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minister, asked for an overhaul of an agreement on post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland,

a serious escalation in a simmering dispute over how Northern Ireland fits into the British withdrawal from the European Union.

His speech served as something of a pre-emptive strike, coming just one day before the European Commission,

That could include increasing the number of signatures needed to force a recall election, raising the standard to require wrongdoing on the part of the officeholder and changing the process that could permit someone with a small percentage of votes to replace the state’s top elected official.

The governor noted that California has one of the nation’s lowest thresholds for the number of signatures needed to trigger a recall election.

But the efforts faced pushback from those who organized the recall election against Newsom and questions from experts, who said California’s law is better than many others in limiting requirements that make it harder to recall politicians.

SEOUL, South Korea — The government of President Moon Jae-in said on Friday that it would pardon former President Park Geun-hye, who is serving a 20-year prison term after she was convicted on bribery and other criminal charges.

Ms. Park, 69, who became the first democratically elected South Korean leader to be removed from office through parliamentary impeachment,

will be freed on Dec. 31 to promote “reconciliation and consolidate national power to help overcome the national crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

A bitterly divided U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly on Wednesday to censure Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.

The vote was 223 to 207, with just two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining Democrats in favor. One other Republican, Representative David Joyce of Ohio, voted “present.”

They said the rapid move to pass a censure resolution exposed the Democrats’ true agenda: silencing conservatives by branding them as instigators of violence.

The Biden administration will not send any American government officials to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, making official a diplomatic boycott to pressure China for human rights abuses.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that while American athletes would be able to compete in the Winter Games in Beijing, there would be no delegation of American officials.She said the boycott was a response to human rights abuses in Xinjiang.“This is just an indication that it cannot be business as usual,” Ms. Psaki said. “That does not mean that is the end of the concerns we will raise about human rights abuses.”

“This boycott is a necessary step to demonstrate our unwavering commitment to human rights in the face of the Chinese government’s unconscionable abuses,” Mr. Menendez said, adding that he hoped other nations would join the United States.

Over the past eight years, the Russian government has promoted the idea that the motherland is surrounded by enemies, filtering the concept through national institutions like schools, the military, the news media and the Orthodox Church. It has even raised the possibility that the country might again have to defend itself as it did against the Nazis in World War II.

And all are united by the near-sacred memory of Soviet victory in World War II — one that the state has seized upon to shape an identity of a triumphal Russia that must be ready to take up arms once more.

This year, the share of Russians saying they feared a world war hit the highest level recorded in surveys dating to 1994 — 62 percent.

Also known as the Seven Years’ War, this New World conflict marked another chapter in the long imperial struggle between Britain and France.

William Pitt, the British turned the tide with victories at Louisbourg, Fort Frontenac and the French-Canadian stronghold of Quebec. At the 1763 peace conference, the British received the territories of Canada from France and Florida from Spain, opening the Mississippi Valley to westward expansion.

In the early 1750s, France’s expansion into the Ohio River valley repeatedly brought it into conflict with the claims of the British colonies, especially Virginia. In 1754, the French built Fort Duquesne where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers joined to form the Ohio River (in today’s Pittsburgh), making it a strategically important stronghold that the British repeatedly attacked. 

Texas’ climate risks. Houston will not do well on a warming planet — it is economically dependent on the oil and gas industry and is threatened by hurricanes and a surge in sea levels. But other big cities, including Dallas and Fort Worth, face more moderate risks, especially compared to many cities in California. Yes, Texas is very hot and likely to get hotter; but if a lot of other American cities also begin to get very hot, Texas cities might not feel as overheated by comparison. In addition to the risk of heat stress, Texas also faces the possibility of water shortages, but that will be true across much of the West, including California’s population centers.

What Texans will not have to worry about as much are wildfires, the scourge of so much of California, and the attendant air pollution, though experts predict increases in wildfires in Texas. It’s true that Texas’ less extreme fire risk is related to something precious about California that Texas lacks — abundant trees and mountains in major metro areas, or really any of California’s striking natural beauty. But nobody said living through climate change would be pretty.

You might argue that it’s too speculative to take into account something as broad and complex as climate change when deciding where to live. And more important, there’s no real escape from a long-term planetary disaster — even if you move to some place with lovely weather, your life is bound to be altered in significant ways as habitability shifts elsewhere on the globe.

Mr Biden warned his Russian counterpart, threatening retribution if Russian troops currently massing on Ukraine’s borders launched an invasion.

blocs start to align in what looks like a new world energy order. 

“This represents the biggest re-drawing of the energy and geopolitical map in Europe — and possibly the world — since the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not the end of World War II,

The outcome, he said, could be “a sequel to the Cold War.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a seismic event, perhaps the most significant one in international life since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This war marks the end of an age. But what can we say about the new one we are entering?

Most important, it is marked by the triumph of politics over economics.

On May 4, 1891, as gale-force winds and waves raged on Lake Superior, the crew of a schooner barge named Atlanta abandoned ship as it sank. The six men and one woman, a cook, clung to their lifeboat for nine hours, fighting at its oars to guide it to the Michigan shore.

Only two men survived.

This month, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society said that the wreckage of the Atlanta had been found after it had sat undetected in the cold oblivion of the lake’s depths for more than a century. The announcement revived the story of how the Atlanta’s crew members fought for their lives on the world’s largest freshwater lake.

The atrocities that Russian troops have committed in Ukraine raise two questions about Russians at home: Do they know their military is doing these things? And if they do, are they OK with it? The answers are almost certainly “Yes” and “They’re working on it.”

Ostensibly, the Putin regime has done its best to starve Russians of truthful information. Independent news outlets have been closed outright or blocked on the internet. Those still active cannot be reached without a virtual private network

is this information blockade really effective?

Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history

This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families

A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,

In a chilling, existential, bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question: Did Manhattan Project scientists think there was even a minute possibility that detonating the first atomic bomb on the remote plains of New Mexico could destroy the world?

physicists knew it wouldn’t, long before the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, about 210 miles south of the secret Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory.

“This thing has been blown out of proportion over the years,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The question on the scientists’ minds before the test, he said, “wasn’t, ‘Is it going to blow up the world?’ It was, ‘Is it going to work at all?’”

Trigger warnings migrated from feminist websites and blogs to college campuses and progressive groups. Often, they seemed more about emphasizing the upsetting nature of certain topics than about accommodating people who had experienced traumatic events. By 2013, they had become so pervasive—and so controversial—that Slate declared it “The Year of the Trigger Warning.”

he issue only got more complicated from there. Around 2016, Richard Friedman, who ran the student mental-health program at Cornell for 22 years, started seeing the number of people seeking help each year increase by 10 or 15 percent. “Not just that,” he told me, “but the way young people were talking about upsetting events changed.

He described “this sense of being harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The language that was being used seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done. I mean, I was surprised—people were very upset about things that we would never have thought would be dangerous.” Some students, for instance, complained about lecturers who’d made comments they disliked, or teachers whose beliefs contradicted their personal values.

These claims of criminalizing politics are themselves nothing but spin. They imply that Trump and his associates took no action beyond typical political maneuvering.

there’s something telling about this phrasing. Politics, it suggests, is a dirty game, where the players jockey viciously for advantage—and if the game becomes rough, well, nothing can be done about that.

actually is not the case: Attempting to overturn an election and hold on to power despite the will of the voters is far from typical politics.

China’s boom was underpinned by unusually high levels of domestic investment in infrastructure and other hard assets, which accounted for about 44% of GDP each year on average between 2008 and 2021. That compared with a global average of 25% and around 20% in the U.S., according to World Bank data.

Such heavy spending was made possible in part by a system of “financial repression” in which state banks set deposit rates low, which meant they could raise funds inexpensively and fund building projects. China added tens of thousands of miles of highways, hundreds of airports, and the world’s largest network of high-speed trains.

About one-fifth of apartments in urban China, or at least 130 million units, were estimated to be unoccupied in 2018,

the gritty child-trafficking thriller billed as the “film Hollywood did not want you to see” has defied all expectations, beating Harrison Ford’s movie on Independence Day and earning rave reviews from fans — including Mel Gibson, who wept after watching it.

The film made $14.2 million on its opening day on July 4, while Indiana Jones, which was released late last month, took in $11 million despite being available in far more cinemas.

Caviezel, 54, who has been accused of promoting conspiracy theories about child sacrifice, said the film’s success was proof that Americans are “waking up” to the evil industry.

Long a linchpin of Chinese trade in Europe, Germany is increasingly caught in the diplomatic tussle between the world’s two largest economies — wooed by China but urged by Washington to move further away from Beijing

These companies provide the majority of Germany’s economic output, according to some studies. They employ 60 percent of its workers, and make up 99 percent of its private sector — a higher percentage than in any industrialized nation in the world.

These companies, known in German as the “Mittelstand,” are struggling to create a model for the future, as the country’s socioeconomic order begins to falter under the weight of stalled modernization and ruptures in global politics.