Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Do you have a front lawn? If not, have you ever fantasized about having one? Why do you think a lush, perfectly manicured lawn is a dream for so many Americans? Did you know that kind of lawn can hurt the environment and contribute to the decline of bee populations?

Do you have a front lawn? If not, think of a familiar field or patch of grass that you pass by or visit regularly, such as a schoolyard, park or neighbor’s backyard. What plant and animal species do you imagine live there?

What stood out from your observations? Were you surprised by the variety of life you found? What did you learn from looking closely at something you may have passed by without much thought before?What did you wonder? What questions do you have about the life you observed?

People.” Photographs and Text by Núria López TorresThe Seri, an Indigenous nation of only about 1,000 people, have lived in northwestern Mexico for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Their identity is deeply tied to their natural environment, which in recent decades has been susceptible to an increasing number of threats related to climate change.

What is one thing you can infer about the Seri people based on their origin story of the Earth?Does this story remind you of any others about how Earth was created from other cultures and religions?

3. How has climate change threatened core aspects of the Seri people’s culture? What other challenges has the community faced?4. What actions have Seri women taken to protect their territory and heritage?

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey threatened this month to block NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, Western officials were exasperated — but not shocked.

he Turkish strongman has come to be seen as something of a stickup artist.

Now the Turkish leader is back in the role of obstructionist, and is once again invoking the Kurds, as he charges that Sweden and Finland sympathize with the Kurdish militants he has made his main enemy.

visitors watched in disbelief as he began pounding on the glass that shields the painting. Then, Mr. Sundberg said, the man smeared what appeared to be cake all over the glass protecting what is one of the world’s most recognizable pieces of art.

The painting was not damaged,

“He threw a whole bunch of roses at me and then he started yelling,”

Rescue workers recovered 22 bodies on Monday and Tuesday after a nearly 48-hour operation to reach and assess the site of a plane crash in the rocky heights of the Himalayas, according to officials in Nepal.

The flight normally takes about 30 minutes, but the plane went down in bad weather with 13 Nepalis, four Hindu pilgrims from India and two German trekkers on board.

“No one is alive,” said Narendra Shahi, an international mountain guide, who was sent to the crash site as part of the rescue operation. “The plane has crashed into pieces. It’s so heartbreaking.”

The international airport, built a decade ago in the name of Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa family, is devoid of passenger flights, its staff lingering idly in the cafe. The cricket stadium, also constructed on the family’s orders, has had only a few international matches and is so remote that arriving teams face the risk of wildlife attacks.

As Sri Lanka grapples with its worst ever economic crisis, with people waiting hours for fuel and cutting back on food, nowhere is the reckless spending that helped wreck the country more visible than in Hambantota, the Rajapaksa family’s home district in the south.

This enormous waste — more than $1 billion spent on the port, $250 million on the airport, nearly $200 million on underused roads and bridges, and millions more (figures vary) on the cricket stadium — made Hambantota a throne to the vanity of a political dynasty that increasingly ran the country as a family business.

The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.

For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’

Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.

When Boris Johnson hit energy companies with a windfall tax last week as a way of providing more aid for struggling consumers, it was a bittersweet moment for the opposition Labour Party, which had been promoting just such a plan for months.

For once, Labour could claim to have won “the battle of ideas.” But at a stroke, Mr. Johnson had co-opted the party’s marquee policy and claimed the credit.

senior leadership “must bear responsibility” for the failure to follow the rules.

A drone lifted off from Michigan this month and flew across the St. Clair River toward Port Lambton, Ontario. Its spooked pilot aborted the landing after being spotted by a neighbor, leaving the police to later fish the drone out of a tree and discover 11 handguns strapped to it with plastic bags, tape and carabiner clips.

The problem is also glaring on the U.S.-Mexico border. Last August, Mexico sued 10 American gunmakers, blaming them for fueling violence in Mexico.

The spillover across Canada’s border with the United States extends beyond the guns themselves to the shared grief and calls for increased firearms regulations in the wake of mass shootings, including two just this month: 10 people were killed in a racist attack in a Buffalo supermarket on May 14; and 19 students and two teachers were killed on Tuesday at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

The Italian Bishops’ Conference on Friday presented its plan to investigate clerical abuse, but critics say it is insufficient and disappointing.

Seeking to address the concerns about the revelations of abuse that have devastated the church worldwide, the bishops announced that they would commission a report examining cases from 2020-21, to be published in November, as well as a second report that would analyze how clerical abuse had been handled in Italy in the past two decades.

Victims groups and their advocates in Italy have been frustrated by the church’s failure to follow in the footsteps of other countries — including Australia, Ireland and the United States — that have commissioned fully independent investigations carried out by third parties.

Older people who received smallpox vaccinations may yet have some immunity, researchers say. Healthy children and adults generally do not become severely ill.

The answer is reassuring. Most children and adults with healthy immune systems are likely to dodge severe illness, experts said in interviews. But there are two high-risk groups.

One comprises infants younger than six months.

The European Union’s long-delayed deal to embargo Russian oil, finalized late Monday, effectively exempts Hungary from the costly step the rest of the bloc is taking to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

He has also painted Hungary’s interests as being distinct from the West by fanning culture wars and fears of liberal values lapping at Hungary’s borders, speaking in March about “the gender insanity sweeping across the Western world.”

“Hungary is exempt from the oil embargo!” Mr. Orban declared on his Facebook page Monday. He had previously said cutting off Russian oil “amounts to an atomic bomb being dropped on the Hungarian economy.”

“China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it,”

“We can’t rely on Beijing to change its trajectory,” he said. “So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open and inclusive international system.”

On Feb. 4, almost three weeks before the invasion, President Vladimir V. Putin met with President Xi Jinping in Beijing as their two governments issued a 5,000-word statement announcing a “no limits” partnership that aims to oppose the international diplomatic and economic systems overseen by the United States and its allies. Since the war began, the Chinese government has given Russia diplomatic support by reiterating Mr. Putin’s criticisms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories that undermine the United States and Ukraine.

In every country, people get into arguments, hold racist views or suffer from mental health issues. But in the U.S., it is easier for those people to pick up a gun and shoot someone.

But federal laws are lax.

The U.S. is always going to have more guns, and consequently more deaths, than other rich countries. Given the Second Amendment, mixed public opinion and a closely divided federal government, lawmakers face sharp limits on how far they can go.

As Shanghai eased one of the longest, toughest lockdowns anywhere since the pandemic began, many of its 25 million residents celebrated being free to move around. The reopening on Wednesday came after Shanghai’s two-month siege against Covid had set off public anger over shortages of food and medicine as well as the harsh enforcement of quarantine rules.

For now at least, that anger gave way to relief after the government wound back many restrictions. During the day, people — all wearing masks — basked in the novelty of previously mundane pleasures like meeting friends and relatives, strolling in parks, and driving through streets that had been largely empty since early April. Hairdressers were, as in many cities freed from lockdowns, busy. Subway lines were open but quiet.

The uncertainty and anxiety about the future could impede Shanghai’s — and China’s — recovery. Officials have been cautiously lifting some restrictions on residents and selected companies since midway through May.

A navy shirt that read, “Wilmington Friends Quakers” was just right for Ms. Beatty’s needs on a recent thrifting trip to Urban Jungle, a large store with a little yellow submarine sign out front in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. But she needed more than just one perfect T-shirt.

While upcycling has become a more common practice in fashion in recent years, it’s less common to see a brand entirely devoted to it.

The reconstructed look will be priced around $125, a steep premium, but a price that Ms. Beatty thinks is fair, given all that goes into making the garments: sourcing and cleaning the shirts, determining the look (matching shirts based on color tone, size and feel), cutting and sewing the garment.

It all starts with a whistle, said Vladislav Goncharenko, a Ukrainian army sergeant, describing the relentless Russian shelling.“You lie in a trench,’’ he said, waiting in an ambulance packed with other wounded soldiers. “There are very loud explosions. You want to get deeper into the ground. And you have shrapnel whistling above you, like flies.”

The momentum Ukraine generated after pushing Russian forces back from Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, has given way in the East to weeks of give-and-take over villages, heavy shelling — and a stream of Ukrainian dead and wounded from the battlefields.

“Those people who said that the war would end very soon, that we have already won, that we will celebrate in April, said a dangerous thing,” Ukraine’s national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov, told Ukrainian media this week.

“This, too, is a decision we have made that ensures Ukraine’s security with the most modern equipment,”

The speed and scale of weapons donations to Ukraine has been a persistent source of criticism for Mr. Scholz both from Ukraine and from inside Germany, even as he has spoken of breaking with decades of pacifist policy.

In addition, Germany has taken in 168 “especially severely wounded” Ukrainian soldiers for medical treatment, Mr. Scholz said.

In emails to workers at SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Musk said they were required to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office.

“The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence,” Mr. Musk said. “That is why I spent so much time in the factory — so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

The issue has become more fraught as coronavirus vaccinations have increased and an abatement of the pandemic seemed to be near. Some companies began saying they expected workers to return to the office. Still, plans have continued to fluctuate. Apple last month suspended its requirement that employees return to the office in May for at least three days a week because of a resurgence of Covid-19 cases. Airbnb recently told its employees that they never had to return to the office.

President Yoon Suk-yeol’s governing party won​ 12 of the 17 races for big-city mayors and provincial governors

The results on Wednesday were a decisive victory for Mr. Yoon, who won the presidential race by a razor-thin margin in March and was inaugurated just three weeks ago. Although this week’s elections were only held at the local level, the results were seen as an early referendum on Mr. Yoon’s performance as leader.

The election​ results were a stunning setback for the Democratic Party. During the last local elections four years ago, it won 14 of the same 17 races for leaders of big cities and provinces.