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In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”

“I have tried to be optimistic,” he also wrote in a recent essay. “I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident.”

Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.

In much of Europe, the far-right is thriving. Hard-line anti-immigrant parties rule Poland and Hungary. In Italy, Matteo Salvini’s League tops the polls and wields significant power after entering a national unity government. In France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen is President Emmanuel Macron’s most fearsome rival, while Spain’s Vox has steadily bled support from the mainstream conservatives since its creation in 2013. But Europe’s far-right is finding it a lot harder to translate the power it has at home into influence across Europe, even though hard-line nationalists occupy more seats in the European Parliament than ever before.

In the current European Parliament, the far-right is divided into two relatively small groups. Identity and Democracy includes the League, as well as France’s National Rally and a smaller delegation from Alternative for Germany (AfD). The other hard-right bloc is European Conservatives and Reformists, dominated by Poland’s Law and Justice Party. While traditionally more mainstream—it used to host Britain’s Conservative MEPs—this group is also to the right of the EPP and includes such immigration hard-liners as Brothers of Italy and Spain’s Vox.

international cooperation might seem strange. But ever since the 2014 European elections and the subsequent creation of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group—a Le Pen-led assembly of far-right European parties in the European Parliament that later became Identity and Democracy—the continent’s far-right parties have shown a growing appetite for international alliances,

The vote came exactly one week after the Capitol was breached by an angry mob of Trump loyalists.

In 2019, not a single Republican voted in favor of impeachment. House Republican leaders said they would not formally lobby members of the party against voting to impeach the president this time. Here are the Republicans who voted to impeach on Wednesday.

Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.

Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump “encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.”

Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio said Vice President Mike Pence and members of the House and Senate “had their lives put in grave danger as a result of the president’s actions,” adding, “When I consider the full scope of events leading up to Jan. 6, including the president’s lack of response as the United States Capitol was under attack, I am compelled to support impeachment.”

Representative Tom Rice of South Carolina criticized Mr. Trump’s response to the siege and concluded: “I have backed this president through thick and thin for four years. I campaigned for him and voted for him twice. But this utter failure is inexcusable.”Four Republicans did not vote: Representatives Kay Granger of Texas, Andy Harris of Maryland, Greg Murphy of North Carolina and Daniel Webster of Florida.

The Battle-Axe

Germanic soldiers were known to wield heavy battle-axes capable of smashing through shield, armor and helmet in a single blow.

“The iron head of this weapon was thick and exceedingly sharp on both sides while wooden handle was very short,”

People use the phrase “Middle Ages” to describe Europe between the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century.

The phrase “Middle Ages” tells us more about the Renaissance that followed it than it does about the era itself.

European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

There is ample evidence that climate change is happening. 97% of scientists believe not only that climate change is happening, but that humans are causing climate change.

Snow and ice cover has decreased in most areas with the most drastic reductions at the poles. In fact, minimum arctic sea ice (usually during September) has decreased by more than 40%. NCA states that “This decline is unprecedented in the historical record, and the reduction of ice volume and thickness is even greater.” Sea level is increasing because as water warms it expands and melting ice and icecaps adds water to the oceans. Atmospheric water vapor is increasing because warmer air can hold more water.

While it is true that the climate has changed in the past due to natural factors, natural factors alone cannot explain the speed of temperature increase and global changes that we are experiencing now

an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing. “I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,” wrote Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960). 

The Oklahoma lawyer, father of famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), was describing the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood known as Greenwood in the booming oil town. “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”

The younger Franklin says Tulsa has been in denial over the fact that people were cruel enough to bomb the black community from the air, in private planes, and that black people were machine-gunned down in the streets. The issue was economics. Franklin explains that Native Americans and African-Americans became wealthy thanks to the discovery of oil in the early 1900s on what had previously been seen as worthless land.

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.

China, one of the world's biggest users of plastic, has unveiled a major plan to reduce single-use plastics across the country. Non-degradable bags will be banned in major cities by the end of 2020 and in all cities and towns by 2022.

In 2017 alone, China collected 215 million tonnes of urban household waste. But national figures for recycling are not available.

The National Development and Reform Commission on Sunday issued the new policy, which will be implemented over the next five years.

As soon as #StopTheSteal went offline in a serious, dangerous way, everyone who had been posting about it had to choose a side, or a reality. Broadly, the Republican establishment and its voters have had to grapple with whether they want to continue claiming the party’s radical flank. Wednesday “was probably the most visceral experience of watching a political party fracture,” says Joan Donovan, the research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “It seems to me that we’re in the midst of watching MAGA become its own movement.”

Samantha Marika, a right-wing social-media personality with 293,000 Twitter followers, appeared enthralled by the insurrection and frustrated by the claims that it was staged by antifa. “Those people aren’t Antifa,” she tweeted. “They are patriots.” On her Instagram Story, she reposted a tweet from the pro-Trump blogger David Leatherwood: “I don’t know how some of you have spent the last 2 months riling up the base about a stolen election and telling everybody we must fight- And then when we finally do you cower away and blame Antifa. Beta cucks.”

Gray, the rapper and Trump fan, for his part spent much of Wednesday and yesterday reminding his 205,000 followers of the truth in exceptionally clear terms: “No it wasn’t Antifa that stormed the Capitol building. That was us,” he wrote in one tweet. “MAGA was in DC fighting for our country and freedoms,” he wrote in another. “Twitter ‘maga’ people were giving the credit to Antifa.” That tweet ended with an emoji shedding a tear.

For Trump, Fox News has two functions: With some exceptions, it largely functions as his “shameless propaganda outlet,” as Margaret Sullivan put it, aggressively inflating his successes and faithfully pushing his messages. When Fox occasionally departs from this role, Trump rages at it as a form of deep betrayal.

Yet for precisely this reason, Fox also functions as a kind of security blanket: It persuades Trump that he’s succeeding, which provides an effective reality distortion field against outside criticism.

Trump repeatedly failed to act to tame the spread, even though that would have helped him politically, due to a pathological refusal to admit earlier error and “overly rosy assessments and data" from Fox News:Another self-imposed hurdle for Trump has been his reliance on a positive feedback loop. Rather than sit for briefings by infectious-disease director Anthony S. Fauci and other medical experts, the president consumes much of his information about the virus from Fox News Channel and other conservative media sources, where his on-air boosters put a positive spin on developments.

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.

The storms displaced hundreds of thousands of people, creating a new class of refugees with more reason than ever to migrate north and setting up an early test for the incoming Biden administration.

“This is where I live,” said Jorge Suc Ical, standing atop the sea of rocks and muddy debris that entombed his town. “It’s a cemetery now.”

The storms, two of the most powerful in a record-breaking season, demolished tens of thousands of homes, wiped out infrastructure and swallowed vast swaths of cropland.

Mutual toleration involves accepting the legitimacy of one’s opponents, as long as they play by the constitutional rules

Institutional forbearance means refusing to exercise the full extent of a legal right if it’s the morally wrong thing to do or violates the spirit of the law.

leading figures on the right have openly abandoned the obvious standard that those who bring allegations should also bring evidence. This is not a recent development.

The iceberg drifted slowly through the icy Weddell Sea for a few years, before picking up steam as it entered the Southern Ocean. When last we heard from it, in 2020, it was bearing down on the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic, a bit shrunken and battered from a journey of more than a thousand miles.

Ecologists and others had feared that during its journey the iceberg might become grounded near South Georgia. That could have kept the millions of penguins and seals that live and breed there from reaching their feeding areas in the ocean.

As it traveled through the relatively warm waters of the Southern Ocean into the South Atlantic, it melted from below, eventually releasing a huge quantity of fresh water into the sea near the island. The influx of so much fresh water could affect plankton and other organisms in the marine food chain.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Washington, D.C. remained the capital of the fractured United States and also the military headquarters of the Union Army. Richmond, the newly minted capital of the Confederacy, was less than 100 miles away in neighboring Virginia.

At the outset of the Civil War, Washington, D.C. was extremely vulnerable to attack, defended by a solitary fort located 16 miles from the city center. But by the war’s end in 1865, Washington, D.C. was arguably the most heavily defended city on the planet, ringed by an impenetrable network of 68 earthen forts connected by miles of trenches, gun batteries and military roads.

By the end of the war, the “Father of the Defenses of Washington”—as Barnard came to be known—constructed a total of 68 forts, each made with thick earthen walls that could absorb cannon balls and heavy artillery.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- The tsunami threat around the Pacific from a huge undersea volcanic eruption receded Sunday, but the massive ash cloud covering the tiny island nation of Tonga prevented surveillance flights from New Zealand to assess the extent of damage.

In Tonga it sent tsunami waves crashing across the shore and people rushing to higher ground.

The eruption cut the internet to Tonga, leaving friends and family members around the world anxiously trying to get in touch to figure out if there were any injuries. Even government websites and other official sources remained without updates on Sunday afternoon.

Some of the world’s most ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change, as rising concentrations of salt in Iraq eat away at mud brick and more frequent sandstorms erode ancient wonders.

Iraq is known as the cradle of civilisation. It was here that agriculture was born, some of the world’s oldest cities were built, such as the Sumerian capital Ur, and one of the first writing systems was developed – cuneiform. The country has “tens of thousands of sites from the Palaeolithic through Islamic eras”, explained Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

Damage to sites such as the legendary Babylon “will leave gaps in our knowledge of human evolution, of the development of early cities, of the management of empires, and of the dynamic changes in the political landscape of the Islamic era”,

What’s striking about AITA is the language in which it states its central question: you’re asked not whether I did the right thing but, rather, what sort of person I’m being.

We would have a different morality, and an impoverished one, if we judged actions only with those terms of pure evaluation, “right” or “wrong,” and judged people only “good” or “bad.”

, if Aristotle’s ethics is to be sold as a work of what we call self-help, we have to ask: How helpful is it?