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RIO DE JANEIRO — As dozens of fires scorched large swaths of the Amazon, the Brazilian government on Thursday struggled to contain growing global outrage over its environmental policies, which have paved the way for runaway deforestation of the world’s largest rain forest.

The fires, many intentionally set, are spreading as Germany and Norway appear to be on the brink of shutting down a $1.2 billion conservation initiative for the Amazon.

“The ongoing forest fires in Brazil are deeply worrying,” the European Commission said in a statement on Thursday. “Forests are our lungs and life support systems.”

A study has found that the Republican Party in the United States lags behind conservative parties worldwide when it comes to accepting the reality of climate change

The study’s author examined the platforms of the top conservative parties in each of nine countries — the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Canada and New Zealand — and found that the Republican Party here was the only one to deny the existence of human-caused climate change.

Conservative parties in other countries aren’t necessarily committed to fighting climate change effectively, the study found. “Still,” writes Mr. Jacobs, “once you agree on a premise — climate change is happening, and it’s worrisome — you can debate over the best technological approaches to tackle it, or what combination of government regulations and market forces will be most effective. That sort of substantive debate between political parties is, sadly, not possible in the U.S., at least for now.

“the robbery of the century,” and what one academic declared “the biggest tax theft in the history of Europe.” From 2006 to 2011, these two and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.

The scheme was built around “cum-ex trading” (from the Latin for “with-without”): a monetary maneuver to avoid double taxation of investment profits that plays out like high finance’s answer to a David Copperfield stage illusion. Through careful timing, and the coordination of a dozen different transactions, cum-ex trades produced two refunds for dividend tax paid on one basket of stocks.

One basket of stocks. Abracadabra. Two refunds

“It’s the Swedish trust in government,” says Elias Billman, 22. “No one told me you have to stay home right now,” agrees his friend, Fredrik Glückman, a history student at Lund University. “We’re not in quarantine. And as soon as we hear from our government that we have to stay in, like you do in Britain, then we will do it.”

While every other country in Europe has been ordered into ever more stringent coronavirus lockdown, Sweden has remained the exception. Schools, kindergartens, bars, restaurants, ski resorts, sports clubs, hairdressers: all remain open, weeks after everything closed down in next door Denmark and Norway.

Universities have been closed, and on Friday, the government tightened the ban on events to limit them to no more than 50 people. But if you develop symptoms, you can still go back to work or school just two days after you feel better. If a parent starts showing symptoms, they’re allowed to continue to send their children to school.

a fundamental question about the coronavirus pandemic remains unanswered: Just how deadly is this disease?

In Germany, fewer than three out of every 100 people with confirmed infections have died. In Italy the rate is almost five times higher, according to official figures.

Singapore, renowned for its careful testing, contact tracing and isolation of patients, saw only 10 deaths out of 4,427 cases through April 16. That yields a strikingly low case fatality rate of 0.2 percent, about twice the rate of seasonal influenza.

while there is cooperation on many levels — including among companies that are ordinarily fierce competitors — hanging over the effort is the shadow of a nationalistic approach that could give the winner the chance to favor its own population and potentially gain the upper hand in dealing with the economic and geostrategic fallout from the crisis.

What began as a question of who would get the scientific accolades, the patents and ultimately the revenues from a successful vaccine is suddenly a broader issue of urgent national security.

behind the scramble is a harsh reality: Any new vaccine that proves potent against the coronavirus — clinical trials are underway in the United States, China and Europe already — is sure to be in short supply as governments try to ensure that their own people are the first in line.

In Italy, 9.5 percent of the people who have tested positive for the virus have succumbed to covid-19, according to data compiled at Johns Hopkins University. In France, the rate is 4.3 percent. But in Germany, it’s 0.4 percent.

The biggest reason for the difference, infectious disease experts say, is Germany’s work in the early days of its outbreak to track, test and contain infection clusters. That means Germany has a truer picture of the size of its outbreak than places that test only the obviously symptomatic, most seriously ill or highest-risk patients.

Germany, with 31,150 cases at midday Tuesday, appeared to have a larger outbreak than France, with 20,149. But the higher death rate in France implies there were more undiagnosed cases there. France’s outbreak could be larger than Germany’s.

Donald Trump has announced that the US would temporarily suspend most travel from the European Union, as the country reckons with the spread of coronavirus and the White House grapples with the severity of the situation.

The restrictions, which would begin on Friday and last for 30 days, would not apply to US citizens or to travelers from the UK.

During the rare address to the nation, Trump defended his administration’s response while laying blame on the European Union for not acting quickly enough to address the “foreign virus”, saying US clusters had been “seeded” by European travelers.

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.”

I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.” The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, “is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions.”

Peston advocates a “wealth tax” – an annual levy of 1% on all net assets greater than £500,000. “Workers have become too powerless,” he goes on, and argues for “new forms of online collectivism” – digital trade union platforms – and the creation of a new ombudsman to regulate the labour market along the lines of the financial services’ Financial Conduct Authority.

. His book is full of depressing statistics about the vanishingly small prospect of disadvantaged Britons today climbing the economic or social ladder, but when I ask if he himself shares the worry that his own children will not enjoy a better life than his, he erupts.

Some big investors and banks are rethinking investments in an oil and gas industry wrestling with uncertain oil demand, government regulation and disruptive technology like electric vehicles.

government says it will decide this year whether to wind down its $1 trillion sovereign-wealth fund’s investments in the oil and gas sector.

The trend resembles—on a smaller scale—the early investor movement against the coal industry, which was rocked by an explosion in production of cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas in the U.S. over the past decade.

The United States, Norway and Britain joined forces with companies including Amazon (AMZN.O) and Nestle (NESN.S) on Thursday to launch a project aimed at protecting the world's tropical forests.

Governments and companies taking part will pay countries with tropical and subtropical forests for emissions reductions, a move it hopes will help reduce and eventually end deforestation.

The pace of deforestation actually picked up in 2020, LEAF said, with data from Global Forest Watch showing a 12 percent increase from the prior year or more than 10 million hectares of primary tropical forest, roughly the size of Switzerland.

Wanting to copy the happiest people in the world is an understandable impulse, but it distracts from a key message of the happiness rankings—that equitable, balanced societies make for happier residents.

In the process, a research-heavy, policy-oriented document gets mistaken, through a terrible global game of telephone, for a trove of self-help advice.

the list implies “a social understanding of happiness—something that happens between people,” which is a welcome alternative to the default assumption that individual people are responsible for their own misery. He also thinks it can show people which policies to vote for if they want to nudge their society in a happier direction.

Fewer people still knew that this piece of spook hardware was invented by a German (based on an idea by a Dutchman), that information about it was leaked to the French, and that it was first reconstructed by a Pole, before it was offered to Britain's codebreakers as a way of deciphering German signals traffic during World War Two

the Zimmermann telegram - a message from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Mexico City informing him of plans to invade the United States. On being notified of these plans, officials in Washington were understandably perturbed, and hastened to effect the entry of the US into the war.

Dr Arthur Scherbius had developed his 'Enigma' machine, capable of transcribing coded information, in the hope of interesting commercial companies in secure communications. In 1923 he set up his Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft (Cipher Machines Corporation) in Berlin to manufacture this product, and within three years the German navy was producing its own version, followed in 1928 by the army and in 1933 by the air force.

As the media struggles to make sense of President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland, some say that his motives are transparent: Greenland possesses vast untapped natural resources.

Of course, resource wealth does not always lead to well-being. In fact, in some cases the opposite seems to be true. The idea of a “resource curse” gained momentum in the early 2000s. It proposes a correlation between resource endowment, particularly oil, and the propensity for armed conflict, corruption, and poor development outcomes.

resources provide financial incentives for rebels to continue conflict, and governments to engage in misrule, with little of a country’s resource wealth translating into public welfare. Civil wars in resource-rich African countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the post-Cold War period are examples of this dynamic.

“happiness is, in the end, a much more complicated concept than income. Yet it is also a laudable and much more ambitious policy objective.”

it’s a challenge to set criteria for measuring happiness. However, in a conversation, she told me she did not see it as an insurmountable one: “It doesn’t have to be perfect; after all, it took us decades to agree upon what to include in G.D.P. and it is still far from a perfect metric.”

there remains the issue of being No. 1. Many of us have lived our lives in a country that has thought itself the world’s most powerful and successful. But with the United States economy in a frustrating stall as China rises, it seems that period is coming to an end. We are suffering a national identity crisis, and politicians are competing with one another to win favor by assuring a return to old familiar ways.

A long time ago, I read of a torture technique that a journalist heard was used by Hamas on residents of Gaza suspected of being informants: The person is shown a wall onto which a staircase is drawn, and at the top is a drawing of a bicycle. The person is told to go up and get the bicycle. But it’s only a drawing, he says. He is told that if he doesn’t bring the bicycle down the stairs, he will be beaten. And when, again, he appeals to his torturer’s reason, to the reality in which both the staircase and the bicycle are drawings, he is hit.

he part about the beautiful door is funny, but the really funny part, as far as my children are concerned, is when the late-night host gives the future president a chance to apologize to anyone he wants, and the president can’t think of anyone. No one at all? Nope, the president says.

Those of us with homes have been told to take refuge there, to stay within the walls. As such, no one can reach anyone except via satellite, and our only shared reality is the news, and the numbers of infections and fatalities.

The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — to measure quality of life.

Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand.

What are we to think, then, when we find that the world’s major military powers, which are also among the world’s richest nations, are failing badly when it comes to enhancing public happiness?

According to the most credible study of military expenditures (with figures drawn from 2018), three out of the top four military spenders, in rank order, are the United States, China, and India.

Ranked by total wealth, the United States is 1st, China 2nd, India 5th, and Russia 11th.  If ranked by their number of billionaires, the United States is 1st, China 2nd, India 4th, and Russia 5th.

The latest polling data from the company YouGov show Vietnam to lead the list of countries most supportive of their governments’ efforts to combat COVID-19. To be exact, 95% of Vietnamese people think their government is handling the pandemic “very” or “somewhat” well. But this doesn’t mean the Vietnamese people are letting down their guard. Of the 26 countries measured by the YouGov researchers, Vietnam also exhibits the highest level of COVID-19 fear; 89% of the Vietnamese population are “very” or “somewhat” concerned they will contract the disease. This finding is interesting, as one might assume that fear should drop to the extent that citizens believe their government has things under control. Then again, unprecedented events often produce unexpected results.

Other countries that are handling the crisis well, at least in the eyes of its citizens, include India, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Canada, and Finland. Where does the United States stand? Toward the bottom of the pack. According to the most recent YouGov polling data, less than half (49%) of Americans think the government is handling the pandemic “very” or “somewhat” well. This squares with other polling data in the United States. A recent Pew Research poll, for instance, found that 65% of Americans felt that the federal government was too slow to take major steps to address the threat posed by COVID-19.

The three countries where citizens show the weakest support of their governments’ handling of the pandemic are Spain, France, and Japan. In each of these countries, less than 40% of people are supportive of their governments’ handling of the crisis. And then there’s the case of Sweden. Interestingly, the data show a significant increase in Swedish citizens’ support of the way their government has handled the crisis. Currently, 57% of Swedes think their government is handling the pandemic “very” or “somewhat” well compared to 41% a month ago. This may have to do with the fact that more Swedes are buying into the government’s contrarian approach to managing the crisis. Unlike most of the developed world, Sweden decided not to close businesses and schools. A recent article in Bloomberg suggests that COVID-19 infections and fatalities are beginning to plateau in Sweden and the popularity of Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has soared.