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In Greece, an unlikely economic star since the pandemic, as many as 44% of all jobs are connected to tourism. 

Can Europe’s emerging “museum economy” support sustained wealth creation and the expansive welfare systems Europeans have become accustomed to since the end of World War II? And what happens if the dollar falls and the tourists leave?

Rent and other living expenses are rising in hot spots, making it harder for many locals to make ends meet. A heightened focus on tourism, which turns a quick profit but remains a low-productivity activity, tethers these economies to a highly cyclical industry

It also risks keeping workers and capital from more profitable areas, like tech and high-end manufacturing. 

some economists, residents and politicians are concerned about the boom’s long-term implications.

The strong dollar—and a powerful post-Covid recovery—has empowered millions of Americans who would have vacationed in the U.S. before the pandemic. They are now finding they can afford a lavish European holiday.

“It is literally, for Americans right now, the place to go,”

One reason is the brutal sovereign debt crisis that hit the continent’s south especially hard just over a decade ago. Unable to stimulate demand with public spending or to energize exports by devaluing their currency—the euro, which is shared by 20 states—those countries could only boost their competitiveness by lowering wages.

“Your dollar goes a lot further,” Cross said over coffee in the lobby of her five-star hotel. “You don’t feel you’re scrounging as much.”

Tourism now generates one-fifth of economic output in Lisbon and supports one in four jobs. That boom has reverberated far beyond the capital.

Portugal’s gross domestic product grew nearly 8% between 2019 and 2024, compared with less than 1% for Germany,

The government recorded a rare 1.2% of GDP budget surplus last year, and its debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to fall to 95% this year, the lowest since 2009

Portugal’s population is growing again after years of decline, thanks in part to an influx of migrant workers and to various tax incentives and investor visas that have attracted high-income workers. 

In Portugal, a country of 10 million that juts out into the North Atlantic from Spain, Americans recently surpassed Spaniards as the biggest group of foreign tourists. 

The trend is part of a global readjustment following the Covid-19 lockdowns. Spending on travel and hospitality worldwide grew roughly seven times faster than the global economy over the past two years, according to Oxford Economics. That pattern is expected to continue for the next decade, though to a lesser degree.

Europe, especially southern Europe, has benefited more than many other regions. Though it is home to just 5% of the world’s population, the European Union received around one-third of all international tourist dollars—more than half a trillion dollars—last year. This is up roughly threefold over two decades, and compares with about $150 billion for the U.S., where tourism has been slower to rebound.

Moedas, Lisbon’s mayor, says there’s room for further growth. For a city that doubles in size to around one million every day, including commuters, only around 35,000 are tourists, he said. “We are very far from a situation of so-called overtourism.”

This and a real estate collapse that left hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly available made the region’s tourist industry ultracompetitive, much cheaper than Caribbean beach destinations and on a par with Latin American destinations like Mexico. 

Once an owner of TAP, Neeleman increased the number of direct flights to the U.S. eightfold between 2015 and 2020, adding major hubs such as JFK and Boston Logan, betting that would open up an untapped market. As bookings soared, other U.S. airlines followed. 

Signs of discontent are bubbling up across the region. Tens of thousands of local residents marched in Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands in recent months to protest mass tourism and overcrowding. On Mallorca, activists have put up fake signs at some popular beaches warning in English of the risk of falling rocks or dangerous jellyfish to deter tourists, according to social-media posts.

For Gonçalo Hall, a 36-year-old tech worker, the influx of foreign cash that has transformed Lisbon has been overwhelmingly beneficial for the city. When he lived in the capital 15 years ago, he wouldn’t walk in the historic downtown after 8 p.m. It was “full of homeless people, not safe. Lots of empty and abandoned buildings,” he said. 

“The quality of life in Lisbon doesn’t match the prices. Even expats are leaving,” said Hall, who moved to the Atlantic island of Madeira during the pandemic and continues to work remotely.  

The average Portuguese employee earns around €1,000 a month after tax, or around $1,100 a month, and only 2% earn more than €2,000. A one-bedroom apartment in Lisbon can easily cost more than €500,000 to buy, or over €1,200 a month to rent. Rents in nearby cities are also climbing as people leave the capital, squeezed out as lucrative short-term rentals transform the housing market. 

Jessica Ribeiro, a 35-year-old sociologist, pays around €490 a month for an apartment that she shares with her ex-husband in a town close to Lisbon. Neither can afford to leave. Both make a little more than the minimum wage of €820 a month, and soaring rents mean it is impossible to find an apartment in the neighborhood for less than €700, Ribeiro said. 

“The harm that tourism has brought is infinitely bigger than the benefits,” Ribeiro said. “It sends people away from their place of work, making their lives much harder.” 

A frequent complaint from residents and housing advocates is that some of the boom’s biggest winners are American companies, from Airbnb to Uber, which often pay little tax in the places where they do most of their business.

Lisbon is cracking down on Airbnbs and increasing taxes on tourists, doubling the nightly city tax from €2 to €4, which should raise €80 million a year. Airbnb has paid Lisbon and Porto, Portugal’s two biggest cities, more than €63 million after entering into voluntary tax collection agreements with local officials. Moedas said he is considering “a bit more regulation” of the city’s many Ubers, whose drivers he said don’t always respect traffic rules. 

Around nine in 10 Airbnb hosts in Portugal rent their family home and almost half say the extra income helps them afford to stay in their homes, according to a spokesperson for the company. “Guests using our platform account for just 10% of total nights booked in Portugal, and we follow the rules and only allow listings that are registered with local authorities,”

Higher rents are forcing many businesses and cultural and social spaces catering to locals to close, according to Silva. “This is not an economy that is serving the needs of the majority of people,” she said.

“It was actually comical, because I went from knowing no one who had been to Portugal to everyone telling me they were going to Portugal,”

Serving foreigners is difficult to scale up and is more exposed to economic headwinds. Like the discovery of oil, southern Europe’s new focus on tourism can crowd out higher-value activities by hogging capital and workers, a phenomenon some economists have dubbed the “beach disease.”

“Portugal isn’t an industrialized country. It’s just the playground of the EU,” said Priscila Valadão, a 43-year-old administrative assistant in Lisbon. She makes €905 a month and rents a room from a friend for €250 a month. “The type of jobs being offered…are restricted to a type of activity that really doesn’t enrich the country,”

For Europe’s policymakers, having people open hotels or restaurants is easier than incentivizing them to build up advanced manufacturing, which is capital intensive and takes a long time to pay off, said Marcos Carias, an economist with French insurer Coface. 

“Tourism is the easy way out,” Carias said. “What is the incentive to look for ingenuity and go through the pain of creating new economic value if tourism works as a short-term solution?”

Proponents say tourism attracts capital to poor regions, and can serve as a base to build a more diversified economy. Lisbon’s Moedas said he is trying to leverage the influx of foreign visitors to build up sectors such as culture and technology, including by developing conferences and cultural events. 

“Some extreme left parties basically say we need to reduce tourism,” Moedas said, but that is the wrong approach. “What we have to do is to increase other sectors like innovation, technology…. We should still invest in tourism, but we should go up the ladder.”

In Athens, Mayor Haris Doukas says he is working on extending the tourist season, increasing the average length of stay and promoting specific types of tourism, such as organizing conferences and business meetings, to attract visitors with higher purchasing power. He’s also called for new taxes to help the city accommodate the millions of additional tourists thronging to the ancient capital.

More than one-third of highly qualified Portuguese students leave the country after graduating,

Even higher-paid technology workers have started decamping to cheaper places. 

Tiago Araújo, chief executive of tourism tech startup HiJiffy, has held on to his employees but says many of them have been moving out of Lisbon. The trend, which started during Covid, is now being primarily driven by the housing crisis.

While Dias, the hotel owner, is diversifying into nightlife, he refuses to envisage a future where the sector would have to rely heavily on visitors from elsewhere.

If Americans stop coming to Lisbon, he said, “I don’t think we can charge this kind of [price] because we will have to go to Europeans, and the Europeans, they don’t have money.”

“We haven’t seen travel demand for Hawaii this strong for over a year,” Richards said. “I thought we would have a U-shaped recovery; it’s V-shaped. January and February were terrible, but we’ve gone from zero to 150 mph in two weeks.”

Visitors said rules in their home states are different than those in place in Hawaii.“We carry our masks around and if we walk into an establishment we’ll wear one, and if people look like they’re uncomfortable with us around, we’ll put one on. But otherwise, like I said where we come from, people are really not required to wear them,” Wisconsin visitor Larry Dopke said.

Some lawmakers expressed concern about a possible backlash from residents.“I think we’re all going to have to be prepared for a potential surge in tourism,” said Hawaii state Rep. Scott Saiki, a Democrat. “I think we have to be prepared because the public may have a response to a sudden surge.”

“Pushing back against tourism is the same thing as telling your neighbor they shouldn’t have a job,” said Carl Bonham, executive director of the University of Hawaii’s Economic Research Organization.

The island of Kauai has additional measures that will be in place until April 5. All visitors to Kauai must either spend three days on another island or quarantine at a county-approved resort for three days and then get second, post-arrival tests.

Tim Sakahara, a spokesman for Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, said in an email that the city recently put up banners throughout Waikiki reminding people to wear masks and remain socially distanced. “These banners provide a tool to help Honolulu Police officers do their jobs in gaining compliance with COVID-19 rules,” Sakahara said. “The majority of residents and visitors are compliant with the rule or are cooperative when informed of it.”

Dr. Hunte-Ceasar said that, at this point, the Department of Health did not consider vaccine tourism to be a problem. “We definitely want to ensure the local residents get vaccinated,” she said. But “we have not had any shortages by serving both populations.” The Virgin Islands currently have 27,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, 18,900 doses of the Moderna vaccine, and 600 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine available, said Monife Stout, the department’s immunization director.

or now, health authorities are focused on ways to reduce vaccine hesitancy in the territory. “People access misinformation and perpetuate lies and things that are harmful,” Dr. Hunte-Ceasar said in a news conference last week. As a result, the islands have been experiencing a surge in cases and hospitalizations that she said give her “chest pain and heartburn every night.” Although vaccine hesitancy does seem to be decreasing, residents will need to start widely embracing the vaccine if the islands are to meet their goal of vaccinating 50,000 Virgin Islanders by July 1.

Officials have differing opinions about how much change Times Square may be in for over the next few years — as new businesses inevitably replace old ones — and how long its full recovery will take. Real estate and tourism officials say estimates range between one and four years.

"2021 is certainly going to feel more upbeat than 2020 did, but I think there will also be some disappointment,"

Douglas Hercher, managing director at RobertDouglas, a private real estate investment bank. "If people are thinking Times Square, by the summer, is going to look like the Times Square we all know and love, that's probably not going to be the case."

A Times Square Alliance study found foot traffic in the neighborhood's busiest block on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was down 70% from the previous year.

Tompkins says about 43% of Times Square's street-level businesses are currently closed, down from 87% in the spring. Hercher estimates 25%-30% of retail rental spaces in Midtown have "gone dark" due to tenants shuttering indefinitely.

"We've been really fortunate in that we raised the original capital for the project prior to Covid," Orowitz said. "At the end of the day, from the perspective of an entertainment and tourism Mecca, I think Times Square continues to evolve and will continue to be what it always was."

Krispy Kreme, for example, opened its new flagship Times Square location in September, a few months after Covid-19 lockdowns caused a 78% drop in Manhattan retail sales activity, according to the Metro Manhattan Office Space blog.

Tompkins says the pandemic hasn't changed Times Square's appeal to retailers looking to create more-engaging shopping experiences for their customers. Luxury real estate developer L&L Holding Company has continued construction of its TSX Broadway experiential retail complex throughout the pandemic.

L&L managing director David Orowitz says the pandemic hasn't shaken the developer's faith in the $2.5 billion project, which is still set to open at the end of 2022.

"You're going to see those retailers reducing their footprint to bring their costs in line with their sales. ... I think rental rates are going to have to come down tremendously to attract tenancy to those spaces."

the normalizing of remote work options across business sectors this year has already led many companies to scale back on office space, which some analysts have predicted will be a permanent shift in the commercial real estate market.

"We've definitely seen in the residential market, rents have dropped 10-15% this year in Manhattan," he said. "That's probably a little bit of the canary in the coal mine."

Only 8% of Manhattan's estimated 1 million office employees returned to their offices for work by mid-August, according to a survey conducted by the Partnership for New York City.

"There's talk about whether it makes sense to make those into residential usage," he said. "The name of the game here in the Covid era is flexibility."

The administration has also canceled bidding rounds for clean-energy projects in solar and wind power, while boosting natural-gas pipelines and refineries, which experts say will complicate Mexico’s goals under the Paris Climate Accords

“It’s become clear that this guy does not care about the environment at all,” said Gustavo Alanis-Ortega, director of the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights, or Cemda, a prominent nonprofit. Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Mexico Climate Initiative, said he feels “totally betrayed.”

This week, the government said that it is beginning work on the Maya Train without having published an environmental impact report, as required by law.

Another study, this time looking specifically at business travel, backs up these findings. The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), which represents corporate travel managers, found that business travel transactions in America declined by 3.4% over the course of one week following the president’s order.

If a 3.4% decline sounds small, consider the group’s assertion that a 1% drop in business travel over the course of a year correlates with a loss of 71,000 American jobs and close to $5bn in gross domestic product

a net $185m in business travel bookings was lost

as Mr Trump is broadly unpopular in much of the world, some people were probably already thinking twice about coming to America before the executive order was announced.

Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, a consultancy, told Forbes that the furore will probably “severely damage the US travel sector this year”

He cites the $246bn that international visitors spent in America last year, a figure that vastly exceeds the value of other major American exports such as cars ($152bn), agricultural products ($137bn) and petroleum products ($97bn)

Those high stakes explain why travel firms, normally reluctant to annoy customers by taking a political stance, have gone out of their way to condemn Mr Trump. 

All told, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels dropped by 2.6 billion metric tons in 2020, a 7 percent reduction from 2019, driven in large part by transportation declines.

The figures tell the story of a rebound that’s slightly stronger than that of air travel: a sharp drop in March and April, as state and local restrictions fell into place, followed by a gradual rise to around 80 percent of 2019 levels.

Some national parks located near cities served as convenient recreational escapes throughout the pandemic. At Cuyahoga Valley National Park, 2020 numbers exceeded 2019 numbers from March through December. At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, numbers surged after a 46-day closure in the spring and partial closures through August; between June and December, the park saw one million additional visits compared to the same time period in 2019.

The economic crisis is everywhere. In December, bread lines stretched around the corner. And as the Turkish lira plunged, Turks around the country rushed to change money into U.S. dollars.

But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says it's part of his plan.

The economic pain runs deep. Extensive borrowing and previous interest rate cuts were already driving up prices. But analysts say Erdogan's recent medicine is making the country sicker. Under his pressure, since September, Turkey's Central Bank slashed interest rates four times.

Soner Cagaptay, Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Anyone who took econ 101 in college would know, if your inflation climbs up, interest rates have to follow that. Erdogan is doing the opposite.

He says Erdogan's motivation is difficult to know, but, in the last few months of 2021, the lira lost almost half of its value, in December, 18.4 for $1. And a weak lira can boost tourism and Turkish exports.

Erdogan is maybe trying to create what is called growth out of contraction. In other words, let the economy crash and burn, and that will make Turkish exports very affordable, because the lira has lost its value, and the country will have a restored growth driven by strong export sector and also demand for Turkish tourism and services.

There are some signs of increased tourism. Last month, Bulgarians by the busload arrived in Istanbul to buy cheap groceries and bargain bazaar Christmas gifts.And Erdogan says exports are at an all-time high. Turkish authorities have also raised the minimum wage by 50 percent. And a new plan pays Turks to keep their bank deposits in lira. But the depreciation is still large, as is the anger. In November, protesters called for the government to resign and the police to back down.

If Erdogan does not restore economic growth, he's not going to win the next elections in 2023. We're going to see the country's economic resilience pushed back, and also a more unified opposition.

At this stage, I think the only way for him to stick to power — it looks like he's not going to be able to restore strong economic growth — is by becoming more autocratic only.

some South African scientists have pointed out that the travel ban may also be hampering the race to learn more about Omicron by blocking supplies of the reagents they need to study it.

Partly because of this South Africa was, until recently, recording less than one-tenth as many daily covid cases as Britain. “It boggles the mind that people in the United Kingdom can pile into a full football stadium and in the United States it appears as though it’s business as usual, but as soon as something happens on African soil, those countries go into a hysterical tailspin,”

The new travel restrictions will wallop the region’s tourism industry, just as hotels, game reserves and wine estates were preparing for their busiest months of the year

Because of the drop in tourism and the imposition of lockdowns the economy shrank by about 6% last year. Thousands of small businesses collapsed

The ripples may spread far beyond southern Africa to countries such as Kenya and Uganda that do not yet face travel restrictions.

South Africa’s health workers are gearing up for another December of mayhem as covid’s fourth wave washes over the country.

The emergence of Omicron, which seems to spread easily, will probably upset those estimates. “It looks like it's spreading quickly but there’s so much that’s unknown, specifically if it will evade the vaccines and its severity,”

There was little resistance

the palace hung white sheets out of the windows as a surrender signal

Batista cancelled the election and installed himself as dictator. The regime he replaced had been both weak and corrupt, and was not widely regretted

Batista was determined to build up income from tourism

Cuban tourism blossomed and  helped the economy to boom

Cruise vacations are vastly more popular than they once were, with the diesel-belching vessels disgorging thousands of passengers at a time onto port towns. Supercheap airlines using satellite airports have dramatically cut the cost of hopscotching around Europe, the Americas, and Asia, encouraging travelers to take 1 billion flights on budget airlines every year

platforms such as Airbnb have increased the supply of rentable rooms in cities from Rio to Delhi, reducing search friction for travelers, boosting cities’ carrying capacity, and bumping up rents for existing residents—an estimated 4 percent in Barcelona, for instance.

Christopher Columbus traveled more after death than many people do in life! In 1537, his bones and those of his son Diego were sent from Spain to Santo Domingo to lie in the cathedral there. As time went on, Santo Domingo became less important to the Spanish Empire and in 1795 Spain ceded all of Hispaniola, including Santo Domingo, to France as part of a peace treaty.

Columbus' remains were judged too important to fall into French hands, so they were sent to Havana. But in 1898, Spain went to war with the United States, and the remains were sent back to Spain lest they fall to the Americans.

In 1877, workers in the Santo Domingo cathedral found a heavy leaden box inscribed with the words “Illustrious and distinguished male, don Cristobal Colon.” Inside was a set of human remains and everyone assumed they belonged to the legendary explorer. Columbus was returned to his resting place and the Dominicans have claimed ever since that the Spanish hauled the wrong set of bones out of the cathedral in 1795. Meanwhile, the remains sent back to Spain via Cuba were interred in an imposing tomb in the Cathedral in Seville. But which city had the real Columbus?

The man whose remains are in the box in the Dominican Republic shows signs of advanced arthritis, an ailment from which the elderly Columbus was known to have suffered. There is, of course, the inscription on the box, which no one suspects is false. It was Columbus’ wish to be buried in the New World and he founded Santo Domingo: it’s not unreasonable to think that some Dominican passed off some other bones as those of Columbus in 1795.

The Spanish have two solid arguments. First of all, the DNA contained in the bones in Seville is an extremely close match to that of Columbus’ brother Diego, who is also buried there. The experts who did the DNA testing believe the remains are those of Christopher Columbus. The Dominican Republic has refused to authorize a DNA test of their remains. The other strong Spanish argument is the well-documented travels of the remains in question: had the lead box not been discovered in 1877, there would be no controversy.

The tourism factor alone is huge: many tourists would like to take their picture in front of Christopher Columbus’ tomb. This is probably why the Dominican Republic has refused all DNA tests: there is too much to lose and nothing to gain for a small nation that depends heavily on tourism.

The Dominicans refuse to acknowledge the DNA test done on the Spanish bones and refuse to allow one to be done on theirs: until they do, it will be impossible to know for sure.

How will the airline industry “come back” when people decide to take flights only for travel that cannot be avoided—and international travel is severely restricted?

Getting on an airplane to fly to a city so that you can stay in a hotel, eat in crowded dining rooms, and stand elbow-to-elbow with strangers around a craps table will be far, far down the list of behaviors on which most people are open to taking a risk.

If the tourism industry were to only decline by 30 percent in Las Vegas, it would be an utter catastrophe

Dinner and a Movie Consider the movie theater.

(1) If every theater in America opened tomorrow, what percentage of normal attendance would you see? 70 percent? 50 percent? 30 percent? What would that translate into as a percentage of total revenue decline, once you factor in concession sales? (2) The theatrical exhibition business is such a low-margin industry that even a 30 percent decline in revenues would be enough to push just about every operator in America into bankruptcy.

Let’s say you are Disney and you made Black Widow expecting it to open to $130 million dollars, pre-pandemic. Now you think that, at some point in the undetermined future, maybe it will open $70 million. Or possibly $30 million. Are you going to take that sort of chance with this asset? Or would you rather bootstrap the part of your business that looks like the future—meaning, your streaming service—and eschew the theatrical release altogether?

we could scan the economic landscape and find existential dislocations pretty much everywhere.

Up until this past January, 70,000 people got off an airplane in Las Vegas every single day, mostly to take in the city’s charms. On these flights, passenger seats are roughly 17 inches wide with 31 inches of pitch.

How will professional sports—which require thousands of people to be packed into small spaces—play in front of live crowds again? The sports leagues may be able to limp along with only broadcast revenues, but the micro-economies built around stadiums and arenas will not.

As teleworking becomes increasingly accepted—or even preferred—the physical office will wane. What happens to commercial real estate?

not just a single national lockdown of a country’s population and economy is in store to fend off mass contagion but rather quite possibly a succession of them—not just one mother-of-all-economic-shocks but an ongoing crisis that presses economic performance severely in countries all around the world simultaneously.

the American economy is a tightly integrated system where disruption in one sector can cascade into failures everywhere else. In the last 50 years we’ve seen how shocks to finance or energy were sufficient to throw the entire country into deep recessions.

Exactly what sort of recession should we be expecting when several sectors are pushed toward extinction, all at once?

Here in the United States, we watch, week by week, as highly regarded financial analysts from Wall Street and economists from the academy misestimate the depths of the damage we can expect—always erring on the side of optimism.

After the March lockdown of the country to “flatten the curve,” the boldest voices dared to venture that the United States might hit 10% unemployment before the worst was over

our weekly jobless claims reports and 22 million unemployment insurance applications later, U.S. unemployment is already above the 15% mark: north of 1931 levels, in other words. By the end of April, we could well reach or break the 20% threshold, bringing us to 1935 levels, and 1933 levels (25%) no longer sound fantastical

Even so, political and financial leaders talk of a rapid “V-shaped recovery” commencing in the summer, bringing us back to economic normalcy within months. This is prewar thinking, and it is looking increasingly like the economic equivalent of talk in earlier times about how “the boys will be home by Christmas.” . . .

The Long War

yes, there will eventually be creative destruction that spurs innovation and increasing economic activity. But that is in the long run.

The reality of our near- and medium-term future is something very different. And whatever the government orders people to do, that reality will look more like our “stay-at-home” present than the pre-virus past.

he movement to “reopen” America is a fallacy based on a fantasy. The fallacy is the notion that lifting stay-at-home orders will result in people going back to their normal routines. This is false.

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the sooner people grasp how completely and fundamentally the world has changed, the faster we’ll be able to adapt to this new reality. Let’s take a close look at just a couple of examples.

It's not the first time lions have been set upon in the country's most popular national park. In 2018, a pride of 11 lions, including eight cubs, were discovered dead, believed to have been poisoned. Suspicion then fell on farmers who denied any involvement, but who also expressed frustration at wildlife that kills their cattle and damages their crops.

To incentivize farmers living near preserves and parks to protect increasingly vulnerable wildlife, Ugandan authorities give farmers 20% of the gate fees taken at national parks. The UWA says the revenue-sharing scheme enhances the livelihood of the local community and helps sustain protected areas.

According to wildlife conservation groups, the illegal wildlife trade, poachers, and trophy hunters are all contributing to the disappearance of lions on the African continent. The loss of habitat, poor regulation of legal trade, and climate change are also drivers in their declining numbers

About 20,000 lions still live in the wild of Africa; a century ago there were 200,000 lions, the largest of Africa's big cats. Lions are currently listed as "vulnerable" on the "red list" of threatened species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The park is famous for having the largest population of tree-climbing lions, and whole prides can be spotted in trees. The newly discovered mutilated lions are reported to have had this particular tree-climbing trait.

Nearly half live in Queen Elizabeth National Park, where a team of investigators are now on the ground, joined by conservationists and police to probe this latest grim assault on Africa's wildlife.

All told, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels dropped by 2.6 billion metric tons in 2020, a 7 percent reduction from 2019, driven in large part by transportation declines.

Third-quarter revenues for Carnival Corporation, the industry’s biggest player, showed a year-to-year decline of 99.5 percent — to $31 million in 2020, down from $6.5 billion in 2019.