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Jokowi said there were agreements on development of a deep sea port and the Masela gas field in Indonesia, and for preliminary discussions of a Jakarta-Surabaya rail line.

Neo-Nazis have been emboldened by the arrival of Alternative for Germany, the first far-right party to break into Parliament since World War II. And there are concerns that the recent absorption of more than a million immigrants, many from the Middle East and many Muslim, has inadvertently created incubators of a different kind of anti-Semitism — one hiding behind the injustices of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but often reverting to hateful old stereotypes, too.

“Our most powerful tool,” she said, “is identification.”Recently, a young Syrian had asked a fellow guide, “Why do you turn your torture chambers into a museum?”To make sure we will never have torture chambers again, he had replied.The boy had thought this over for a while. “We have torture chambers in Syria,” he eventually said. “Maybe, when the war is over, we should turn them into a museum, too.”

North Korea has launched two ballistic missiles over northern Japan in recent months, and has threatened to conduct a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific Ocean to demonstrate it has developed the means to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons.Trump said the US-Japan alliance had been the cornerstone of regional security for the past six decades, adding: “We dominate the sky, we dominate the sea, we dominate the land and space.”

Trump’s bellicose rhetoric targeting Kim Jong-un has unsettled Moon, a liberal who this week said no military action should be taken on the Korean peninsula without his consent.Trump defended his provocative remarks about the North Korean nuclear crisis en route to Japan from Hawaii earlier Sunday.

Jonathan Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the trip comes “at a very inopportune time for the president. He is under growing domestic vulnerabilities that we all know about, hour to hour,” he said.

Earlier this month, when Greene flirted with the idea of forming an "America First" caucus, a leaked flier promoting the caucus received sharp criticism for using inflammatory rhetoric. While many Republicans -- even some from the far-right Freedom Caucus -- were quick to distance themselves from the document and the caucus itself, Gaetz proudly proclaimed he was ready to sign up.

Greene has returned the favor. When news broke of a federal investigation into Gaetz, which includes allegations of sex trafficking and prostitution, many Democrats and even fellow GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois called for him to resign. But Greene defended her Florida colleague.

"I have proudly defended Matt Gaetz from the beginning because I know he has done nothing wrong and I recognized this playbook right from the start,"

Now the two are solidifying that alliance through the joint fundraising committee -- which generally allows politicians to secure a single, larger check from a donor and then split the money among several committees -- and their "America First" tour, which is set to kick off next Friday with an event at the Villages, a retirement community that is in neither of their congressional districts.

"There are millions of Americans who need to know they still have advocates in Washington D.C., and the America First movement is consistently growing and fighting," Gaetz said in a statement announcing the tour.

"I think these people get too much attention. I don't really want to elevate or amplify their voices. They're not the Republican Party that I am excited to be a leader within," one Republican lawmaker, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely, told CNN. "For me, it'd be better if these guys just go away."

"This is part of the Republican Party's internal struggle about, you know, is this the party of Trump or is this the party of conservative values? And you know, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are many things, but you know, conservative Republicans they are not," the lawmaker said.

Greene has also become a fundraising force, despite being kicked off her congressional committees. The Democratic-controlled House voted to remove her in February in the wake of recently unearthed incendiary and violent past statements from the congresswoman that triggered widespread backlash. But the freshman raised an unprecedented $3.2 million in the first quarter of 2021, which largely came from an online spigot of small-dollar donations from people across the country.

Some Democrats have called on Gaetz to be removed from his committees as well because of his legal troubles.

Some Republicans fear that the more the pair are under attack, the stronger their base of support becomes. A separate GOP member of Congress argued that removing Greene from her committees left her only one option: waging a public relations war."I tell the Democrats, who ask me what we are going to do about MTG, that this situation is one of their own creation," the Republican lawmaker told CNN.

"It's obviously a bad look for the party. This is not who we are. This is not how we get the majority back. It's a distraction that's only going to hurt our efforts to talk about our agenda and talk about policy," said a GOP congressional aide.

The pact, if accepted, would have marked a significant advance in Beijing's connection to the region, which holds geo-strategic importance in the Indo-Pacific.

"Don't be too anxious and don't be too nervous, because the common development and prosperity of China and all the other developing countries would only mean great harmony, greater justice and greater progress of the whole world," he said.

"We will expand US Coast Guard presence and cooperation in Southeast and South Asia and the Pacific Islands, with a focus on advising, training, deployment, and capacity-building," the strategy's action plan says.

The relationships the US Coast Guard has forged in the Pacific islands have deep roots, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

With fish as the main food source and key economic driver of the island nations, the Coast Guard says the emphasis of Operation Blue Pacific is to deter illegal and unregulated fishing.

"You cannot understate the Coast Guard's importance to ... relationships in the Central and Western Pacific," he said.

"It's difficult to imagine China having sufficient political capital to push for something analogous to what the US is currently doing," Koh said.

Special effects software can give your music all sorts of subtle vibes. For $299, for instance, you can make your song sound as though it was recorded in Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, on the $20,000 vintage microphones with the $100,000 mixing console that recorded Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana. For $259 you can simulate the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios

In the past, when you assembled all the tracks for a song, it would have to be mixed and mastered in a studio by a sound engineer adjusting the levels. Now an app will do it for you.

Now, all you need to do is get the files uploaded to streaming services. If you are signed with a label, they will do that for you, but you don’t need a record deal to do that. There are companies such as DistroKid that act as postmen: for £17.99 a year, you can ensure that the song you created in your bedroom is available on multiple streaming platforms.

Some artists thrive on social media. It suits lively, quirky performers like Ryder, and artists who want to experiment with different genres. Mxmtoon, a 23-year-old American YouTuber, singer-songwriter and ukulele player, is also a streamer on Twitch, a platform on which people watch others playing online games, has published graphic novels and made a podcast. Maia — the artist’s name — describes mxmtoon as “a multi-hyphenated project”.

More traditional musicians struggle with some aspects of tech. “We get together,” says Sital-Singh of his contemporaries in the business, “and have a little moan about how everyone’s telling us to do TikTok and we can’t bring ourselves to dance and we feel old and decrepit.”

Even digital natives struggle sometimes: “I already have nostalgia for a simpler past, even though I’m 23,” says Maia. “It’s exciting but it does put so much pressure on a normal individual to be an entrepreneur to advertise their own personal brand.”

Journalists, regrettably, no longer have the power they once did. What matters these days is social media. The A&R (artists and repertoire) people at record companies who would once have hung out in basement clubs scouting for new talent now sit in meetings examining the data on artists’ social media performance.

Now that the whole world’s music is available all over the world at the click of a play button, there’s a greater diversity among top-selling artists.

People making videos of themselves performing or dancing to the song on TikTok helped propel it to the stratosphere. It has been streamed a billion times. Sethi now plays to packed venues in America and Europe; last year, he performed at Coachella, America’s Glastonbury. “Without digital technology I would be a south Asian indy musician, working on the fringes of Bollywood,” he says from his home in New York.

For musicians, it’s more ambiguous. Because the costs of making music are lower, anybody with ambition can have a go. Many more people, as a result, are getting into the music business. According to PPL, the organisation which distributes money to music performers and rights-holders, the number of registered artists has risen from 61,310, when the industry was at its nadir, to 165,039 last year.

That makes the business fiercely competitive. As Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of Tarzan Economics, points out, around 100,000 tracks are being uploaded on to Spotify every day: that’s more than were released in an entire calendar year in the 1980s

That has cemented the power of the record companies. When the digital revolution started, it was widely expected that record labels would cease to exist, and be replaced by a model in which everybody promoted and distributed their own music. That’s not what has happened: because it’s so difficult to get noticed, embryonic stars need record labels to promote them.

A label invests in the production of the music, the styling of the band, video content, interviews, touring and the crucial business of getting a song on a streaming service’s playlist that suggests the song to listeners to suit their tastes. Artists that are signed with major labels get paid more, per stream, than those that aren’t.

Three quarters of streamed tracks have one of the major record labels behind them. And even though streaming is booming, it doesn’t contribute much to the incomes of the vast majority of artists.

Most artists stay hungry. A single stream will earn a musician anywhere between 0.1p and 2.4p. Crispin Hunt reckons that on average a million streams for a song — a wild ambition for most musicians — will, if you have to pay a cut to a record company, probably make you £1,000

If you’ve then got to pay your manager 20 per cent, and divide the rest between the four band members, “it barely pays for a Sainsbury’s shop. That’s why music is dominated by middle-class people called Crispin whose parents can afford to buy them an electric guitar and a laptop.”

For Christie Gardner, half of Lilo, a two-woman band, it helps planning gigs. “You can see where your listeners are and you can tell what they’re listening to. We make decisions about shows on that basis.” But for most bands, the economics of live performance are pretty grim.

Deathcrash’s manager Joe Taylor says that the band has been offered the opportunity of a European tour supporting a much bigger act. It would be good for their career but not their bank balance. The fees per show would be €200; once the costs of a sound engineer, a tour van, a driver, fuel, hotels and a carnet for importing musical instruments into the EU had been factored in, they would lose £15,000.

music has always been an uneconomic business, which people subsidise through other activities. The fiddler in the village pub probably worked in the fields in the daytime and played for money and fun in the evenings and at the weekend, rather as Ryder ran a juice bar and sang at weddings. These days, there is also the wafer-thin chance that they might end up being one of the 1,200 artists who make more than $1 million a year on Spotify

There are some signs that in the new musical economy, the balance of power between artists and the big record companies may have tipped slightly in the artists’ favour

the share of streaming revenues going to artists increased from 19.7 per cent to 23.3 per cent between 2012 and 2021 and that going to songwriters has risen from 8 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2021. “Outcomes for consumers, artists and songwriters,” it concludes, “are getting better.”

Most of the extra revenues generated by streaming are going to the top earners. But the stars are not the only ones benefiting. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of artists earning over $1 million on Spotify more than doubled, but so did the number earning over $10,000

more than two fifths of artists who release their own music aren’t expecting to make a full-time career. They’re in it for fun, for the love of it, or to be able to show their mum that they have released a song on Spotify.

It seems likely that the more music is being created, the greater the chance that wonderful tunes are being written, but it’s not necessarily the case. The best stuff might get buried under a mound of mediocrity.

In 2010, another American, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, was arrested and sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegal entry and “hostile acts.”

“It is only a matter of time” before the industrial complex, the last symbol of attempted reconciliation between the two Koreas, is shut down for good, a North Korean government spokesman told the news agency.

Both of France’s major political parties, Hollande’s Socialists and Sarkozy’s UMP, embrace this stance of “openness” to the world (as the political scientist Sophie Meunier phrases it). It only finds real opposition among the anti-capitalist radicals of the far left, and the reactionary nationalists of the far right. And openness to the world tends to prompt the rejection of narrowly chauvinist national pride, and a readiness to admit one’s own country’s faults and crimes.

anyone who strikes an overly contentious nationalist pose in French politics risks association with the far-right National Front, whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has predictably denounced Hollande, declaring that only God has the authority to recognize French guilt or innocence.

In France, in short, apologizing for your country can be good politics. It is in America where being a politician means never being able to say you’re sorry.

"They have other people, too... These are all very, very disturbing choices by the North Koreans."

The US State Department revised its travel guidance for North Korea this week, saying: "US citizens crossing into North Korea, even accidentally, have been subject to arbitrary arrest and long-term detention." However, a small number of tourists do enter North Korea every year.

US troops backed South Korea in the 1950-1953 Korean War, which killed at least two million people.

“It is disturbing,” Cummings said as he pulled out past Whitney’s gate. “But you know what else? It happened. It happened right here on this road.”

“If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven’t yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history. To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”

Next year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is scheduled to be dedicated in Washington as part of the Smithsonian Institution, a project supported by $250 million in federal funding; exhibits on slavery will stand alongside those containing a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali.

“It has to be said that the end note in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is wonderful,” says Paul Finkelman, a historian who focuses on slavery and the law. “We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them.”

What makes slavery so difficult to think about, from the vantage point of history, is that it was both at odds with America’s founding values — freedom, liberty, democracy — and critical to how they flourished.

created equal” was drafted by men who were afforded the time to debate its language because the land that enriched many of them was tended to by slaves. The White House and the Capitol were built, in part, by slaves. The economy of early America, responsible for the nation’s swift rise and sustained power, would not have been possible without slavery.

“Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American exploitation,” says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor. “This is still, in many respects, the America of 2015.”

“If one word comes to mind to summarize what is in John’s head in doing this,” Seck said, “that word would be ‘reparations.’ Real reparations. He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes.”

People have tried to do a museum like this for years, and I’m still stunned that this guy made it happen,” he said afterward. “There I was, coming down to talk about how in trying to tell the story, it’s often one step forward and two steps back, and boom, here’s the Whitney.” Holloway was particularly taken by the museum’s subversive approach. “Having been on a number of tours where the entire focus is on the Big House, the way they’ve turned the script inside out is a brilliant slipping of the skirt,” he said. “The mad genius of the whole thing is really resonant. Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It’s almost this astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes you stop and wonder.”

The museum has an extraordinary collection of spy gadgets, weapons and espionage memorabilia from before World War II to the present—more than 28,000 items, of which 18,000 have been cataloged—and hundreds are on display.

“The CIA has a rich history, and our museum is where we touch that history.”

I make no pretense that our proposed answers to those questions are precise or scientific. We traveled as broadly as we could. We listened; we learned. We were looking for civic success stories, and we found them. But we also ended up in places where well-intentioned efforts had failed. So we steadily adjusted our conclusions. We ended up convinced that the national prospect is more promising than we’d felt before we started—full of possibilities that the bleak trench warfare of national politics inevitably obscures.

America is becoming more like itself again. More Americans are trying to make it so, in more places, than most Americans are aware. Even as the country is becoming worse in obvious ways—angrier, more divided, less able to do the basic business of governing itself—it is becoming distinctly better on a range of other indicators that are harder to perceive. The pattern these efforts create also remains hidden. Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.

During the Pennsylvania part of Romney’s tour, which then went on to Ohio, we stayed in a cheap motel in the hard-luck coal-country town of Hazleton, where the median household income, in the low $30,000s, was much less than the national level of more than $50,000 and the unemployment rate, about 15 percent at the time, was much greater. The few visible signs of after-dark life were bodegas on downtown Wyoming Street, serving the city’s growing Latino population. When we got back from dinner at a small Mexican restaurant, we channel surfed to a local-access TV station and saw Lou Barletta, the longtime Republican mayor of Hazleton who had recently made it into Congress as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave, warn that ongoing immigration was a threat to Hazleton’s safety and quality of life. As mayor, Barletta had been a proto-Trump, championing a city ordinance that, among other anti-immigrant provisions, declared English the “official language” of Hazleton and required that official city business be conducted in English only. The measures were eventually tossed by federal courts.

Were we mistaking anecdotes and episodes for provable trends? This is the occupational hazard of journalism, and everyone in the business struggles toward the right balance of observation and data. But the logic of reporting is that something additional comes from traveling, asking, listening, seeing. This is particularly true in detecting a sense of changed course. A political movement, a new technological or business possibility—I have learned through the decades that enthusiasm in any of these realms does not guarantee world-changing success, but it’s an important marker. (The visionary California entrepreneurs I wrote about in the 1980s were confident that their Osborne and Kaypro computers would change the world. They were wrong. The visionary California entrepreneurs I met at Apple in those same years were confident that their dreams would come true. They were right.) And enthusiasm is what we have seen.

“Across the country, we’re seeing significant growth in local officials’ training for civic engagement, and the appearance of many new online platforms and other tools to connect citizens and their governments,” Pete Peterson, the dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, in California, told me. Peterson ran down a list of cities illustrating the effects of a new emphasis on engagement—starting, to my surprise, with the Los Angeles–area city of Bell. In 2010, Bell was the object of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times showing corruption in the city’s administration top to bottom. (For instance, the city manager of this small, low-income city had engineered pay for himself of well over $1 million a year.) The series was followed by arrests, trials, and prison sentences. “That city has seen nothing less than a civic renaissance, with new leadership and a public much more involved in the future of the city,” Peterson said. “It’s an amazing before-and-after illustration of what happens when people get engaged”—for example, involving citizens in decisions about what had been a notably secretive city-budgeting process.

In Wichita, Kansas; in Bend, Oregon; in Duluth, Minnesota; in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; in Fresno, we found people who had already worked in the most expensive and “elite” cities or who had been recruited for opportunities there, and decided instead that the overall life balance was better someplace smaller and less expensive. Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL and now the CEO of the technology-investment firm Revolution, has for several years led “Rise of the Rest” tours across the country to promote new tech businesses and support existing ones in places other than the famous tech centers. “For half a century, there’s been a brain drain, as people who grew up in the ‘rest of America’ left their hometowns for better opportunities elsewhere,” Case told me recently. Case himself grew up in Hawaii but built his companies in the Washington, D.C., area. “We’re starting to see less of that brain drain. We’re seeing more graduates stay in place, in cities like Pittsburgh or Columbus, and a boomerang of people returning to where they’re from—for lifestyle reasons, and because they can see that their communities are rising and opportunities are increasing, and they’d like to be part of what’s going on.”

There is of course evidence that this has happened, in the form of the bigotry that has been unleashed since 2017. In the months after Donald Trump took office, we checked back with communities where we’d met immigrants and refugees. Some places had seen a nasty shift, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and police became newly aggressive and local racists felt empowered. A few months before the election, we interviewed Catholic nuns and secular volunteers in Garden City, Kansas, who were bringing surplus food and medical supplies to poor households, many of whose members were immigrants working in the area’s vast beef-packing complex. A few months after the election, a white-extremist hate group in Garden City was arrested while plotting to blow up an apartment building where African immigrants and refugees lived. In Dodge City, we met and wrote about a rising, respected young city-government official named Ernestor de la Rosa. His parents had brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a child, and he had stayed in the country as a “Dreamer,” on a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals waiver, while working toward an advanced degree at Wichita State. Trump carried Dodge City more than two to one. But people we spoke with there after the election said they never intended their preference in national politics to lead to the removal of trusted figures like de la Rosa.

He took advantage of a misunderstanding between his ineffective brother and Francis II to recover Normandy, and at the same time distracted Burgundy by encouraging the revolt of the cities of Dinant and Liege. Having bought off Brittany and Charles de France, he sought to detach them from their Burgundian alliance by revealing the details of their defection

Yet Philip the Good felt himself increasingly isolated by French negotiations with Frederick III and the Swiss cantons. The opportune arrival of the Dauphin allowed him to reassert his influence at the French court and to arbitrate between father and son

Louis XI appeared to represent all the forces of feudal and Burgundian reaction

The independent duchy of Brittany possessed its own governmental institutions, and its ruler, Francis II, refused anything but simple homage to both Charles VII and his successor

If his royal connections and foreign ambitions had induced this capricious and luxury-loving prince to avoid open conflict with the crown, his impetuous son, John of Calabria, was foremost in every plot and affray

Louis XI might dismiss his father’s favourites; but he could not afford to reverse his policy. He refused support for John of Calabria’s ill-fated venture in Italy, quarrelled with Philip the Good, and disputed the right of Francis II to control the church in Brittany.

The King did indeed learn much from the League of the Common Weal

The supposed humiliation of attending the sack of Liege by the Burgundian army cost him little; and he avoided the second condition imposed by Charles—the award of Champagne and Brie to Charles de France—by persuading his brother to accept the more remote province of Guyenne in their place

Louis XI also anticipated later methods of economic warfare. He deprived his Burgundian enemy of specie and procured the withdrawal of the support afforded him by the Medici bank. His concessions to English, Swiss and Hanseatic merchants were designed to detach them from Burgundian commerce

In these years Louis XI was conducting equally complex negotiations in Aragon and England

While Louis won over Warwick, and reconciled the King-Maker with Margaret of Anjou to secure the brief Lancastrian restoration of 1470, the Burgundian Duke responded by publicly welcoming the return of Henry VI, and secredy promoting the triumph of his Yorkist brother-in-law, Edward IV.

Pot-bellied and spindle-shanked, Louis XI was an unlikely figure, either as a monster of vice or, as he described himself, as the restorer of the splendours of Charlemagne and St. Louis

Louis employed the agents of the former financier, Jacques Coeur, whose condemnation under Charles VII he declared invalid. From Tours he drew the merchant financiers of the Beaune and Briçonnet families, and from Berry the Bochetels, who founded a notable line of royal secretaries

It is doubtful whether Louis XI had any general plan to transform the social order, but he found the middle classes his most convenient allies against the forces of disorder from above and below

In the towns Louis XI accelerated the trend to the formation of urban patriciates. He widened the special form of ennoblement available to municipal councillors.

From the number of national assemblies convoked by Louis XI it is sometimes conjectured that his government proceeded by consultative methods. But of the twelve such bodies convened by the King only one was a full Estates General, the others being merely assemblies of notables

The Estates General of Tours in 1468 was skilfully won over to the royal cause, and persuaded that to grant Normandy to the King’s brother would be to detach it from France and expose it to English and Burgundian influence

Trade prospered under Louis XI, but the recovery of agriculture was slow in the aftermath of the Hundred Years War. Choisnet had written in the Rosier des Guerres that “the King should see for himself the condition of his people, and should watch over them as a good gardener does his garden.”

Charles VII exiled him to his government in Dauphiné. The nine years he spent there were occupied with strengthening the provincial administration and resisting the authority of the Crown

As Charles VII had promoted the trade fairs of Lyon to ruin Geneva, so Louis established fairs at Caen and Rouen to challenge those of Bruges and Antwerp

Charles the Rash pursued chimerical schemes in Alsace, and clashed with the German Emperor. His preoccupation with affairs in the electorate of Cologne prevented him from supporting an English invasion of France in 1475, and Louis bought off Edward IV with the Treaty of Picquigny

Maximilian, the son of Frederick III, married the Burgundian heiress, Mary, and defended her lands against France until the Treaty of Arras brought peace in 1482. In all his calculations the Spider King could not have foreseen that Philip, the issue of this match, would marry the daughter and heiress of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile— an alliance which itself was in part a response to Louis’ policy in Catalonia

A new France had been nurtured by measures that seem at times not merely generations but centuries in advance of their age. Yet for all the surprising modernity of his policies, the manner in which Louis died revealed the extent to which he was still in thrall to the forces of the past.

The arcana of kingship which he bad penetrated were not of this kind. The first of modern national rulers went to his death surrounded by all the trappings of magic

When Sgt. Musil came back from Afghanistan he unplugged from the others who had seen what he had seen in combat. He didn’t talk much to anyone about that year in southern Afghanistan. He deleted his social-media accounts. But the memories festered. His marriage fell apart.

On a weekend this past spring, the VA and the Independence Fund brought 98 remaining Bravo Company veterans together to test a theory: Just as they relied on each other to survive in combat, they could again rely on each other to survive the lingering effects of war.

Bravo Company’s traumatic tour and high suicide rate have drawn the attention of the Department of Veterans Affairs and an advocacy group called the Independence Fund. The agencies declared men from the unit—including Sgt. Musil—to be at what the fund calls “extraordinary risk” of succumbing to addiction, isolation and suicid

During an 11-month tour of Afghanistan’s notorious Arghandab Valley, three soldiers from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment were killed in action and a dozen more lost at least one leg or arm. In the 10 years since they returned to the U.S., two B Company soldiers—isolated from their buddies, struggling with their demons—have killed themselves, more than a dozen have tried and others admit they have considered it.

“Derek, Grant, Timmy—all those guys died at their own hands,” said Sgt. 1st Class Robert Musil, listing close friends from Bravo Company and other units he served in who had killed themselves. “All those men were warriors. If they can do it, what’s stopping me?”

Thus, an industry was born. She taught her people how to raise silkworms and later invented the loom.

It refracts incoming light at different angles and so produces different colors. 

Anyone found smuggling silkworm eggs, cocoons, or mulberry seeds was put to death. 

Silk is a delicately woven product made from the protein fibers of the silkworm cocoon. Silk production is a lengthy process that requires close monitoring.

Silk garments were worn by emperors and royalty, and it was a status symbol.

Avoid storing them in plastic since this might trap moisture and cause yellowing or mildew.

Touring the sights along the ancient Silk Road trade routes,

The Hangzhou National Silk Museum is the largest of its kind in the world. It is a showcase for the origin, evolution and technique of silk production.

As we proceeded to meetings with diverse groups of community representatives, this sort of blame-casting was a common refrain. Disdain for the young, in particular, was a constant, across demographic, socio-economic, and generational lines: Even young people complained about young people. “They don’t want to do the work, and they always feel like they’re being picked on,”

Critics on the left call the group the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, and accuse it of advancing its donors’ interests over the greater political good. Third Way has called for cutting Social Security and Medicare and vehemently attacked the soak-the-rich economic populism of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Voters, it claims, are not interested in a party that’s all about big government and tax-and-spend.

Hale and Watson’s opening remarks to focus groups were an honest statement of the group’s animating worldview: that all things are possible when politicians make the right sales pitch to a fundamentally reasonable electorate that can agree on a lot of things. That in a time of division, they could find the things that still bound Americans together. That with enough research and focus groups and listening tours and charts and graphs, they could figure out—and cure—what ails the body politic.

Her problem wasn’t that people were wrong. She had managed to maintain her equanimity while hearing other groups express opinions she disagreed with. It was that they didn’t want to get along.

The report surprised me when I read it. Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way. We had heard people blame each other for their own difficulties, take refuge in tribalism, and appeal to extremes. But the report mentioned little of that. Instead it described the prevailing attitude as “an intense work ethic that binds the community together and helps it adapt to change.”

The researchers I rode with had dived into the heart of America with the best of intentions and the openest of minds. They believed that their only goal was to emerge with a better understanding of their country. And yet the conclusions they drew from what they heard corresponded only roughly to what I heard. Instead, they seemed to revert to their preconceptions, squeezing their findings into the same old mold. It seems possible, if not likely, that all the other delegations of earnest listeners are returning with similarly comforting, selective lessons

The Galápagos, once a destination for only well-off travelers unfazed by the islands’ remote location, had seen an increase in tourism before the coronavirus pandemic, with visitor numbers jumping 90 percent between 2007 and 2016.

In 2018, a group of tour operators expressed concern about the influx of tourists, saying they could harm not just the wildlife but the islands’ landscapes and beaches.