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Famine is riding alongside pestilence, on the tail of war. Though coronavirus leaves no part of the world untouched, its impact will be harshest in places that were already suffering.

The head of the World Food Programme warns that we are now on the brink of a hunger pandemic, with the prospect of multiple famines “of biblical proportions” within a few months,

Covid-19 alone has not created this crisis. Rather, it is one more devastating blow, complicating and deepening the troubles of countries already struggling with the impact of war, global heating, other health crises, and specific threats such as the locust infestations plaguing east Africa. It could almost double the number of those facing acute hunger, pushing an additional 130 million people to the brink of starvation by the end of the year. In all, shortages are likely to affect a fifth of the world’s population. Many of them live in overcrowded conditions, with poor sanitation, and a considerable number have pre-existing health problems such as HIV or TB; malnutrition will make them more vulnerable to Covid-19 and other threats

Toxicology tests suggest a German former nurse murdered at least 100 people at two hospitals where he worked, prosecutors say.

If found guilty of all the deaths, he would become one of Germany's worst post-war serial killers.

The investigation into Hoegl was widened when he admitted killing up to 30 people during his 2015 trial, when he was convicted of two murders, two attempted murders and harming patients.

Maryland and Montana have passed the nation’s first laws limiting forensic genealogy, the method that found the Golden State Killer.

New laws in Maryland and Montana are the first in the nation to restrict law enforcement’s use of genetic genealogy, the DNA matching technique that in 2018 identified the Golden State Killer, in an effort to ensure the genetic privacy of the accused and their relatives.

For one thing, the law states that by 2024, genealogists working on such cases must be professionally certified — a credential that does not yet exist.

Saudi Arabia Curbs Death Penalty in Move to Soften Image - WSJSaudi Arabia Curbs Death Penalty in Move to Soften Image - WSJRIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Saudi Arabia said Monday it had imposed a moratorium on capital punishment for drug-related offenses that led to an 85% reduction in executions, as the conservative Muslim kingdom seeks to soften its image to attract Western tourists and foreign investment.

The state-backed Human Rights Commission said 27 executions were recorded in 2020. That is down from 184 the year before, according to rights watchdog Amnesty International, when Saudi Arabia trailed only China and Iran globally.

Prince Mohammed, the 35-year-old de facto ruler, has previously said the government was working to change the law to reduce the punishment for some crimes from execution to life in prison.

It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century

Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans.

To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument.

Courts usually don’t let cats argue cases. But here was Rod Ponton, a county attorney in Presidio County, Texas, unable to figure out how to turn off the cat filter on his Zoom call during a hearing on Tuesday in Texas’ 394th Judicial District Court.

The result was a video immediately hailed across the internet as an instant classic,

“If I can make the country chuckle for a moment in these difficult times they’re going through, I’m happy to let them do that at my expense,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon.

John Avlon is a senior political analyst at CNN. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

With the country in crisis after a month from hell, President Trump's public schedule for this last day of May is blank. But when he's not MIA, the President's comments have only deepened our divisions, with tweets like "when the looting starts, the shooting starts", coming one day after he retweeted an account saying "the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat."

We need to be clear-eyed when confronting the politics of fear, whether the source is overseas or here at home. There are folks who romanticize riots, at least when the destruction happens to someone else's property. But fighting fire with fire will only burn the whole house down. Or, as the rapper Killer Mike said in an emotional press conference with the Mayor of Atlanta: "it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy."

To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.

ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.

Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”

lifetime prevalence of violence among people with serious mental illness — like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — was 16 percent, compared with 7 percent among people without any mental disorder. Anxiety disorders, in contrast, do not seem to increase the risk at all.

Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself.

mass killings are very rare events, and because people with mental illness contribute so little to overall violence, these measures would have little impact on everyday firearm-related killings. Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness.

Belonging to the anti-war group Code Pink, one of the protesters tried to remind Brennan of children being killed by the drones, another held up a list of victims in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and another a sign saying "Drones Make Enemies".

The route to drone supremacy has been a surreptitious one relying sometimes on exaggerations of their "surgical accuracy" and precision

Brennan claimed that not a single "collateral" death had taken place as a result of drone strikes in Pakistan. This was proven untrue by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which looked at 116 secret drone strikes during the period in which 45 or more civilians appeared to have died.

Sacks makes three points: that “new” atheists lack the gravitas of old ones, that religion is the only reliable source of morality, so that without faith the world would crumble, and that a plurality of faiths is a bulwark against religious “fundamentalists,” whom he sees as not religious at all.

it’s simply not true that we haven’t grappled with those “real issues.” It’s just that they don’t upset most of us as much as Sacks thinks they should

Holocaust? Really? And did the Christian ethic prevent that? Indeed, much of the Holocaust was the inevitable working-out of a Christian animus against Jews, a reflection of the eternal Jewish status as killers of Christ.

The world has seen a remarkable improvement in the quality of life in the last 200 years or so

In fact, thanks to the computing and Internet revolution, the UK’s economy expanded more than 8 times in this period to reach $1.0932 trillion.

These developments are creating a world where humans and smart machines are becoming interdependent of each other.

It was obvious to anyone paying attention that the incoming administration would be blatantly corrupt. But would it at least be efficient in its corruption?

Mr. Trump hasn’t pivoted, matured, whatever term you prefer. He’s still the insecure, short-attention-span egomaniac he always was. Worse, he is surrounding himself with people who share many of his flaws — perhaps because they’re the sort of people with whom he is comfortable.

the typical Trump nominee, in everything from economics to diplomacy to national security, is ethically challenged, ignorant about the area of policy he or she is supposed to manage and deeply incurious.

Hispanic Republicans and conservatives are increasingly anguished over whether they can remain involved in this year’s presidential election as Donald Trump continues to launch attacks on prominent Latinos and makes little effort to win their support.

Many Hispanics active in national GOP politics have been hoping for months that Trump would tone down his broadsides against immigrants

there is little evidence that such a change is coming — leading some to abandon the presidential race or the 2016 elections altogether.

Egypt protest after tea vendor 'killed by police'

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of Egypt's capital, Cairo, to protest after a tea vendor was allegedly shot dead by police.

he unrest erupted after a policeman allegedly killed the man and wounded two others during an argument over the price of a cup of tea.

Barry Latzer: The optimistic view is that the late ‘60s crime tsunami, which ended in the mid-1990s, was sui generis, and we are now in a period of "permanent peace," with low crime for the foreseeable future

Pessimists rely on the late Eric Monkkonen's cyclical theory of crime, which suggests that the successive weakening and strengthening of social controls on violence lead to a crime roller coaster. The current zeitgeist favors a weakening of social controls, including reductions in incarcerative sentences and restrictions on police, on the grounds that the criminal-justice system is too racist, unfair, and expensive. If Monkkonen were correct, we will get a crime rise before long.

the most provocative feature of your book: your belief that different cultural groups show different propensities for crime, enduring over time, and that these groups carry these propensities with them when they migrate from place to place.

No country in Africa, if not the world, has so thoroughly turned itself around in so short a time, and Kagame has shrewdly directed the transformation.

Kagame has made indisputable progress fighting the single greatest ill in Africa: poverty. Rwanda is still very poor — the average Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day — but it is a lot less poor than it used to be. Kagame’s government has reduced child mortality by 70 percent; expanded the economy by an average of 8 percent annually over the past five years; and set up a national health-insurance program — which Western experts had said was impossible in a destitute African country.

Progressive in many ways, Kagame has pushed for more women in political office, and today Rwanda has a higher percentage of them in Parliament than any other country. His countless devotees, at home and abroad, say he has also delicately re-engineered Rwandan society to defuse ethnic rivalry, the issue that exploded there in 1994 and that stalks so many African countries, often dragging them into civil war.