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BERLIN — “It was a very touching moment. It brought back memories of a time when as a young man I had sworn to fight the wall.”Those were the words of Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel, a 73-year-old retiree who says that he helped dig a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in the 1960s.

The discovery has fueled memories of a dark chapter in Berlin’s history.

When East Germany sealed off its section of Berlin in August 1961, many families and friends were separated. Shortly after, a group of four West Berliners, responding to the call of a man named Gerhard Weinstein, found an abandoned railway shed near the wall that split their city, and began digging.

For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players

Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade

A railway tunnel underneath the Bosphorus Strait has been opened in Turkey, creating a new link between the Asian and European shores of Istanbul.

Japan invested $1bn of the $4bn (£3.4bn) total cost of the project, named Marmaray,

In theory it brings closer the day when it will be possible to travel from London to Beijing via Istanbul by train.

is house was nothing special, a single-story, tree-shrouded home in a middle-class neighborhood in this seaside city. And there the world's most sought-after drug kingpin hid for months until his capture in a deadly shootout.

Neighbors noticed his comings and goings, but without special attention. And then suddenly, the Mexican naval special forces descended Friday.

And with that, Sinaloa cartel commander Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was captured, in a shootout that killed six of his associates. It was six months after he escaped from Mexico's maximum-security prison through a tunnel he dug under his cell.

A scathing report by the US Capitol Police watchdog obtained by CNN reveals that there were even more law enforcement failures prior to January 6 than previously known, including new details about expired ammunition, ineffective shields and a previously unreported warning more than two weeks ahead of the insurrection about a map of the Capitol's underground tunnels that was posted on a pro-Donald Trump website.

Further, the report points out Capitol Police leadership knew as far back as July 2020 the department needed to make significant changes, but inexplicably failed to do so.

On that day, "the Department of Homeland Security notified the Department of a blog referencing tunnels on U.S. Capitol grounds used by Members of Congress and research of the website identified four 'threads/blog topics containing comments of concern,'" the summary states.

"He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. The tunnel had caved in on it in addition," Trump said.

Though a majority of nations have opted to pull the lever and shift tracks to a lockdown strategy, thereby sacrificing economic growth, Sweden has continued on the same line.

the Swedish government’s decision not to pull the lever and pursue a low-death approach has taken them into a tunnel.

From inside this tunnel we do not know how many people are now tied to the track. We do not know how far the line runs. Or even what the final destination looks like. Sweden’s strategic inaction was predicated on the hope that they might save lives in future by taking risks now and avoiding a shutdown.

e are trapped in a long, dark tunnel, all of whose known exits are blocked. There is no plausible route out of the UK’s coronavirus crisis that does not involve mass suffering and death

We have been told repeatedly that the UK was unprepared for this pandemic. This is untrue.

Last year, the Global Health Security Index ranked this nation second in the world for pandemic readiness, while the US was first. Broadly speaking, in both nations the necessary systems were in place. Our governments chose not to use them.

“I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said this month. “The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.”

Since it first emerged in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. The organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies, according to political and military specialists

In addition, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader segment of the population, inspiring new recruits.

physicists admit that it will take more work and analysis before they will have the cold numbers that clinch the case that the new particle announced on July 4 last year is in fact the exact boson first predicted by Peter Higgs and others in 1964 to be the arbiter of mass and cosmic diversity

What happened in the first instant of the Big Bang? What happens at the middle of a black hole where matter and time blink in or out of existence? What is the dark matter whose gravitational influence, astronomers say, shapes the structures of galaxies, or the dark energy that is forcing the universe apart? Why is the universe full of matter but not antimatter? And what, finally, is the fate of the universe? These are all questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century, does not answer

Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called supersymmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite. It predicts a whole new population of elementary particles — called superpartners to the particles physicists already know about — one of which could be the dark matter that pervades the universe. If such particles exist, they would affect the rate at which Higgs bosons decay into other particles, but the CERN teams have yet to record what they consider a convincing deviation from the Standard Model predictions for those decays. Supersymmetry is still at best a beautiful idea.

THE DISAPPEAREDU.S. Can’t Find ISIS Prisoners

Iraq’s security forces have allowed the U.S. military to interview fewer than “a handful” of detained fighters under Iraqi control since the Mosul offensive began in mid-October, a U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast.

Iraqi officials have said hundreds of ISIS fighters have died so far in the three-week-long battle; U.S. officials estimate a smaller number have fled.

State asks for bids in $2 million North-South rail link study

State transportation officials began soliciting bids Wednesday to study a proposed rail tunnel connecting North and South stations, a long-discussed project that would create an unbroken rail route from Maine to Washington, D.C.

The study, expected to take about eight months after a consulting firm is chosen, will cost as much as $2 million and will provide updated cost estimates and outline the benefits to riders.

Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.

“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.

Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions.

There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.

Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.

at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?

With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.

The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early.

China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering.