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Bringing Syrian refugees to the U.S. has become an especially contentious issue. In Canada, however, they're being welcomed with open arms.

Roughly 600 Syrians from refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon will arrive by plane in Canada this evening. They're the first of 25,000 Syrians the new Canadian government wants to resettle by the end of February.

Toronto's major newspaper, the Toronto Star, gave them an emotional welcome on the front page of Thursday's edition. It reads, in part: "You're with family now. ... "You're in Canada now, with all the rights and protections and possibilities that confers. "You'll find the place a little bigger than Damascus or Aleppo, and a whole lot chillier. But friendly for all that. We're a city that cherishes its diversity — it's our strength. Canadians have been watching your country being torn apart, and know that you've been through a terrifying, heartbreaking nightmare. But that is behind you now. And we're eager to help you get a fresh start."

The attack at the Olympic Village stands as one of sports’ most horrifying episodes. The eight terrorists, representing a branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization, breached the apartments where the Israeli athletes were staying before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972. That began an international nightmare that lasted more than 20 hours and ended with a disastrous failed rescue attempt.

The treatment of the hostages has long been a subject of speculation, but a more vivid — and disturbing — account of the attack is emerging. For the first time, Ms. Romano, Ms. Spitzer and other victims’ family members are choosing to speak openly about documentation previously unknown to the public in an effort to get their loved ones the recognition they believe is deserved.

Among the most jarring details are these: The Israeli Olympic team members were beaten and, in at least one case, castrated.

he Syrian government declared Saturday it is ready to attend peace talks scheduled in Geneva later this month

“terrorist groups” will be participating in the meetings, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.

The Geneva negotiations are the first step in a road map laid out last year by the international community to end the Syrian civil war. The

“The goal in America today,” Rosen said on our walk, “is to resurrect the primacy of reason over passion—what we are watching now is the struggle between logos and pathos. The central question in our democratic age is this: Is it possible to slow down the direct expression of popular passion? The answer to this question is not obvious.”

The leaders of Facebook and its Silicon Valley cousins argue that instantaneous, universal communication is a boon to democracy and freedom. Constitutional scholars such as Rosen argue that the rapid diffusion of all manner of information—the false and the decontextualized, especially—can just as easily expedite the formation of mobs.

I asked Rosen to imagine what Madison, the main proponent among the Founders of indirect democracy, would have made of Trump, of Trumpism, and of our coarse and frenzied political age. Rosen’s eloquent answer is contained in his essay, “Madison vs. the Mob,” which is an anchor article in this special issue on democracy in peril.

Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets)

On average, that’s at least $23,386 per taxpayer.

how could you even begin to put a dollars-and-cents value on the larger human costs of those wars

To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.”

The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.

Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.

Social networks are now so deeply embedded into global culture that it feels irresponsible to think of them as some exogenous force. Instead, when it comes to misinformation, the internet is a mere cog in the larger machinery of deceit.

There are other important gears in that machine: politicians and celebrities; parts of the news media (especially television, where most people still get their news); and motivated actors of all sorts, from governments to scammers to multinational brands.

It is in the confluence of all these forces that you come upon the true nightmare: a society in which small and big lies pervade every discussion, across every medium; where deceit is assumed, trust is naïve, and a consensus view of reality begins to feel frighteningly anachronistic.

His new book revisits that approach, expanding his portrait of a planetary nightmare that, to judge by climatologists’ assessments, will soon take over our waking life

Wallace-Wells is more concerned with the prospect of human suffering and even extinction.

The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.

More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.

The idea that undeserving people of color are stealing money or recognition from the deserving  predates Trump, of course. It has been a feature of American politics since the country’s founding. The poetry of the young enslaved woman Phillis Wheatley was assumed to be fraudulent because her intelligence undermined the basic assumption of chattel slavery, that black people were not truly human. After Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography, a critic who knew one of Douglass’s owners insisted that the famed orator was “not capable of writing the Narrative” and that “there are no such barbarities committed on their plantations.”

More recently, the election of Barack Obama provoked a fierce backlash on the right, one that manifested in one conspiracy theory after another meant to prove Obama was a fraud. Conservatives became fixated on proving that the first black president did not write his autobiography, that he was functionally illiterate absent a teleprompter, and that his admission to elite universities was the unearned result of affirmative action, despite his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law.

Mr. Ullrich offers a fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country — and, in Hitler’s case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world.

Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”

Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”

One of the most evocative stories from the Mumbai attacks is that of the Israeli toddler saved by his Indian nanny as gunmen killed both his parents. He is now set to revisit the site of the attack with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. BBC Hindi's Zubair Ahmed met his family in Israel. Every night before going to bed, 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg looks up at the photo of his smiling parents hanging above his bed and wishes them good night. Gabi and Rivka Holtzberg were killed in Chabad House, a Jewish cultural centre in the western Indian city of Mumbai, during a deadly attack in 2008. Moshe was barely two years old at the time.

The gunmen carried out a series of co-ordinated attacks across Mumbai targeting seven different locations, including two luxury hotels, the main railway station and the Jewish centre where the Holtzbergs had been living.Moshe was saved by his nanny, Sandra Samuel, who said she found him standing over the unconscious bodies of his parents. She is believed to have grabbed him and fled outside. It remains unclear what Moshe witnessed but, according to his family, he suffered nightmares for months and had trouble sleeping.

This will be Moshe's first time in India since the attack. It will be an emotional journey, Mr Rosenberg says. Moshe was invited by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had met the boy during his visit to Israel in July.

It was the sort of nightmare that had only ever been real for most people’s parents or grandparents — the fear of an impending nuclear attack. “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii,” read the emergency alert that residents of the Aloha State received on Saturday morning. “Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

At a time when many are questioning whether Mr. Trump ought to be allowed anywhere near the nuclear “button,” he is moving ahead with plans to develop new nuclear weapons and expanding the circumstances in which they’d be used. Such actions break with years of American nuclear policy. They also make it harder to persuade other nations to curb their nuclear ambitions or forgo them entirely.

A major departure in the new policy is the plan to build new low-yield nuclear weapons. The rationale is that most modern weapons are so powerful that no one believes they will ever be used, so lower-explosive warheads are needed to maintain an effective deterrent. This logic is insane.

His calculations about where power really lay in Germany and how to best manipulate the emotions of ordinary Germans

In addition, Hitler generated enormous – and genuine – support. His views very often matched those of huge numbers of the German population. That’s something incomprehensible if we take at face value the portrayal of Hitler as a screaming nightmare.

As Spaun saw Hitler staring at him he felt as if Hitler’s eyes looked directly into his innermost thoughts. And when Hitler held on to the back of von Spaun’s chair, Spaun felt “a trembling from his fingers penetrating me. I actually felt it. But not a nervous trembling. Rather I felt: this man, this body, is only the tool for implementing a big, all-powerful will here on Earth. That’s a miracle in my view.”

the diplomatic nightmare of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

the French crown maintained the only permanent embassy of Elizabeth’s reign

The Spanish embassy was a stormy one, suspended between 1572 and 1578 and permanently terminated in 1584

I sense a social barrier to talking about these emotions. If I bring up climate change in casual conversation, the topic is often met with awkward pauses and the polite introduction of new subjects

we seldom talk about it, face to face. It’s as though the topic is impolite, even taboo.

I reached out to Renee Lertzman to gain insight into how we’re coping with such huge impending losses. Lertzman is a psychologist studying the effects of environmental loss on mental health

I feel compelled to ask Trump supporters: Is it worth it? How many have to suffer for you to feel great again?

For them, our success is the American nightmare

white-supremacist terrorism is now the No. 1 domestic-terrorist threat in America. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that the FBI has recorded about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in 2019, most of them involving ties to white supremacy

Less than a week before the 2016 election, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic published a chilling prediction. The Trump campaign, they wrote “has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate.” If their analysis of the process of violent radicalization was correct, they said, “the result will be blood.” 

in March, Christian Vanderbrouk wrote an extraordinary piece about a darker but related strain of rhetoric on the right. It is time, he wrote then, for conservatives to stop trafficking in violent fantasies about racial civil wars that pit red and blue states against one another. 

“Schlichter’s books and The Turner Diaries share the same paranoia that progressive governments, aided by white collaborators, are empowering blacks to enable them to rape white women and ultimately exterminate the white race.”

In 2017, the Communist Party formally took control of all print media, including books.

Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines, literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with L.G.B.T. themes, have been hit especially hard. History textbooks crafted by independent scholars are being replaced with those produced by the state at a disturbing rate

Last month, the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s education minister Ziya Selcuk revealed — proudly — that 301,878 books had been taken out of schools and libraries and destroyed. All these books were purportedly connected to Fethullah Gulen,

Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.

With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.

“Epidemics are really bad for economies,”

Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from those of the last ice age.

It is a future in which emergency becomes the norm, and no state has the capacity to respond.

It is a future in which, as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes, disasters like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, has already arrived, almost unremarked on by the rich world’s media.