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We must now reckon with this fact: Human history is the bumbling-about of self-deluded and incompetent doinks. Surely you are not going to deny that. It is nothing so much as a series of pratfalls by inept leaders and the suckers who follow them toward doom. Their incompetence is a historical force in the lives of each and all of us.

It is now painfully clear that we’ve overestimated intelligence as a world-changing force; it is idiocy that holds sway

The traditional culmination of a philosophy of history is to identify the goal, end or destination of the whole human saga. I speculate that the Trump-Kim dialectic is the final stage, in which history simultaneously realizes and annihilates itself, and us with it.

I was wrong in the priority that I gave the deficit relative to other issues, wrong to discern a looming “fiscal precipice,” wrong in some of the criticism I leveled at both George W. Bush and Barack Obama for failing to care enough about balancing the nation’s books.

in hindsight the most important economic argument of the early Obama years was between two schools of thought that agreed we should put more money into the economy and only disagreed about how to do it — the Keynesians who wanted massive government spending and the market monetarists who favored looser monetary policy. Today, both sides of that debate look far better than the strict fiscal and monetary hawks, and the endless arguments about Bowles-Simpson look like an interesting exercise that did not deserve so much swarming attention from politicians and the press.

a rich and powerful country with a stable government and control over its own currency (which is to say, not a prisoner of the euro) should be willing to live with a loose fiscal policy when wage growth is disappointing and inflation low, and it should debate tax and spending changes on their own terms — will this money be put to good use? — rather than pursuing a balanced budget for its own sake.

Half of Italy's 20 regions, which include the cities Rome, Milan and Venice, will be entering new coronavirus restrictions from Monday, March 15. The measures will be effective through April 6, according to a decree passed by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi's cabinet on Friday.

Affected regions will be labelled red or orange, depending on the level of contagion. Regions that report weekly Covid-19 cases of more than 250 per 100,000 residents will also automatically go into lockdown, meaning that other regions could also be affected during this time period

Additionally, over Easter weekend, the entire country will be considered a "red zone," and will be subject to a national lockdown from April 3 to 5.

An American contractor went to a small town in the Guatemalan mountains with an ambitious goal: to ignite the local economy, and hopefully even persuade people not to migrate north to the United States.

Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”

As vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led an enormous push to deter people from crossing into the United States by devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to Central America, hoping to make the region more tolerable for the poor — so that fewer would abandon it.

Heavy fighting has erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, with both civilians and combatants killed.

Accusing Azerbaijan of air and artillery attacks, Armenia reported downing helicopters and destroying tanks, and declared martial law.Azerbaijan said it had begun a counter-offensive in response to shelling

The region is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but controlled by ethnic Armenians.

Politics|Conservatives Voice Support for Mulvaney

telling President Trump in a letter that the “D.C. swamp is attacking him” and urging the president to permanently appoint him to the job.

The letter was signed by dozens of conservatives

Iran has announced that it will no longer abide by any of the limits imposed by the unravelling 2015 nuclear deal, and Iraq’s parliament urged its leaders to expel troops from the US-led coalition, as the aftershocks of the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani reverberated through the Middle East.

the Iranian government said the country would no longer observe limitations on uranium enrichment, stockpiles of enriched uranium or nuclear research and development. But the statement noted that the steps could be reversed if Washington lifted its sanctions on Tehran.

The Iraqi parliament’s call to expel US troops was another clear sign of blowback from the assassination – and was quickly hailed by Suleimani’s supporters as a major step towards one of his main goals.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed gave Tigrayan regional forces 72 hours to surrender before the military begins an offensive on the regional capital of Mekelle.

Ethiopian troops plan to surround Mekelle with tanks and may shell the city to force surrender.

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF),

On Wednesday, the Spanish Health Ministry reported that the 14-day incidence rate had fallen 20 points to 3,286 per 100,000. This is the second day in a row that this data point has dropped after two months on the rise.

What’s more, while hospitals remain under strain, the situation is far from what it was during other waves.

In response to the surge in coronavirus infections in the leadup to Christmas, the Spanish government announced on December 23 that face masks would once again be mandatory outdoors. At the time, Darias said this measure would be in place “until the epidemiological situation improved.”

A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.

The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.

But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.

in 2017, the story took an unexpected turn – the seven-continent model has been a mistake all along. Enter Zealandia, a long-lost land to the southeast of Australia, otherwise known as the planet's forgotten eighth continent. Scientists had long predicted the existence of this bonus southern landmass, but it remained missing for 375 years – largely because it’s almost entirely submerged under 1-2 km (0.6-1.2 miles) of water. Now they are beginning to unravel its secrets.

This month, an international team of researchers released the most detailed maps of Zealandia to date – incorporating all five million square kilometres (two million sq miles) of this underwater region and its geology. In the process, they have uncovered hints as to how this mysterious continent formed – and why it has been obscured beneath the waves for the last 25 million years.

Zealandia is thought to have formed around 83 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous. However, its journey began up to 100 million years before that, when the supercontinent of Gondwana – which congealed much of today's land into one giant lump – started to break up. As it disintegrated, the world's smallest, thinnest and youngest continent struck out on its own, while the regions of Gondwana that had once laid directly to its north west and south west became Australia and Antarctica, respectively.

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.

In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

. The Chinese government stunned environmentalists this year by reviving plans to build a series of hydropower dams on the upper reaches of the Nu,

Critics say the project will force the relocation of tens of thousands of ethnic minorities in the highlands of Yunnan and destroy the spawning grounds for a score of endangered fish species. Geologists warn that constructing the dams in a seismically active region could threaten those living downstream.

Among the biggest losers could be the millions of farmers and fishermen across the border in Myanmar and Thailand who depend on the Salween,

By some estimates, Americans sleep two to three hours fewer today than they did before the industrial revolution.

now a new study is challenging that notion. It found that Americans on average sleep as much as people in three different hunter-gatherer societies where there is no electricity and the lifestyles have remained largely the same for thousands of years.

Dr. Siegel said he worried that putting a number on the amount of sleep people require could push those who get less to resort to using sleeping pills, which carry severe side effects. About 5 percent of Americans take sleeping pills, a percentage that has doubled in the past two decades.

When he takes the debate stage, he does not smile.

The closest thing to it is a sore-loser sneer for failing to get an Emmy out of a reality television show that allowed him to belittle women. He tries to act normal — to hold back the hatred inside him. But this dangerous man is incapable of bottling up his dark self for a full 90 minutes.

The best presidents are aspirational, urging us to climb every mountain and ford every stream. Trump has never been able to make it out of the gutter.

“This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,” writes Matthew Continetti,

“After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home.”

“what makes this crisis acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it on themselves.”

the church does not allow nations to take up arms and go to war merely when they have a high moral cause on their side. Justice is necessary, but it is not sufficient:

Peaceful means of ending the evil in question need to have been exhausted, there must be serious prospects of military success, and (crucially) “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

What this teaching suggests is that we should have a strong bias in favor of peaceful deliberation so long as deliberation remains possible.