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The government of Northern Ireland is holding an emergency meeting on Thursday following days of unrest reminiscent of "The Troubles" that plagued the region for decades.

The latest violence in Belfast has erupted amid anger from Protestant unionists concerned they're being isolated from the United Kingdom and pushed into a union with the republic of Ireland due to post-Brexit trade rules.

a concrete barrier, known as the peace wall, that separates a Protestant neighborhood from a Catholic area.

Dr. Varadkar, 41, is winning praise for his energetic handling of the crisis. He canceled St. Patrick’s Day festivities, oversaw an aggressive early testing program, closed pubs and schools earlier than other European leaders and has spoken to the public about the contagion in honest, humane terms — in other words, like the general practitioner he once was.

Britain has 13 times the population as Ireland and is far more densely populated, with a capital, London, that has nearly twice as many people as the entire Irish Republic

“Some of the difference may be serendipity,” said Dr. Patricia Kearney, an expert in epidemiology at the University College Cork. “We have a relatively small population, and the way we live outside the cities is far less dense than in the U.K. But there was still really decisive action by our political leaders.”

Earlier this month Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s taoiseach, and Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, each faced a fraught dilemma. Coronavirus infection rates were falling and the economic devastation from lockdowns was rising

Varadkar extended Ireland’s lockdown to 18 May. Johnson rolled the dice and began to unlock – at least for England, while Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland stuck with the “stay home” recommendation.

There was another stark difference. Ireland started lifting lockdown only after testing and contact-tracing systems were fully scaled up. England took the plunge before its systems were ready.

the tall barricades of corrugated metal and concrete erected during the sectarian conflict, known as the Troubles, that began in 1968 and ravaged Northern Ireland for three decades. The walls were built to divide Protestant and Catholic enclaves and to prevent people from killing one another as the spiraling cycle of attacks took hold.

“We’re not ready for it,” he said. “I’m sure you’re probably fed up with hearing about Brexit,” he said. “But people are worried about a bad deal, the wrong deal or no deal.” If things went badly, he added, “I think we’re going to need these walls more than ever.”

Few of the hard-line politicians who advocated Brexit seemed to consider the consequences their push to “take back control” would have on the delicate peace in Northern Ireland or, for that matter, on the cohesion of the United Kingdom itself. In the more than three years since the referendum, the matter of Northern Ireland has presented a unique and treacherous stumbling block to any agreement between the British government and the European Union on the terms of withdrawal.

The return of a “hard” border might threaten to undermine the Good Friday agreement that has reduced sectarian conflict in the North. And that is exactly what some fear Brexit will do, unless Britain remains part of the European Union’s single market and a customs union — an option that Mrs. May ruled out at the beginning of the withdrawal process.

European officials say they are putting into legal language a document, agreed to by Britain in December, that laid out three options. Britain’s preferred one is for an overall Brexit trade agreement that would solve the problem, but talks on that have not even formally begun. The second was for Britain to propose “specific solutions” such as the use of technology to avoid a hard border. No detailed plans have been put forward, and many are so skeptical of this idea that critics call it the “Narnia solution.”

Speaking in Parliament, Mrs. May described the proposals as a threat to her country’s “constitutional integrity,” while one of her former ministers, David Jones, told the BBC that the European Union was using the Brexit talks to try to “annex” Northern Ireland.They worry that if Northern Ireland stays largely within the European Union’s customs union and single market while mainland Britain quits them, a new economic frontier will be created down the middle of the Irish Sea.

: the little-known story of the Irish slaves who built America, who are sometimes said to have outnumbered and been treated worse than slaves from Africa.But it’s not true.

Historians say the idea of Irish slaves is based on a misreading of history and that the distortion is often politically motivated. Far-right memes have taken off online and are used as racist barbs against African-Americans. “The Irish were slaves, too,” the memes often say. “We got over it, so why can’t you?”

Last year, 82 Irish scholars and writers signed an open letter denouncing the Irish slave myth and asking publications to stop mentioning it

minister, asked for an overhaul of an agreement on post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland,

a serious escalation in a simmering dispute over how Northern Ireland fits into the British withdrawal from the European Union.

His speech served as something of a pre-emptive strike, coming just one day before the European Commission,

FOR the past month, Ireland has been outraged by tapes of Anglo Irish Bank officials, back in 2008, discussing lying to the government about how big a loan they needed, and how they knew there was no chance that the loan would ever be repaid. That loan was the first domino in a sequence that ended with the whole Irish economy flat on its face.

It’s not the bankers’ actions that have outraged people — pretty much everyone had a fair idea that this was what had gone down. It’s the overpowering sense of amorality revealed on the recordings, which were released by the Irish Independent newspaper. The bankers have a great laugh about the situation. It genuinely never seems to mean anything to them that the taxpayer is going to be forced to pay their bills, to the tune of tens of billions. More than that: it never seems to occur to them that their actions might harm people.

The British police have arrested a 15-year-old boy in Northern Ireland in connection with a recent hacking attack on the telecommunications operator TalkTalk.

The teenager was taken into custody Monday afternoon, and the police were searching his residence as part of a criminal investigation, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police. On Tuesday, the police said the boy had been released on bail.

the third cyberattack on the company in 12 months. It became aware of the breach late on Wednesday.

“Celtic” languages were not imports to the region but instead were developed somewhere in the British Isles or the Iberian Peninsula — and then spread eastward into continental Europe.

His doubts about the traditional view arose as he was studying inscriptions on artifacts from southern Portugal. The inscriptions on those artifacts strongly resembled the languages known as Celtic, yet they dated as far back as 700 B.C. This placed Celtic languages far from the Celt homelands in the middle of Europe at a very, very early date.

“What it shows is that the language that became Irish was already out there — before 700 B.C. and before the Iron Age,” Koch said. “It just didn’t fit with the traditional theory of Celtic spreading west to Britain and Iberia.”

the third major war of Louis XIV of France, in which his expansionist plans were blocked by an alliance led by England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Austrian Habsburgs

the epileptic and partly insane king Charles II, was unable to produce heirs

the Austrian Habsburgs, headed by the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I

Owen Smith, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, has waded into the row about Labour’s Brexit stance, warning the return of border posts in Northern Ireland will be unavoidable without the UK “effectively retaining membership of the single market and the customs union”

Asked about Labour’s policy, he said: “The position we’ve got at the moment is very clear, which is that we’ve got to stay in for the transitional period

“It is incredibly important for the peace process that we do not have, cannot countenance, a hard border on the island of Ireland,” he said

Identification. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the formal name of the sovereign state governed by Parliament in London. The term "United Kingdom" normally is understood to include Northern Ireland; the term "Great Britain" refers to the island of Britain and its constituent nations of England, Wales, and Scotland but does not include Northern Ireland. Any citizen of Great Britain may be referred to as a Briton.

Sinn Fein Makes Big Gains, Reshuffling Political Landscape In Northern Ireland

When the dust finally settled Saturday on Northern Ireland's snap assembly election, it became clear a new political reality now awaits voters there. After an exceedingly strong showing by Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's government is split all but down the middle between Irish nationalists and their pro-British counterparts.

Relatively few of them were at the United States Capitol on January 6, determined to stop Congress from certifying a legitimate election. Millions more cheered the rioters on—and still do.

As a group, it’s hard to know what to call them. They are too many to merit the term extremists. There are not enough of them to be secessionists. Some prominent historians and philosophers have been arguing for a revival of the word fascist; others think white supremacist is more appropriate,

I’m calling all of them seditionists—not just the people who took part in the riot, but the far larger number of Americans who are united by their belief that Donald Trump won the election, that Joe Biden lost, and that a long list of people and institutions are lying about it: Congress, the media, Mike Pence, the election officials in all 50 states, and the judges in dozens of courts.

Britain’s existential threat is not simply the result of poor governance—an undeniable reality—but of something much deeper: the manifestation of something close to a spiritual crisis.

no other major power is quite as conflicted about whether it is even a nation to begin with, let alone what it takes to act like one.

it is now one of the rare states in the Western world whose name is not simply the nation it represents: The United Kingdom is more than Britain and the British. Some of its citizens believe themselves to be British, while others say they are not British at all; others say they are British and another nationality—Scottish or Welsh, say. In Northern Ireland it is even more complicated, with some describing themselves as only British while others say they are only Irish.