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About 4,000 years ago, people started burning the forest, which was mostly bamboo, just enough to make small openings. They may have planted maize or squash, weeded out some underbrush, and transported seeds or saplings to create a partly curated forest of useful tree products that Dr. Watling calls a “prehistoric supermarket.” After that, they started building the geoglyphs. The presence of just a few artifacts, and the layout of the earthworks, suggest they weren’t used as ancient villages or for military defenses. They were likely built for rituals, some archaeologists suspect.

in contrast with the large-scale deforestation we see today — which threatens about 20 percent of the largest rain forest in the world — ancient indigenous people of the Amazon practiced something more akin to what we now call agroforestry. They restricted burns to site locations and maintained the surrounding landscape, creating small, temporary clearings in the bamboo and promoting the growth of plants like palm, cedar and Brazil nut that were, and still are, useful commodities. Today, indigenous groups around the world continue these sustainable practices in forests.

There are two kinds of shoppers, says Brett Gordon, a professor at Columbia Business School. There's the bargain-hunter and the clock-watcher. If the first walks into a store without a bargain, she leaves. But the second customer isn't looking for markdowns. She's looking at her watch. She just wants what she wants, and fast, coupons or no.

“It has now become standard for every Bavarian to have traditional clothing in their wardrobe, and from here it has simply expanded,” she said. “Everyone wears them.”

“Everyone is longing for a world that is intact,” said Mr. Hittenkofer, whose modern dirndls hark back to the traditional dresses,

“This generation is incredibly conservative,” he said. “Many struggle for orientation in the globalized world, but discover they are able to find themselves in traditional clothes.”

“For me the dirndl has always been associated with good times, and with a feeling of home,” she said. “I always wore one on happy occasions, a relative’s birthday, to celebrations in church; whenever something nice happened.”

The surging demand has also resulted in waves of mass-produced dirndls and lederhosen that sell for as little as $40 to $95 in chain stores and even supermarkets,

The Committee to Protect Journalists described Wednesday’s police statement and Thursday’s summoning of the media figures as the kind of “forced patriotism” that was “potentially a sign of a downward spiral of press freedom” in Kenya.

The country is known to have one of the freest and most robust news industries in Africa, but it is currently facing two new bills that could change the industry landscape

closed-circuit television video from inside the Westgate mall during the attack appeared on national and international news media showing Kenyan security agents carrying full plastic shopping bags out of the Nakumatt supermarket in the Westgate mall,

In the police briefing Wednesday, Mr. Kimaiyo said the news media “need not distribute or maybe issue statements that can amount to hate speech.”

The agencies leading and disseminating information about the investigation have also seemingly shifted in a Round Robin among the police, the army and the Internal Affairs Ministry.

“Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”

The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.

overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.

This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t ru

Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again

HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And

we change how people feel by changing the environment.”

Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco.

Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone.

did not believe there was a direct connection between the events in Belgium and the carnage in France last week when gunmen conducted a three-day onslaught that left 17 people dead.

Mr. Coulibaly was accused of shooting dead a police officer on Jan. 8 and taking hostages at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris the next day, killing four of them.

As the waves of alarm spread, the only Orthodox Jewish school in the Netherlands was closed on Friday, Reuters reported, even though there was no specific threat against it.

In Germany, prosecutors said that 250 officers had raided 11 apartments after months of tracking a group that was said to support the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, with money and the recruitment of combatants.

Verviers is home to one of the biggest mosques in French-speaking Belgium, the newspaper report

The attacks last week provoked alarm, not simply about terrorism but also about a wider range of issues relating to the balance between liberty and security

The editorial director of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier, who signed his drawings with the name “Charb,” was buried on Friday in Pontoise, near Paris, where he had lived as a child.

With France on its highest level of alert, 10,000 troops have deployed across the country. Thousands of police officers are on patrol, including hundreds assigned to protect Jewish schools.

It's unclear how many people are blamed for the 54 infractions. The cases include investigations involving phone threats, cyberattacks and Facebook posts, the ministry said.

"We're not waiting around here to die."

Not many French Jews make the decision to emigrate here in such public or such painful circumstances

the idea that a history of persecution and statelessness gave the Jewish people the right to a place of safety.

renewed force in the aftermath of the Holocaust

About 7,000 Jews came to Israel from France in 2014

Now clearly all sorts of factors will lie behind every one of those individual decisions, but in Israel the rising numbers of French migrants will be seen by many as a kind of rough and ready measure of the level of anti-Semitism in French society.

Israel is in the middle of an election campaign, and several party leaders - including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - have travelled to France in the aftermath of last week's attacks.

Israel stands ready to welcome them with open arms if they decide to come.

“I suspect that Chérif Kouachi did engage AQAP members in Yemen, but that he was not fully brought into the organization,

The statement by the Qaeda branch in Yemen called the Kouachi brothers, who were shot to death by police on Friday, “two heroes of Islam.” But it referred to the actions of Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a police officer the day of the assault on Charlie Hebdo and was shot to death by police after holding hostages in a kosher supermarket, as a coincidence and did not take responsibility for them.

a song referring to the march on January 11 last year, in which more than 1 million people joined world leaders to march in solidarity

Hollande also made an unannounced visit to the Grand Mosque of Paris

A state of emergency is still in place in France, and people there are still struggling to come to terms with the horrendous events of last year.

The French are hesitating between anger and fear

It's very difficult for the Parisians, because they know they have been touched in the heart, but at the same time they would like their lives to go on like before -- but they also know that is not possible

ISIS claimed responsibility.

Paris, already on edge, faced a fresh scare Thursday as police shot dead a knife-wielding man on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks

"I am here to show my support and to say that we must continue to live," he told CNN.

A three-time Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, defined his party’s purpose as “hostility to radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility … The fear that radicalism may triumph is the only final cause that the Conservative party can plead for its own existence”

his party has today been hijacked by the radicals. It no longer has space for the Keynesianism of Rab Butler or the liberalism of Francis Pym. It is the home of the radical right. That defines the Brexit project; it is also the dying embers of Thatcherism.

It also called into question the economic assumptions that had guided the country since World War II, opening the door for new assumptions that have governed us ever since.

Slowly, though, inflation entered the picture. It hit 5.7 percent in 1970, then 11 percent in 1974. Such sustained inflation was something that had never happened in stable postwar America. And it was punishing. For a family of modest means, a trip to the supermarket was now a walk over hot coals.

Total credit card balances began to explode.

the average family of 1936 was near poor. Everyone was in it together, and if Bill couldn’t find work, his neighbor would give him a head of cabbage, a slab of pork belly.

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But the Great Inflation, as the author Joe Nocera has noted, made most people feel they had to look out for themselves

Throw in wage stagnation, which began in the early ’70s, and deindustrialization of the great cities of the North

Inflation also produced the manic search for “yield” — it was no longer enough to save money; your money had to make money, turning every wage earner into a player in market rapaciousness

Even as Americans scrambled for return, they also sought to spend

The Great Inflation was an inflection point that changed us for the worse. This moment can be another such point, but one that will change us for the better.

a 2006 Department of Labor study pegged the average household income of 1934-36 at $1,524. Adjust for inflation to 2018, that’s about $28,000, while the official poverty level for a family of four was $25,100

Americans became a more acquisitive — bluntly, a more selfish — people. The second change was far more profound.

John Maynard Keynes. His “demand side” theories — increase demand via public investment, even if it meant running a short-term deficit — guided the New Deal, the financing of the war and pretty much all policy thinking thereafter. And not just among Democrats: Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were Keynesians.

There had been a group of economists, mostly at the University of Chicago and led by Milton Friedman, who dissented from Keynes. They argued against government intervention and for lower taxes and less regulation. As Keynesian principles promoted demand side, their theories promoted the opposite: supply side.

Inflation was Keynesianism’s Achilles’ heel, and the supply-siders aimed their arrow right at it. Reagan cut taxes significantly. Inflation ended (which was really the work of Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve). The economy boomed. Economic debate changed; even the way economics was taught changed.

And this, more or less, is where we’ve been ever since

walk down a street and ask 20 people a few questions about economic policy — I bet most will say that taxes must be kept low, even on rich people, and that we should let the market, not the government, decide on investments. Point to the hospital up the street and tell them that it wouldn’t even be there without the millions in federal dollars of various kinds it takes in every year, and they’ll mumble and shrug.

we have a long way to go. Dislodging 40-year-old assumptions is a huge job. The Democrats, for starters, have to develop and defend a plausible alternative theory of growth

But others have a responsibility here too — notably, our captains of commerce.

They will always be rich. But they have to decide what kind of country they want to be rich i

Then along came Ronald Reagan. The great secret to his success was not his uncomplicated optimism or his instinct for seizing a moment. It was that he freed people of the responsibility of introspection, released them from the guilt in which liberalism seemed to want to make them wallow.

they can move moderate and maybe even conservative public opinion in a way that Democratic politicians, civic leaders and celebrities cannot.

A place of more and more tax cuts for them, where states keep slashing their higher-education spending and tuitions keep skyrocketing; where the best job opportunity in vast stretches of America is selling opioids; where many young people no longer believe in capitalism and record numbers of them would leave this country if they could?

Or a country more like the one they and their parents grew up in, where we invested in ourselves and where work produced a fair and livable wage?

Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.

It’s not just Elon Musk, who stated that ‘there’s a one in a billion chance we’re living in base reality,’ who believes this—in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty

Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it.

once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn’t physical reality be next? With Google’s Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn’t the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?

Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they’re just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’

Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.

Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn’t a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us

there’s always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal—it’s just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.

The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage

In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast

‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?

the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can’t really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you’re using to read these words right now;

simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we’ve known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality

Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn’t ‘really’ exist, there’s no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground

Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren’t actually blinded by artifice; they’re fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality—they’ve just decided that it’s not this one

What’s far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.

one of Oodi’s architects, has described the new library as “an indoor town square” – a far cry from the stereotypical view of libraries as stale and silent spaces. “[Oodi] has been designed to give citizens and visitors a free space to actively do what they want to do – not just be a consumer or a flâneur,”

Oodi – Ode in English – is more than a sober monument to civic pride. Commissioned as part of Finland’s celebration of a century of independence, the library is no mere book repository. “I think Finland could not have given a better gift to the people. It symbolises the significance of learning and education, which have been fundamental factors for Finland’s development and success,”

“There’s strong belief in education for all,” says Hanna Harris, director of Archinfo Finland and Mind-building’s commissioner. “There is an appreciation of active citizenship – the idea that it is something that everyone is entitled to. Libraries embody that strongly,” she adds.

Those feelings of pride in the equality of opportunity offered by the city’s new library are echoed by the site chosen for Oodi: directly opposite parliament. “I think there is no other actor that could stand in front of the grounds of democracy like the public library does,

“We want people to find and use the spaces and start to change them,” says Nousjoki. “Our aim was to make [Oodi] attractive so that everybody will use it – and play a role in making sure it is maintained.”

Perhaps a clue to the Finnish enthusiasm for libraries comes from the fact that they offer far more than books. While many libraries worldwide provide internet access and other services, libraries in cities and towns across Finland have expanded their brief to include lending e-publications, sports equipment, power tools and other “items of occasional use”. One library in Vantaa even offers karaoke.

These spaces are not designed to be dusty temples to literacy. They are vibrant, well-thought-out spaces actively trying to engage the urban communities who use them. The library in Maunula, a northern Helsinki suburb, has a doorway that leads directly to a supermarket – a striking and functional decision which, along with its adult education centre and youth services section, was partly down to the fact that it was designed with input from locals.

Oodi, however, will go even further: in addition to its core function as a library, it will boast a cafe, restaurant, public balcony, cinema, audiovisual recording studios and a makerspace with 3D printers

“Libraries must reach out to the new generations. The world is changing – so libraries are changing too. People need places to meet, to work, to develop their digital skills.”

“Töölö library is one of my favourites,” says Harris. “It’s set in a park and has a rooftop balcony. Recently my colleagues and I went down there and there was a queue outside the doors – on a regular weekday morning, there was a queue at 9am to get in.”

the most impressive thing about it is the lack of public opposition to such a costly project. “People are looking forward to Oodi. It’s not been contentious: people are excited about it across the board,” says Archinfo director Harris. “It will be important to daily life here in Helsinki.”

Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe the anguish caused by environmental alterations due to droughts and destructive mining. Taking the Latin word for comfort (sōlācium) and the Greek root designating pain (-algia) he gives us a neologism that sums up the devastating effects of finding unease where you used to look for relief.

Where you used to be able to sustain yourself by hunting, fishing and foraging, now you may have to supplement this with trips to the newly established supermarket. But how are you supposed to pay for the food? And what if you can no longer afford to feed your dog?

we also have the more self-explanatory “ecological grief” and even the idea of a kind of post-traumatic stress linked to the state of the planet

people are finding the need for new words to describe the mental health issues linked to environmental change.

To others this sort of scenario is delusional, a symptom of media-fed panic

Some people are inclined to catastrophise while others prefer to blot out the possibility of unpleasantness. Both tendencies could be said to be attempts at self-preservation

Should you act pre-emptively to avert disaster, opening yourself up to accusations of being pathologically anxious, or keep calm and carry on at the risk of seeming at best obtuse or at worst selfishly destructive? Is it mad to mourn something before you’ve lost it?

It can sometimes seem that the only reasonable response is melancholia, anger and helplessness

“The intersection between the climate emergency and mental and physical health will become one of the world’s major issues.”

Before climate change became an established concept, one could look to the world around one as a source of joy and it gave a sense of something permanent and bigger than oneself. It had that quality often ascribed to god. With the crisis now unfolding, we must contend with two mortalities, the personal one and the death of nature. On top of that is the sickening worry for one´s children. We naturally worry for their future but this was often in terms of their fate and place in society. Now we can wonder what grim future they have if water shortages, economic and political breakdown get ever closer. So, yes, climate change is a heavy blow to the psyche. Anyone who is not worried is not paying attention.

The FTSE, Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nikkei have all seen huge falls since the outbreak began on 31 December.

The Dow and the FTSE recently saw their biggest one day declines since 1987.

Investors fear the spread of the coronavirus will destroy economic growth and that government action may not be enough to stop the decline.

In response, central banks in many countries, including the United Kingdom, have slashed interest rates.

In the United States, the number of people filing for unemployment hit a record high, signalling an end to a decade of expansion for one of the world's largest economies.

The travel industry has been badly damaged, with airlines cutting flights and tourists cancelling business trips and holidays.

Governments around the world have introduced travel restrictions to try to contain the virus.

In the US, the Trump administration has banned travellers from European airports from entering the US.

Supermarkets and online delivery services have reported a huge growth in demand as customers stockpile goods such as toilet paper, rice and orange juice as the pandemic escalates.

In order to stop the spread of the Covid-19 outbreak, many countries across the world have started implementing very tough measures. Countries and world capital have been put under strict lockdown, bringing a total halt to major industrial production chains.

The new images clearly show how a strong reduction in emission is now in place over major cities across Europe - in particular Paris, Milan and Madrid.

In China, where the coronavirus first appeared, industrial production, sales and investment all fell in the first two months of the year, compared with the same period in 2019.

Chinese car sales, for example, dropped by 86% in February. More carmakers, like Tesla or Geely, are now selling cars online as customers stay away from showrooms.

But even the price of gold tumbled briefly in March, as investors were fearful about a global recession.

“Schools will be ready to help the children and families that we serve. Even above GCSE and A-level exams, the first priority must be to keep vulnerable children safe, looked after and properly fed. This is our bread and butter and we will step up.”