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They coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, apparently trading tools and sharing cultures. Some groups survived the Ice Age, while others vanished,

when farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago, they encountered the descendants of this long history, with light-skinned, dark-eyed people to the east, and possibly dark-skinned and blue-eyed people to the west.

“We lack still an understanding of why these movements were triggered. What happened here, why it happened — it’s strange.”

Modern humans arose in Africa and expanded to other continents about 60,000 years ago

These early Europeans have almost no genetic link to younger remains of hunter-gatherers. It appears that the first modern humans in Europe may have disappeared along with the Neanderthals

he oldest DNA of modern humans in Europe, dating back 45,000 years, undermines such a simple story. It comes from people who belonged to a lost branch of the human family tree. Their ancestors were part of the expansion out of Africa, but they split off on their own before the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians split apart.

About 33,000 years ago, as the climate turned cold, a new culture called the Gravettian arose across Europe. Gravettian hunters made spears to kill woolly mammoths and other big game. They also made so-called Venus figurines that might have represented fertility.

When the glaciers retreated, some descendants of the Fournol continued living in Iberia. But others expanded north as a new population, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called GoyetQ2. “It really seems like a peopling of Europe after the last glacial maximum,

Dr. Posth and his colleagues found DNA in Gravettian remains scattered across Europe. The scientists had expected all of the individuals to have come from the same genetic population, but instead found two distinct groups: one in France and Spain, and another in Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany.

“They were very distinct, and this was a very big surprise to us because they practiced the same archaeological culture,”

Dr. Posth and his colleagues named the western population the Fournol people, and found a genetic link between this group and 35,000-year-old Aurignacian remains in Belgium.

They called the eastern group Vestonice, and discovered that they share an ancestry with 34,000-year-old hunter-gatherers who lived in Russia.

That genetic gulf led Dr. Posth and his colleagues to argue that the Fournol and Vestonice belonged to two waves that migrated into Europe separately. After they arrived, they lived for several thousand years sharing the Gravettian culture but remaining genetically distinct.

It’s clear from the new study that they were not isolated entirely from each other. In Belgium, the scientists found 30,000-year-old remains with a mix of Fournol and Vestonice ancestry.

About 26,000 years ago, the two groups faced a new threat to their survival: an advancing wall of glaciers. During the Ice Age, from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, European hunter-gatherers were shut out of much of the continent, surviving only in southern refuges.

the refuge of the Iberian Peninsula, the region now occupied by Spain and Portugal, by studying DNA in the teeth of a 23,000-year-old man found in a cave in southern Spain. His DNA revealed that he belonged to the Fournol people who lived in Iberia before the Ice Age. The researchers also found genetic markers linking him to a 45,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Bulgaria.

When these groups arrived in Europe, Neanderthals had already been living across the continent for more than 100,000 years. The Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, perhaps because modern humans outcompeted them with superior tools.

The Vestonice, by contrast, did not survive the Ice Age. When the glaciers were at their most expansive, the Vestonice may have endured for a time in Italy. But Dr. Posth and his colleagues found no Vestonice ancestry in Europeans after the Ice Age. Instead, they discovered a population of hunter-gatherers that appeared to have expanded from the Balkans, known as the Villabruna. They moved into Italy and replaced the Vestonice.

For several thousand years, the Villabruna were limited to southern Europe. Then, 14,000 years ago, they crossed the Alps and encountered the GoyetQ2 people to the north. A new population emerged, its ancestry three parts Villabruna to one part GoyetQ2.

This new people, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called Oberkassel, expanded across much of Europe, replacing the old GoyetQ2 population.

another climate shift could explain this new wave. About 14,000 years ago, a pulse of strong warming produced forests across much of Europe. The Oberkassel people may have been better at hunting in forests, whereas the GoyetQ2 retreated with the shrinking steppes.

To the east, the Oberkassel ran into a new group of hunter-gatherers, who probably arrived from Russia. The scientists named this group’s descendants, who lived in Ukraine and surrounding regions, the Sidelkino.

in Iberia, there were no great sweeps of newcomers replacing older peoples. The Iberians after the Ice Age still carried a great deal of ancestry from the Fournol people who had arrived there thousands of years before the glaciers advanced. The Villabruna people moved into northern Spain, but added their DNA to the mix rather than replacing those who were there before.

When the first farmers arrived in Europe from Turkey about 8,000 years ago, three large groups of hunter-gatherers thrived across Europe: the Iberians, the Oberkassel and the Sidelkino. Living Europeans carry some of their gene

The Sidelkino people in the east had genes associated with dark eyes and light skin. The Oberkassel in the west, in contrast, probably had blue eyes and may have had dark skin

These three groups of hunter-gatherers remained isolated from each other for about 6,000 years, until the farmers from Turkey arrived. After this advent of agriculture, the three groups began mixing, the scientists found. It’s possible that the spread of farmland forced them to move to the margins of Europe to survive. But over time, they were absorbed into the agricultural communities that surrounded them.

every continent will likely have its own history of hunter-gatherer migrations.

it is now possible to extract human DNA from cave sediments rather than searching for bones and teeth.

The findings lend support to an emerging hypothesis that the Clovis technology, named for the town in New Mexico where the first specimens were discovered, actually arose in what is now the Southeastern United States and moved west to the Plains and the Southwest. The Western Stemmed technology began, perhaps earlier, in the West. Most artifacts of that kind have been found on the West Coast and in Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. “We seem to have two different traditions coexisting in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” Dr. Jenkins said.

The greatest proportion of refugees comes from Syria, where a brutal civil war over the last four and a half years has killed perhaps a quarter of a million people,

Since Monday, the IOM said, 18 people are believed to have drowned trying to reach Europe since Monday, in two incidents.

In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.

y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.

Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.

Our migration levels are now comparable to Syria or to [the Rohingya going to] Bangladesh,”

leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country

Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.

Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.

bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.

The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands

Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.

They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”

The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.

Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.

“Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.

The operations are sending as many as 100 migrants a day back to Venezuela.

You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”

“The Italian government, with support from Europe, has put a stopper on the departures from Libya by not calculating or perhaps omitting the inevitable consequences of violations of human rights that would originate,” he said.

n spite of the criticism, Minniti’s harsh approach to migration and his history working with the country’s security services has paid off politically. According to a September poll, he is the most popular minister in the Italian government. (The bar is low; just 33 percent of the country approve of his policies.)

For his part, Minniti denies being interested in the country’s top job. But even Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right Northern League praises the minister. “Minniti is for sure better than [Angelino] Alfano [his predecessor] and is finally implementing tough policies such as controlling NGO’s ships operating rescues. When we proposed such measures we were labeled as racist. Now finally everyone seems to understand we were right,” he said.

“Normal, predictable weather years are getting rarer,”

n 2018, drought-related crop failures directly affected one in 10 Guatemalans, and caused extreme food shortages for almost 840,000 people

since October 2018, more than 167,000 Guatemalans travelling in family groups have been apprehended at the US border, compared with 23,000 in 2016.

Those who remain, often depend on money sent home by emigres, especially in rural areas, which received more than half the $9.2bn of remittances sent to Guatemala in 2018.

“Without doubt climate and environmental changes impact food security. For those who depend on agriculture the situation is very precarious, they are very vulnerable,”

Guatemala has the sixth-highest malnutrition rate in the world with at least 47% of children suffering chronic malnourishment. Malnutrition rates are even higher among the country’s 24 indigenous communities, rising to over 60% in Camotán.

“The government strategy [to tackle malnutrition] has good elements, but in practice it has been limited to putting out fires, dealing with emergencies, not tackling structural problems or corruption in public administration,” said Paola Cano, a nutritionist and public policy analyst. “Without international aid, even more people would be dying.”

“This isn’t poverty – or even extreme poverty: this is a famine, and people are dying,”

Families face an impossible choice: stay and risk starvation, or gamble everything on the perilous migrant trail. “They risk their lives if they stay – and if they go,

The exodus is so large that it is reshaping the very concept of childhood in Venezuela, sending grade-schoolers into the streets to work — and leaving many exposed to the swirl of abusive players who have filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Venezuelan state, including sex traffickers and armed groups.

In rare situations, children have been passed from grandparent to cousin to neighbor, with each caretaker migrating or disappearing, until young people finally have found themselves alone.

The arrival of the new coronavirus in Venezuela has isolated these children further. To combat the spread, President Nicolás Maduro has announced a countrywide lockdown, sending the military into the streets to enforce the measures.The effort has cut many young people off from the teachers and neighbors who may be their only means of support. At the same time, borders are now closed, severing these children from the rest of the world and making it impossible for their parents to return, or to come and retrieve them.

Such a regime, in his view, would keep the trappings of democracy, including seemingly free elections, while leaders would control the election process, the media and the scope of permissible debate. “What you get is a country that is de facto less free.”

The use of digital technology in the 2016 election “represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of legacy institutions that had set bounds for American politics in the postwar era,

the Trump campaign was “totally unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics.” He argues thatthis type of campaign is only successful in a context in which certain established institutions — particularly, the mainstream media and political party organizations — have lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world.

The influence of the internet is only the most recent manifestation of the weakening of the two major American political parties over the past century, with the Civil Service undermining patronage, the rise of mass media altering communication, campaign finance law empowering donors independent of the parties, and the ascendance of direct primaries gutting the power of party bosses to pick nominees.

how the erosion of political parties played out in 2016:Neither party appeared to have a mechanism of internal correction. Neither could muster the wise elders to steer a more conventional course. Neither could use its congressional leadership to regain control of the party through its powers of governance. Neither could lay claim to financial resources that would compel a measure of candidate loyalty. Neither could even exert influence though party endorsements.

The parties proved hollow vehicles that offered little organizational resistance to capture by outsiders. And what was captured appeared little more than a brand, certainly not the vibrant organizations that are heralded as the indispensable glue of democratic politics.

“We are witnessing a period of deep challenge to the core claims of democracy to be the superior form of political organization of civilized peoples,” he told his audience:

Put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well.

“Technology has overtaken one of the basic functions you needed political parties for in the past, communication with voters,” he said. “Social media has changed all of that, candidates now have direct access through email, blogs and Twitter,” along with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other platforms.

Two developments in the 2016 campaign provided strong evidence of the vulnerability of democracies in the age of the internet: the alleged effort of the Russian government to secretly intervene on behalf of Trump, and the discovery by internet profiteers of how to monetize the distribution of fake news stories, especially stories damaging to Hillary Clinton.

Clay Shirky is a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U. In a 2009 TED talk — the full political significance of which has only become clear over the past eight years — he described some of the implications of the digital revolution:

The internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one-to-many pattern, the internet gives us the many-to-many pattern.

The second big change is that, as all media gets digitized, the internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media, meaning that phone calls migrate to the internet, magazines migrate to the internet, movies migrate to the internet

The current moment of democratic uncertainty draws from four central institutional challenges, each one a compromise of how democracy was consolidated over the past few centuries. First, the accelerated decline of political parties and other institutional forms of engagement; second, the weakness of the legislative branches; third, the loss of a sense of social cohesion; and fourth, the decline in democratic state competence.

the third big change, according to Shirky, is that members of the former audiencecan now also be producers and not consumers. Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — let you consume and produce

Of course, this problem goes much deeper than the internet

Our politics are vulnerable to nefarious influences — whether of the Kremlin variety or the Breitbart variety — not because our information landscape is open and fluid, but because voters’ perceptions have become untethered from reality. For reasons that are both complex and debatable, very many voters have stopped seeing government as a tool for the production of the common good, and have instead turned to politicians (and others) who at least make them feel good. Thus, the news we consume has become as much about emotion and identity as about facts. That’s where the vulnerability comes in, and its roots are in our politics — not in the internet.

Authorities encountered 9,297 children without a parent in February, a 30% increase from 2019 during the last major influx of unaccompanied children. To be sure, it's still below the peaks of 11,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived in May 2019 and above 10,000 in June 2014, but experts and administration officials expect those records to be broken this year.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that U.S. agents are on pace to intercept more migrants on the southwest border in 2021 than they have in the last two decades.The reasons for the influx of migrants from Central America are vast and complex. They are also deeply personal for each family who chooses to leave their home.

Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, says they involve a mix of longstanding factors, such as poverty and corruption, as well as new factors such as two recent hurricanes and widespread unemployment due to the pandemic.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended an average of 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day over the past 30 days, including about 500 unaccompanied children, according to a senior Border Patrol official who spoke to reporters on Friday.

The official said the influx was "much different" than previous years, citing the large number of unaccompanied children and families traveling. As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children and teens were stuck in Border Patrol facilities waiting for beds in more appropriate shelters built for children, according to Department of Homeland Security data viewed by NPR.

The Border Patrol official told reporters Friday that agents are trying to discharge the children from warehouses and jail-like holding cells as quickly as possible, but there's a bottleneck because the government can't open child shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services fast enough to accommodate everyone who's crossing.

The Biden administration is working with other agencies trying find more bed space. They're using places like the San Diego Convention Center to hold unaccompanied minors so they're not sleeping in cells on the border. The challenges in Central America – and at the border – have become cyclical.

Like under previous presidents, the Biden administration was not prepared to shelter this many arriving children. But Bolter questions whether this is some kind of a new "crisis." She says this part of the same flow of migrants that the United States has been experiencing over the last decade.

Up until 2012, the vast majority of apprehensions at the southwest border were of young Mexican males coming across to find work in the United States. Two years later, the majority of cases coming across the southwest border were from Central America and were a mix people, families and unaccompanied children.

The Biden administration also has long term plans to deal more directly with these issues in Central America. They include developing more legal avenues to seek asylum so that migrants don't feel they have to choose illegal avenues. And Biden just sent three top officials to Mexico and Guatemala as part of efforts to tackle the root causes of migration, something he also just tasked Vice President Harris with leading.

He told NPR's Steve Inskeep Friday that the administration wants to help countries in the region create the right environment for international investment that drives economic prosperity, but also has ways to encourage better behavior from money launderers and other corrupt officials.

"We will also engage community leaders, workers, young innovators and entrepreneurs, and others about ways to provide economic security, address the core factors of migration, and to give people the hope for a better life at home," Sanders added.

"The vice president's strategy is built around catalyzing efforts across the United States government, regional governments," Sanders said, "as well as private sectors and philanthropic sectors and international partners."

The vice president will meet with Guatemalan community leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs as well as greet and thank US embassy staff, per Mazin Alfaqih, special adviser to the vice president for the Northern Triangle.

In next week's bilateral meeting, Harris will discuss with Giammattei "ways to increase economic opportunities in Guatemala, strengthen rule of law and deepen bilateral law enforcement cooperation," Alfaqih told reporters. Already in their virtual bilateral, the two sides agreed to increase the number of border security personnel, among other agreements. The US will also increase the number of its own security forces on the ground to provide training, Alfaqih said.

In the vice president's meeting with Mexico's President, Harris will look to build on the two countries' previous agreements to secure the US-Mexico border and work to bolster economic opportunities in the region while establishing "further areas of collaboration," the officials said.

Sanders wouldn't say whether Covid-19 vaccines would be a topic of discussion in both countries during the visit, just that they would discuss "Covid cooperation."

The vice president has yet to call the leaders of El Salvador and Honduras, as both have underlying issues that have dogged US efforts in the region for years and her staff is finding the best way to engage. Those delayed talks show just one aspect of the challenges in this task.

"We have to give people some sense of hope that if they stay, that help is on the way," Harris told CNN's Dana Bash in April. "It's not going to be solved overnight; it's a complex issue. If this were easy, it would've been handled years ago."

“People aren’t migrating; they’re fleeing,” said César Ramos, of the Mennonite Social Action Commission, a group providing aid to people affected by the storms. “These people have lost everything, even their hope.”

But last month, apprehensions at the southwest border of the United States hit a 15-year high, part of a sharp uptick since Mr. Biden took office.

The majority of families and unaccompanied children are coming from Honduras and Guatemala, the two countries hit hardest by the hurricanes — a sign that the president’s more welcoming policies on immigration have drawn people at a time when they are especially desperate to leave.

Still, Mr. Biden has sent a clear message to anyone considering crossing the border in the meantime: “Don’t come over,” Mr. Biden said in a recent interview.

Mexico has begged the Biden administration to send more disaster relief aid to Central America. Mr. Biden has contended that under former President Trump, “instead of going down and helping in a major way” after the disasters, “we did nothing.”

“We need to be aggressively addressing the levels of despair that the folks hit by these storms are facing,” said Dan Restrepo, a former top adviser to President Obama. “We need to go big now and we need to be loud about it, because that starts actually factoring into the calculus that people face today, which is, ‘Can I survive here or not?’”

“We do not know who the first Europeans were that ventured into an unknown land,” he said.“By analysing their genomes, we are figuring out a part of our own history that has been lost in time.”

The concept is about 35 years old, Arton says. Today there are approximately 25 countries, including Portugal, Dominica and the United Kingdom, that offer forms of residency or citizenship-by-investment programs as a revenue source.

“We’ve had Americans contacting us and saying, ‘Listen, I cannot believe that my American super passport cannot get me into as many countries as it used to before. What can I do?’ ” Arton says. “That was never the case for us before.”

Arton’s new clients fear that if the pandemic carries on for another year or two, they will be trapped by their U.S. passports, so they’re seeking out second passports from countries with investment migration programs.

mid-pandemic, motivations have shifted. Some of Arton Capital’s American clients are in mixed-nationality relationships where couples have been separated because of pandemic travel bans. Others are worried about the impact of U.S. politics on their passport’s global standing.

The United States was an early adopter of the program. In 1990, the government created the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program, which has received nearly 80,000 applicants since. However, Arton says interest in the investment migration program has decreased drastically because of a recent cost increase, the program’s long approval process and the U.S. government’s fluctuating immigration legislation.

investment migration “is a way for sovereign states to raise debt-free capital and also to drive further foreign direct investment — and combine these programs with other policy areas — to really enhance investment in certain industries.”

The application takes months, if not years, to process, and it includes a thorough investigation into a person’s private and financial life.

On occasion, they may find incriminating information during an investigation, and advisers will contact a client to say, “‘Never, ever walk through our doors again. We’re burning all these files.’

part of the reason for the St. Lucia program’s intense vetting is to uphold the value of the country’s passport. It’s in St. Lucia’s best interest to stay in good standing with the 146 countries that allow St. Lucian passport holders visa-free travel.

Besides reducing the time an immigrant must live in the country to apply, the plan will allow people to keep their original citizenship and make language requirements less onerous for older immigrants.

“The opposition does not want to accept or admit that we are a nation of immigrants; they basically want to hide from reality,” said Bijan Djir-Sarai, who came to Germany from Iran when he was 11 and is now the secretary general of the Free Democratic Party, which is part of the governing coalition.

many Germans still do not recognize the diversification of their country.

Before then, it was virtually impossible to become German without proving German ancestry, a situation that was especially fraught for the nearly one million Turkish citizens who started coming to Germany in the 1960s

The proposals are the most sweeping since 1999, when, for the first time in modern German history, people who were not born to German parents could get German citizenship under certain conditions.

the conservative opposition has staunchly resisted easing citizenship requirements, criticizing them as giving away the rights accorded German citizens too easily to people who are not integrated enough.

Over the months of negotiations, the smallest and most conservative of the parties in the governing coalition fought for changes to make sure applicants are self-sufficient and — apart from few exceptions — did not rely on social security payments.“If we want society to accept immigration reform, we also have to talk about things like control, regulation and, if need be, repatriation,” Mr. Djir-Sarai said, acknowledging the opposition’s concerns. “It is simply part of it.”

surveys show that more than two-thirds of Germans believe that changes making immigration easier are needed to alleviate rampant skilled-worker shortages, according to a recent poll. Industry; employers, like the German association of small and medium-size enterprises; and economists welcome the changes, seeing them as a way to attract skilled workers.

Although it naturalized the fifth largest number of people in the European Union in 2020, the most recent year for which such numbers are available, Germany ranks comparatively poorly in naturalizing permanent residents: 19th out of 27 E.U. member states, one spot lower than Hungary.

“Other European countries,” Professor Bendel noted, “naturalize much faster, namely mostly after five years and not after eight years, and that is why we ended up in the bottom third.”

“If you want make people to feel integrated,” she said, “you should not tear apart their identities.”