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Chances are you miss your favorite bar: The chatter, the live music, or the pour of the drink made just so. You're not alone. With bars shuttered all over the world, that sense of community has now been absent for over a year. But one bar in Mexico decided to do so something about it, by recreating some of those sounds at your favorite bar for those confined at home. And that idea? Well, it took off around the world.

The bar is in Monterrey, Mexico. Started in 2012 by Oscar Romo and a few friends, it was a little neighborhood spot, with live music next to a long, wooden bar and a small patio outside.Back then, Monterrey was emerging from a horrific string of violence from the drug cartels waging war across northern Mexico. The city was starting to come back to life, and people were finally feeling safe.

For the next eight years, Maverick blossomed into a cornerstone of the neighborhood, a spot where artists and musicians, writers, and others in the community could meet to unwind. Until the pandemic hit.

passed along party lines around 6 a.m. after eight hours of questioning by Democrats, who have virtually no path to stop it from becoming law.

Republicans in the Texas Senate muscled one of the most restrictive new voting laws in the U.S. to the cusp of the governor's desk early Sunday, approving fewer ways to cast a ballot and more criminal penalties after rushing the bill to the floor in the middle of the night.

Under revisions during closed-door negotiations, Republicans added language that could make it easier for a judge to overturn an election and pushed back the start of Sunday voting, when many Black churchgoers head to the polls. The 67-page measure would also eliminate drive-through voting and 24-hour polling centers, both of which Harris County, the state's largest Democratic stronghold, introduced last year.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has imposed a new import ban on seafood from a fleet of Chinese fishing vessels, after a year-long investigation uncovered what U.S. officials called signs of forced labor within the fleet's operations.

The agency said it identified at least 11 indicators of forced labor across the company's fleet, "including physical violence, withholding of wages, and abusive working and living conditions." The allegations include abuses against many Indonesian workers.

According to CBP officials, this is the first U.S. ban on imports from an entire fishing fleet, as opposed to individual vessels targeted in the past.

Many of the world's top athletes have rallied around tennis star Naomi Osaka and her decision to pull out of the French Open — decrying a culture that doesn't always give athletes the support they need in times of mental distress.

Support from Osaka's fellow athletes soon poured in, often tinged with knowing frustration at systems that don't prioritize competitors' well-being.

I announced it preemptively because I do feel like the rules are quite outdated in parts and I wanted to highlight that."

The suspected gunman in three attacks that killed eight people at Atlanta-area spas on Tuesday has been charged with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.Cherokee County officials announced on Wednesday afternoon that Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with four counts of murder and one count of assault in the shooting involving three women and two men at Young's Asian Massage. He has also been charged with murder in Atlanta, where four other women were killed in two separate attacks.

Police said the suspect has confessed to the crime and told officials about a "temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate."

it is too early to determine if he'll be charged with a hate crime.

Police in Boulder, Colo., have identified the suspect in Monday's shooting rampage at a grocery store as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 21. Ten people died in the shooting, including a Boulder police officer who had arrived to help those inside the store. The victims range in age from 20 to 65.Alissa has been charged with 10 counts of murder in the first degree, Boulder police said.

All of the victims have now been identified, and their families have been notified, Herold said at a news conference Tuesday morning.

The suspect is from Arvada, a small city between Denver and Boulder. He was wounded during the shooting and was expected to be released from the hospital and sent to the county jail sometime Tuesday, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said.

As thousands of National Guard troops now buttress security in Washington, D.C., and the nation, former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund is standing by his actions, and those of his agency, on Jan. 6 — the day pro-Trump rioters attacked the Capitol under his watch. In an interview with NPR, Sund says he had already planned to have 1,400 to 1,500 officers on duty, "all hands on deck."

"We expected some additional violence maybe between some of the counterprotesters — that's one of the reasons we went to the all hands on deck, but nothing like what we saw,"

Sund said he spoke to then-House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving on Jan. 4 about additional aid from the National Guard but was turned down. He had hoped to have service members along the larger perimeter set with police barricades. Sund said he believes Irving consulted with his Senate counterpart, Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger, and then Irving told him there were concerns of optics. These were driven perhaps by "just the military being probably around the Capitol complex,"

House Democrats are facing a time crunch to quickly wrap up their investigation into allegations President Donald Trump abused his office in pushing Ukraine to probe his political rivals, prompting growing expectations that votes on impeaching Trump could slip closer to the end of the year.

But that has proven to be more complicated than it initially seemed, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and sources. The reason: Each witness has so far provided more leads for investigators to chase down, including new names to potentially interview or seek documents from. Plus, Democrats have had to reschedule several witnesses, including some this week in part because of memorial services for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, and others because they needed more time to retain lawyers.

"Every time we have a deposition, it leads us in a slightly different direction," Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, two of the three panels leading the investigation, said Monday. "We don't know how many additional pieces of testimony we may need. We just don't know."

This is the epitome of the educational toy wrapped up in fun.

This is the epitome of the educational toy wrapped up in fun.

1932 by master carpenter

The former chief of U.S. Capitol Police says security officials at the House and Senate rebuffed his early requests to call in the National Guard ahead of a demonstration in support of President Trump that turned into a deadly attack on Congress.

Former chief Steven Sund -- who resigned his post last week after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for him to step down

Sund's superiors said previously that the National Guard and other additional security support could have been provided, but no one at the Capitol requested it.

Statusization — to coin a useful term — is ubiquitous, no matter what your altitude. While you’re in your hospital bed spooning up red Jell-O, a patient in a private suite is enjoying strawberries and cream. On your way to a Chase A.T.M., you notice a silver plaque declaring the existence within of Private Client Services. This man has a box seat at a Yankees game; that man has a skybox. And the skybox isn’t the limit: high overhead, the 1 percent fly first class; the .1 percent fly Netjets; the .01 fly their own planes. Why should it be any different up above from down below?

In his new book, “The Great Degeneration,” the historian Niall Ferguson confirms my intuition. His argument is that we’ve seen a precipitous decline in social mobility over the last 30 years: “Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from ‘rags to riches’ in a generation.

flying has become like driving — only instead of collapsing bridges and potholed roads, the hazards a traveler in economy faces are crippling back pain and plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches tossed on a tray by hassled flight attendants. It’s just another infrastructure in collapse.

The great period of discovery from the latter half of the fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries is generally referred to as the Age of Exploration. It is exemplified by the Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus Essay Gold of the Indies (1451–1506), who undertook a voyage to the New World under the auspices of the Spanish monarchs, Isabella I of Castile (1451–1504) and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516).

"Wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with Russia?"

President Obama's feckless handling of Russia has been so embarrassing that it may have emboldened Putin to annex Crimea, and terrified NATO allies along Russia's border.

When Trump takes office on January 20, he will have to contend with a slew of issues that demonstrate the extent to which Russia and America are strategically interdependent

Five years on, Tahrir has the quality of a dream. Read Worth’s remarkable new book, “A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS,” and weep. The chasm between the civic spirit of the square and the brutal theocracy of the Islamic State reveals the extent of the failure.

Everywhere outside Tunisia, sect, tribe and the Mukhabarat (secret police) prove stronger than the aspiration for institutions capable of mediating differences and bringing the elusive “karama,” or dignity, that, as Worth notes, was the “rallying cry of all the uprisings.”

Who should be blamed for this epic failure

History is lauded in China. Ordinary people will tell you every chance they get that they have 5,000 years of culture: wuqiannian de wenhua.

or the government, it is the benchmark for legitimacy in the present. But it is also a beast that lurks in the shadows.

It is hard to overstate history’s role in a Chinese society run by a communist party. Communism itself is based on historical determinism: one of Marx’s points was that the world was moving inexorably towards communism, an argument that regime-builders such as Lenin and Mao used to justify their violent rises to power. In China, Marxism is layered on top of much older ideas about the role of history. Each succeeding dynasty wrote its predecessor’s history, and the dominant political ideology – what is now generically called Confucianism – was based on the concept that ideals for ruling were to be found in the past, with the virtuous ruler emulating them. Performance mattered, but mainly as proof of history’s judgment.

The argument is that even if you don’t particularly like or trust Mr. Trump, he will not redefine the Republican Party.

But he already has. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, is waging an open attack on what have long been the party’s core views.

For at least three decades Republican politics have been defined by the centrality of conservatism in the party’s governing philosophy. Modern conservatism has three elements: a commitment to limited government and economic liberty that enables prosperity; moral traditionalism that conserves our capacity for liberty by producing responsible citizens; and a belief that America, confidently and carefully engaged in international affairs, can be a force for good in the world.

. Since the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003, estimates of the lives lost to violence vary from a quarter of a million to 600,000. The number of injured will surely be several times that, and the number of men, women and children displaced from their homes is put at between 3.5 and 5 million, somewhere between one in 10 and one in six of the population.

In sum, failures do not come any more abject than Iraq, nor catastrophes any more pure.

this additional probe was impossible to avoid. None of the other investigations provided an official answer to the burning, central question, of how on earth the UK had got embroiled in this great misadventure in the first place.

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is being dragged back into the ring at the age of 85

Invitations to speak have come from Spain, Britain and China. He has won a prestigious education award. Curriculums developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation, which Mr. Hirsch created to disseminate his ideas, have recently been adopted by hundreds of schools in 25 states and recommended by the New York City Department of Education for teachers to use in their classrooms.

“This is a redemptive moment for E. D. Hirsch, after a quarter-century of neglect by people both conservative and liberal,”

One way to determine whether JPMorgan has gotten off lightly is to calculate the settlement payments as a percentage of the subprime and Alt-A mortgages that the bank sold. From 2004 through 2007, JPMorgan, along with Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, sold around $1 trillion of mortgages, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry publication. So far, JPMorgan has paid or set aside about $25 billion to meet claims that the loans should not have been sold. In other words, that sum is 2.5 percent of the total, though that figure could increase as the bank strikes other settlements.

Since the crisis, many attempts have been made to assess how many of the subprime and Alt-A mortgages inside the bonds were of too low a standard. The results are staggering.

Occupancy was a focus of one of the lawsuits that was wrapped into the government settlement. The suit, brought by Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that, in one bond deal, 15 percent of the loans were for a second home, five times the level stated in the deal’s prospectus. Most of those loans probably defaulted, which means the ultimate loss rate on the bond was probably far higher than 2.5 percent.

n his first interview since fleeing to Russia, Ukraine's ousted president said Wednesday that he was "wrong" to have invited Russian troops into Crimea and vowed to try to persuade Russia to return the coveted Black Sea peninsula.

Yanukovych denied the allegations of corruption, saying he built his palatial residence outside of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, with his own money. He also denied responsibility for the sniper deaths of about 80 protesters in Kiev in February, for which he has been charged by Ukraine's interim government.

While Russia can hardly be expected to roll back its annexation, Yanukovych's statement could widen Putin's options in the talks on settling the Ukrainian crisis by creating an impression that Moscow could be open for discussions on Crimea's status in the future.