 euros, or about $542.

I don’t think we should count Obamacare’s average monthly premium of $328 as a success. That’s still a lot of money for a middle-class family—and that’s before co-pays, in-network deductibles, and all manner of hidden costs. From my French-ified perspective, a single-payer system—with strong government oversight to keep the price of medical care low—seems like the only way to go.

It is possible, Dr. Akey speculated, that the genes developed to help Neanderthal skin adapt to the cold climate of Europe and Asia.

Both teams of scientists also found long stretches of the living human genomes where Neanderthal DNA was glaringly absent. This pattern could be produced if modern humans with certain Neanderthal genes could not have as many children on average as people without them. For example, living humans have very few genes from Neanderthals involved in making sperm. That suggests that male human-Neanderthal hybrids might have had lower fertility or were even sterile.

Overall, said Dr. Reich, “most of the Neanderthal genetic material was more bad than good.”