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Local politicians announced plans on Monday to make Oslo, the capital of Norway, the first-ever European capital to totally ban cars in a district of a city. The ban will go into effect by 2019. 

the new measures will implement a "comprehensive and permanent ban" on cars in central Oslo and fund a "massive boost" in public transportation investment.

"We want to have a car-free center," politician Lan Marie Nguyen Berg told the news agency. "We want to make it better for pedestrians, cyclists. It will be better for shops and everyone." Reuters reports Oslo has somewhere short of 350,000 cars. Among the new projects being discussed are 60 kilometers of bike lanes and special accommodations for disabled residents and commercial deliveries.

For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players

Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade

Hamas officials said they had introduced the new textbooks, and doubled the time devoted to the national education course to two sessions per week,

“We need to make sure generations stick to the national rights,”

In April, Hamas approved a law requiring gender-segregated schools from age 9, and making criminal any contact between educational institutions and Israel.

E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.

In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.

One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”

the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years

Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II.

the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.

Twenty-six Palestinian prisoners have been released from Israeli jails, as part of a US-brokered deal to restart Middle East negotiations.

It is the third of four stages to free 104 inmates that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed to let go when the talks were renewed in July. They have been convicted of killing Israeli civilians or soldiers and have spent between 19 and 28 years in prison.

We will not sign a final peace deal with Israel before all the prisoners are released,'' he said.

Netanyahu and Herzog differ stylistically and dispositionally, and yes, their views on a range of economic, security, and social issues are miles apart, but it is their diverging approaches to management of the American file that is most dramatic.

what does Herzog think about Obama—and specifically, about his handling of the Iran nuclear talks? Here is what he told me in December, when I interviewed him at the Brookings Institution's Saban Forum: "I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal."

Whether he actually does, I do not know. But I do know that he is clever enough to talk about the U.S.-Israel relationship with discretion and nuance

Pål André Holme, a professor of hematology and chief physician of the Oslo University Hospital who headed an investigation into the Norwegian cases, said his team had identified an antibody created by the vaccine that was triggering the adverse reaction.

“Nothing but the vaccine can explain why these individuals had this immune response,” Prof. Holme said.

In Germany, 13 cases of CVST were detected among around 1.6 million people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine. Twelve patients were women and three died.

The global death toll from COVID-19 topped 5 million on Monday, less than two years into a crisis that has not only devastated poor countries but also humbled wealthy ones with first-rate health care systems.

Together, the United States, the European Union, Britain and Brazil — all upper-middle- or high-income countries — account for one-eighth of the world’s population but nearly half of all reported deaths. The U.S. alone has recorded over 740,000 lives lost, more than any other nation.

The death toll, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. It rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Globally, COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and stroke.

it dawned on us that what has happened is nothing like the Yom Kippur War. In newspapers, on social media and in family gatherings, people are making comparisons to the Jewish people’s darkest hours — as when the mobile killing units of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen surrounded and murdered Jewish villagers during the Holocaust, and when pogroms were waged against Jews in the Russian Empire.

So how did it happen? How did the state of Israel go missing in action?

On one level, Israelis are paying the price for years of hubris, during which our governments and many ordinary Israelis felt we were so much stronger than the Palestinians, that we could just ignore them. There is much to criticize about the way Israel has abandoned the attempt to make peace with the Palestinians and has held for decades millions of Palestinians under occupation.

for years now, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel have been saying this is a catastrophe — that it is a catastrophe for Israeli security, a catastrophe for Israeli democracy, a catastrophe for Israelis’ international standing, and a catastrophe for Israel’s soul. Their warnings seem quite prescient now.

they’ve argued there was another way. There was a huge amount Israel could do on its own and should have been doing, that if Israel is not going to tip into a kind of single state that it did not want and could not ultimately defend, that the conditions had to be created now for something else to emerge in the future.

One of the people working on that project was Nimrod Novik. He’s my guest today. Novik was a top aide to Shimon Peres when Peres was prime minister and vice premier. In that role, Novik was involved in all manner of negotiations with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with the international community. He’s on the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, which is a group I mentioned a minute ago. And he’s an Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum.