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oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.

King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy barrelled past 10,000 on Saturday, a figure that made an extension of a national lockdown almost certain.

Officials said 889 more people died in the previous 24 hours, the second highest daily tally since the epidemic emerged on Feb. 21, and that total fatalities reached 10,023.

Confirmed cases rose by about 6,000 to 92,472, the second-highest number of cases in the world behind the United States.

nearly a month after the country went into lockdown, Italy is sending another warning. The economy is in trouble, bound for a major contraction. And the precariously situated workers — self-employed, seasonal, informal — are suffering the most. It’s not clear how much longer they can survive.

the economic effects are most severe in the poorer, less industrialized south.

In Campania, the region of which Naples is the capital, 41 percent of people are at risk of poverty. Work is a problem: Last year, unemployment was around 20 percent and about that proportion of the region’s work force was underemployed. And for those who do have work, it is often informal, insecure — and particularly vulnerable to the crisis.

Clashes between police and thousands of demonstrators protesting at the detention of Senegal’s most prominent opposition leader have killed at least five people since last week.

The unrest is the worst in a decade in Senegal, widely seen as one of West Africa’s most stable democracies

Many protesters see Sonko’s arrest as an attempt by Sall to torpedo the career of a prominent rival, not as a legitimate reaction to a credible rape charge.Sall has been accused of targeting other political rivals in recent years, prompting accusations of political interference.

Gun sales in the United States reached a record level last year, with the biggest increases in background checks for firearms overlapping with months of social and political unrest, according to industry and government data.

23 million guns were purchased in 2020

That's a 65% increase compared with 2019, when 13.9 million guns were sold, according to Small Arms Analytics.

Colombians first hit the streets on April 28 to protest a controversial fiscal reform introduced by President Ivan Duque. "The reform is not a whim. It's a necessity to keep the social programs going," he has said.

But critics argued the tax hikes -- like a proposed value added tax (VAT) increase on everyday goods -- would disproportionally impact middle and working classes and escalate inequality in the country's pandemic-hit economy.Unemployment in Colombia is currently at 16%. It was 9% before the pandemic began, according to Colombia's National Statistics Department.

Videos of anti-riot policemen using tear gas and batons against protesters have gone viral on social media, spreading beyond big cities and across the country. Far from curbing the protests, alleged police brutality has become a focal point for the demonstrators, who are now calling for an independent, international inquiry into the deaths.

After Virginia passed gun laws, conservatives began invoking the state’s colonial-era constitution, which calls for a “well regulated militia.”

whereas a militia was “the last best hope” when liberties are threatened by “a tyrannical government,” then be it resolved: Halifax County would support a local militia.

But not everyone saw this fight as just about gun policy. It was also about power.

Washington, D.C., officials say four people have died, including one in a shooting inside the U.S. Capitol, and more than a dozen police officers were injured after a mob of supporters of President Trump stormed the nation's legislative building, temporarily shutting down a vote to certify his successor's win.

Police arrested 70 people on charges related to unrest from Wednesday through 7 a.m. Thursday, Washington's Metropolitan Police Department said. Most of those arrests were for violating curfew, with many also facing charges of unlawful entry

As Congress began debate over the certification of Electoral College ballots that would finalize President-elect Joe Biden's victory, a large mob decked in red "Make America Great Again" hats and carrying "Trump 2020" and Tea Party flags burst through barricades, overcame Capitol Police and entered the legislative chambers.

Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988

It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.

His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”

Vehicles with Trump flags halted traffic on Sunday on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge between Tarrytown and Nyack, N.Y. Another pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond.

In Georgia, a rally for Democrats was canceled shortly before it was scheduled to begin on Sunday, with organizers worried about what they feared would be a “large militia presence” drawn by President Trump’s own event nearby.

are bleeding into everyday life and adding further uncertainty to an electoral process in which Mr. Trump has not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

Bracing for the possibility of political violence stemming from Tuesday’s election, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is declaring a state of emergency in the Portland area

It’s the second time in two months that the governor has declared an emergency in preparation for possible violence.

“I want to be very, very clear that voter intimidation and political violence will not be tolerated,” Brown said.

“The threads of our civic life could start unraveling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox,” said historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.

the toll of the coronavirus outbreak made long-standing racial inequities newly stark. Then, images of police violence made those same disparities visceral.

“There are major turning points and ruptures in history. . . . This is one of these moments, but we’ve not seen how it will fully play out.”

(CNN)President Donald Trump pledged a crackdown of the protests that arose from the police killing of George Floyd, sparking concerns from some Democrats and Republicans that his response to the crisis further deepens the divide in a country already unnerved by a pandemic, distressed economy and racial unrest.

The President tweeted on Saturday that if protesters breached the White House's fence, they would "have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen." And he called on Democratic officials to "get MUCH tougher" or the federal government "will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests."

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, also urged Trump to help "calm the nation" and to stop sending "divisive tweets" in an interview Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Tense protests over the death of George Floyd and other police killings of black men spread across the US on Saturday night as mayors around the country imposed curfews and several governors called in the national guard amid scenes of violence, injuries and unrest.

Governors of six states, including Minnesota, where Floyd died on Monday, called out national guard troops. Many cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Louisville, Columbia, Denver, Portland, Milwaukee and Columbus, imposed curfews in anticipation of a restless night ahead.

Saturday’s demonstrations had started early but as the night drew on sporadic violence broke out again, seeing businesses torched, police cars set on fire and protesters injured and arrested.

a volcanic eruption in the remote Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from the Italian peninsula, contributed to the demise of the Roman Republic. That eruption — and others before it and since — played a role in changing the course of history.

At the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., it’s not unusual to find researchers in puffy parkas and wool hats handling chunks of ice in a minus 4 Fahrenheit “cold room.” Ice cores, typically drilled vertically from glaciers, hide bits of volcanic material that rained down from long-ago eruptions within their layers.

Joseph McConnell, a climate scientist at the institute, and his collaborators are in the business of looking for that debris. Using an instrument they designed and built, they melt the ice and pipe the water into an array of sensors. With hundreds of feet of tubing, the setup looks downright chaotic, but it’s exquisitely sensitive. The sensors pinpoint many substances, including about 30 different elements, and they do so by catching just tiny whiffs.“They have sensitivities of parts per quadrillion,” Dr. McConnell said.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

The bottom line is that Donald Trump both “engaged in” “insurrection or rebellion” and gave “aid or comfort” to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution.

t the time of the January 6 attack, most Democrats and key Republicans described it as an insurrection for which Trump bore responsibility. We believe that any disinterested observer who witnessed that bloody assault on the temple of our democracy, and anyone who learns about the many failed schemes to bloodlessly overturn the election before that, would have to come to the same conclusion.

The only intellectually honest way to disagree is not to deny that the event is what the Constitution refers to as “insurrection” or “rebellion,” but to deny that the insurrection or rebellion matters. Such is to treat the Constitution of the United States as unworthy of preservation and protection.

There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

I think Sulzberger shares this analysis. In interviews and his own writings, including an essay earlier this year for the Columbia Journalism Review, he has defended “independent journalism”, or, as I understand him, fair-minded, truth-seeking journalism that aspires to be open and objective.

It’s good to hear the publisher speak up in defence of such values, some of which have fallen out of fashion not just with journalists at the Times and other mainstream publications but at some of the most prestigious schools of journalism.