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Charlie mentioned this interesting back-and-forth between Bret Stephens and my old friend David Brooks about how they became politically homeless

I was struck by how much of their analysis of what happened to conservatism / the Republican party is based on the movement of the elites. They talk about misunderstanding what people like Laura Ingraham wanted and the evolution of Fox News and the discrediting of the establishment.

hat changed isn’t the ideological preferences of the elites, but the power of the elites. The power of party structures started waning in the 1970s and has only accelerated. The power of media elites and intellectual elites has similarly collapsed.Republican powerbrokers and media figures like Bill Buckley could once wield influence to shape what the party (and conservatism) would be. Today those decisions emanate largely from the demos.

at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

It’s also dubbed a “supervolcano” — a rare but unofficial label given to those that have produced the most intense eruptions in Earth’s history. Camp Flegrei’s super outburst occurred around 39,000 years ago (determined through rock records) and spewed gases and nearly a trillion gallons of molten rock, blocking sunlight and triggering intense cooling

The most recent eruption, much smaller, occurred in 1538 and created a roughly 120-meter-tall mound.

recent months of earthquake activity at Campi Flegrei — more than 2,500 earthquakes as intense as a 4.3-magnitude since September — has stirred concerns that the volcano could super-strike again soon.

For a host of ingenious reasons, Native people had long set fire to the prairie: to rejuvenate vegetation and attract bison herds, to ward off mosquitoes and snakes, to ease travel, even to hinder their enemies in battle. Intentionally or not, they were also keeping the Eastern redcedar at bay, confining the scrappy conifer to the prairie’s deepest wrinkles.

white settlers were slow to catch on. Confronted by fire, wild or not, they fought back, desperate to save their homes, their crops, their livestock, their culture at large. At the same time, they planted trees in a land without: for shelter, for timber, for shade, for a touch of their forested homelands back east

“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons,”

Five years ago last week, Extinction Rebellion was launched in Parliament Square. Back then, a principal term of criticism lobbied at XR was that it was “alarmist”. Five years on, it’s plainly visible that it was not.

In the past few months the process of climatic decline has dramatically accelerated, and we are exceeding many of the supposed worst-case scenarios laid out in climate models. We are plainly hurtling towards 1.5C of global over-heat, long before most seemingly well-informed people thought we would.

it was never able to recover its reputation from the Canning Town incident in October 2019, when rebels inexplicably stopped underground trains running – to much public criticism

“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.

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

SAN ISIDRO DEL PALMAR, Mexico -- Hurricane Agatha caused flooding and mudslides that killed at least 11 people and left 20 missing, the governor of the southern state of Oaxaca said Tuesday. Gov. Alejando Murat said rivers overflowed their banks and swept away people in homes, while other victims were buried under mud and rocks.

Murat said the deaths appeared to be concentrated in a number of small towns in the mountains, just inland from the coast. But he said there were also reports of three children missing near the resort of Huatulco.

It was a strong Category 2 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph, but it quickly lost power moving inland over the mountainous interior. Remnants of Agatha were moving northeast Tuesday into

KYIV, Ukraine — Just days after Russian troops retreated from the suburbs surrounding Kyiv, Yuriy Savchuk, director of a World War II museum in the city, joined the police and prosecutors who were investigating the full extent of the suffering inflicted there by enemy soldiers.

Over the next month, Mr. Savchuk and his colleagues meticulously documented what they saw, taking more than 3,000 photographs.

The sign, and everything else in the basement, was taken from a bomb shelter in a Kyiv suburb, Hostomel, the site of an airport that Russian soldiers tried to take in the first days of the war.

, Zelenskiy indicated he was willing to consider aspects of the Chinese proposal. He said he planned to meet president Xi Jinping and said it would be “useful” to both countries and global security. “As far as I know, China respects historical integrity,” he stressed, adding: “Let’s work China on this point. Why not?”

Zelenskiy – who was dressed in a black fleece, khaki trousers and desert boots – said compromise with a “sick” and “bloody” Russian leadership was currently impossible.

He recalled how Ukrainians “didn’t run to Russian troops with flowers” when they came across the border a year ago and instead greeted them with weapons. Russia had turned from a “neighbour and friend” into a prodigious murderer that “killed and tortured people”, and abducted children, he said.

In her new book, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” Raff beautifully integrates new data from different sciences (archaeology, genetics, linguistics) and different ways of knowing, including Indigenous oral traditions, in a masterly retelling of the story of how, and when, people reached the Americas.

Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from White Sands, N.M., are at odds with the Clovis first hypothesis.

the path to the Americas was coastal (the Kelp Highway hypothesis) rather than inland, and that Beringia was not a bridge but a homeland — twice the size of Texas — inhabited for millenniums by the ancestors of the First Peoples of the Americas.

(CNN)A US Secret Service inspector who helped coordinate then-Vice President Mike Pence's trip to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, testified on Monday that Pence spent several hours in a loading dock underneath the building during the riot.The revelation -- during the second trial for a defendant charged in the Capitol attack -- is the first time that federal law enforcement has confirmed where Pence went after he was evacuated from the Senate chamber on January 6.

"We took him to a secure location ... underground," Secret Service inspector Lanelle Hawa testified. "It was in the loading dock," which is located underneath the plaza on the Senate side of the building, she said.Read MoreHawa said the loading dock counted as a restricted area, established for the Electoral College certification, as did the Capitol grounds. When asked by prosecutors whether Pence ever left that restricted area, Hawa said, "No."

Griffin's legal defense team made it clear before the trial that they wanted to ask about Pence's location during the riot and about the restricted area established for his visit -- appearing to set up the argument that the area was no longer restricted because Pence left. Days before the trial, McFadden allowed Griffin's attorneys to cross examine the Secret Service inspector on Pence's location during the riot, writing that "Griffin must be allowed to test the veracity of the Government's contention that Vice President Pence was on the Capitol grounds during the relevant period."After a half an hour of Griffin's attorney, Nicholas Smith, questioning the inspector, McFadden told Smith that he had not established that Pence had left the restricted area.

Under Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s arsenal has grown rapidly, especially its nuclear program and missile fleet. The expansion of the arsenal has become a growing threat to the United States and allies in the region.

North Korea has used nuclear weapons as its biggest bargaining tool, building more powerful ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. The country conducted six increasingly sophisticated underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. The last four of them happened under Mr. Kim.

Mr. Kim has also said that his country plans to build a nuclear-powered submarine to deliver nuclear weapons to its adversaries more stealthily.