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Some 73 percent of Americans polled late last year said that global warming was happening, the report found, a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015 and three points since last March.

It was conducted online in November and December by Ipsos, which polled 1,114 American adults

“It is something that is activating an emotion in people, and that emotion is worry,” he said. The survey found that 69 percent of Americans were “worried” about warming, an eight-point increase since March.

he was surprised and maddened by the pushback when he mentioned tax. “One American looked at me as if I was from another planet,” he said.

Bregman decided to change his plan for a panel on inequality

It was mainly to ease my own conscience: someone has to say what needs to be said.”

The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 — amounting to about 6.8 million fewer workers in 2016.

Between 50 and 70 percent of that decline probably was due to an aging population.

pretty much all the missing jobs are accounted for.

Florida lawmakers bucked the National Rifle Association on Wednesday to pass new firearms regulations and create a program for arming some school employees in a rare act of Republican compromise on the divisive issue of gun violence.

A bipartisan vote of 67 to 50 in the state House ended an emotional three-week process, during which the state’s legislative leadership toured the bloodstained hallways at the high school and thousands of students marched on the state capital in Tallahassee to demand change.

After weeks of debate, lawmakers approved a bill that would impose a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns and raise the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21.

implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement.

Not far from the sites tourists already know, like the towering temples of the ancient city of Tikal, laser technology has uncovered about 60,000 homes, palaces, tombs and even highways in the humid lowlands.The findings suggested an ancient society of such density and interconnectedness that even the most experienced archaeologists were surprised.

More than 800 square miles of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala’s Petén region have been mapped, according to an exclusive report by National Geographic

But it is not only about protecting cultural treasures, Ms. Hernandez said. The project is part of a broad push to fight climate change, generate tourism dollars and prevent illegal activities like border trafficking and deforestation in protected areas.“This is a Guatemalan effort,” she said. “We need to marry the interest in pursuing scientific stories with our interest in finding a sustainable model for the area.”

In synthesizing this period in European history in a long but very readable volume

Kershaw reminds us that the Continent has faced other large challenges in the postwar era and survived; that some long-term trends of peace, prosperity and democracy are both robust and remarkable; and that individuals have agency, and can alter the course of events — they are not mere expressions of those events.

Today’s Europe, thankfully, is not haunted by the specter of nuclear war. The probability of a Russian invasion of a NATO member is low.

For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.

Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.

The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.

It took several centuries for Buddhism to travel from India to Japan. Once Buddhism was established in Japan, however, it flourished. Buddhism had an incalculable impact on Japanese civilization. At the same time, schools of Buddhism imported from mainland Asia became distinctively Japanese.

The Koreans brought with them Buddhist sutras, an image of the Buddha, and a letter from the Korean prince praising the dharma. This was the official introduction of Buddhism to Japan.

The Japanese aristocracy promptly split into pro- and anti-Buddhist factions. Buddhism gained little real acceptance until the reign of the Empress Suiko and her regent, Prince Shotoku (592 to 628 CE).

Our nation’s students are at the forefront of a technological revolution that is expanding our ability to assert our First Amendment rights.

bias against conservative views exists in higher education. College students from across the nation have testified on this matter before Congress, detailing the difficulties they have encountered in hosting conservative speakers on campus.

The deterioration of the freedom of speech on college campuses has become so apparent that some states have already begun taking action.

Angela Merkel is traditionally known as Germany’s “safe pair of hands,” but when government-coalition talks unexpectedly collapsed late Sunday night after just four weeks, her future as the country’s chancellor was suddenly in question.

pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) party announced that it would no longer take part in coalition talks to form Germany’s next government. Though Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party won the largest share of votes during the country’s general election in September, they failed to win enough seats to govern on their own.

With Jamaica no longer an option, Germany is faced with three choices: The first is a minority government, formed by Merkel’s CDU/CSU party in coalition with either the FDP (which would leave the government 29 seats short of a majority) or the Greens (short 42 seats). Though that’s not impossible, Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me this option would be alien to both Merkel’s leadership style and the country as a whole. “For historical reasons, Germans are very skeptical of minority governments because it reminds people of the Weimar period,” he said, referring to the post-World War I period between 1918 and 1933 known for its political instability. “For somebody like Angela Merkel, it’s not in her style of governing to run a minority government because she’s not exactly a big gambler.” And a minority government would certainly be a gamble for Merkel—effectively denying her the authority she needs to push through reforms both at home and within the eurozone. “She’s somebody who doesn’t just embody stability, but I think she also likes stability herself.”

the idea persists that there is something wrong and oppressive about people of one background adopting and adapting the artifacts of another.

A Canadian university cancelled its yoga classes as culturally appropriating—notwithstanding that most of the strenuous moves taught in a modern class actually originate in Danish gymnastics and British army calisthenics, which were in turn appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs seeking to update yoga from a meditative to an active practice for the body-conscious modern age.

The cultural appropriation police answer the yoga and banh mi objections with a familiar counter-argument: it’s about power. It’s fine for colonized Indians to incorporate European fitness regimes into their yoga; wrong for Canadians of European origin to incorporate yoga into their fitness regimes.

The conflict between the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) and the Valois King of France Francis I (1494-1547) commenced in 1521 and came to an end in 1559 in the reigns of their successors, Philip II and Henry II

to Christendom as a whole

One explanation for the protracted nature of the Habsburg-Valois wars is that the character of warfare was changing

For eleven years, from his defeat at the Boyne in July 1690 until his death in September 1701, James II lived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (near Versailles) in one of the most spectacular royal palaces of the Baroque period

Louis was obliged to recognise William III as de facto King of England, as a condition for signing the peace treaty of Ryswick, which marked the end of the War of the League of Augsburg. The treaty in no way affected James II’s status as de jure king, nor his son’s status as de jure Prince of Wales, but James now had to tolerate the presence in Paris, and occasionally at the French Court, of a hostile English ambassador

At the tercentenary of the King’s death, it is surely time to take a closer look at the life that James led in France

Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that

Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance

It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world

Shakespeare's later Tudor view of Henry VII changed very little between the first study of the reign by Francis Bacon in 1622 and Henry's last academic biography, by Stanley Chrimes, in 1973

Henry Tudor could not understand the problems he faced, and was essentially a bad medieval king. He could only have changed their policies after he had learned how to be an effective king. However, this interpretation takes little account of Henry's particular circumstances in 1485. It was precisely because of his unique upbringing and disconnection from England that Henry Tudor was able to bring new ways of doing things to his kingdom. Between about 1480 and 1520 England was certainly transformed from what Nicholas Pronay described as the 'merry but unstable England ruled by Edward IV to the tame, sullen and tense land inherited by Henry VIII'

It was control of personal relationships and mental attitudes among the people who represented the king that Henry VII saw as the key to forcing change upon the medieval ruling structures he inherited

opposition to welfare programs has grown among white Americans since 2008, even when controlling for political views and socioeconomic status.

White Americans are more likely to favor welfare cuts when they believe that their status is threatened and that minorities are the main beneficiaries of safety net programs, the study says.

T hat also hurts white Americans who make up the largest share of Medicaid and food-stamp recipients.

Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history

what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018.

A record 3.3 million people filed claims for unemployment in the US last week as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down large parts of America’s economy.

he number of new jobless claims filed by individuals seeking unemployment benefits rose by more than three million to 3.28m from 281,000 the previous week. The figure is the highest ever reported, beating the previous record of 695,000 claims filed the week ending 2 October 1982.

Across the US, laid off workers have overwhelmed state labor departments with claims for unemployment benefits. In New York City, which now accounts for roughly 5% of global Covid-19 cases, there has been a 1,000% increase in claims.