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He's a frequent flyer who, in his power wheelchair, has traveled to 46 countries.

He also started a website called Wheelchair Travel and hosts a travel podcast.

Now a new policy from one airline could limit the ability of some people such as Morris to fly. American Airlines, the largest airline in the United States, put in place a limit on the weight of a wheelchair, and now many power wheelchairs, such as the one Morris uses, are deemed too heavy to fly on smaller regional jets.

Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”

They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.

If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.

To many historians, the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE has always been viewed as the end of the ancient world and the onset of the Middle Ages, often improperly called the Dark Age

when a writer speaks of the fall of the empire, he or she generally refers to the fall of the city of Rome.

476 CE

Across the country, there are growing concerns that the bitterness and animosity over the presidential election will not end when the polls close Tuesday night. From coast to coast, cities are preparing for possible protests, civil unrest and violence, regardless of the election's outcome.

While the nation's capital city is certain to be a focal point of post-election demonstrations, other cities are bracing for possible chaos too.

The National Retail Federation has held training webinars for members on crisis prevention and de-escalating conflict and hired security consultants to help store owners prepare.

refers to a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.

The Silk Road extended approximately 6,437 kilometers (4,000 miles) across some of the world’s most formidable landscapes, including the Gobi Desert and the Pamir Mountains.

With no one government to provide upkeep, the roads were typically in poor condition. Robbers were common. To protect themselves, traders joined together in caravans with camels or other pack animals. Over time, large inns called caravanserais cropped up to house travelling merchants.

Although historians differ on our most crucial presidential elections, four of them seem especially significant: those of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940. In 2007, Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote that the 1800 election pitting John Adams against Thomas Jefferson “is the most important election in American history.” In 2012, another scholar, David Mayhew of Yale, considering various criteria, selected the election of 1860 as the most important one, followed by that of 1932. Finally, FDR scholar Paul Sparrow considers the 1940 election our most important: “If you step back and look at its impact on the world, no election was more important.”

But why these four? Regarding 1800, Lepore notes that the election “marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. . . . It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College.” Mayhew concurs that 1800 “settled the point that the incumbent party would accept a loss and hand power over to the opposition--thus ensuring that we would continue to have elections

Lincoln’s 1860 election was followed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. If any of Lincoln’s three main opponentshad won, secession, the civil war, and the abolition of slavery would likely not have immediately followed

"We may be in for a very apocalyptic fall, I'm sorry to say," said Dr. Peter Hotez,

"And it's happening because we're forcing schools to reopen in areas of high transmission. We're forcing colleges to reopen, and we don't have the leadership nationally,

Despite slow, steady progress after an abysmal July, daily new cases have once again soared above 40,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The US is on the cusp of 200,000 Covid-19 deaths.

China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.

in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility

The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.

David Carballo: At its most ambitious, archaeology can cover the totality of the human story, from our evolution as a species to today, since the focus is on material culture rather than on texts—though we typically examine both in tandem. By material culture I mean the places we inhabit (“sites”) and the stuff we use (“artifacts”). Much of our history as a species has no written records and can only be accessed through material remains like sites and artifacts, whereas for other places and times we may have texts, but they represent the official transcripts of the rich and powerful. In those cases, archaeology can provide a voice to the “99 percent” who were non-elites yet played their part in shaping history.

Lacking large domesticated animals, Mesoamerican civilizations developed other solutions to common concerns. Rather than extensive, plowed-field systems, Mesoamericans intensified agriculture in various ways. The ingenious system of lakeshore fields called chinampas is especially noteworthy, as they permitted multiple crop harvests per year and led to a population boom in the Aztec period.

Lacking pack animals, Mesoamericans moved commodities using human porters over land and using canoes over water. For maximizing the circulation of goods in this environment, it made economic sense for populations to nucleate and develop brisk marketplace exchange, daily in larger cities and on a rotating schedule in more rural areas. The twin-city capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, was the largest of these, and likely larger than any city in Europe at the time except for Paris.

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.

U.S. President Donald Trump largely ignores the past or tends to get it wrong.

Whenever he leaves office, in early 2021, 2025, or sometime in between, the world will be in a worse state than it was in 2016. China has become more assertive and even aggressive. Russia, under its president for life, Vladimir Putin, carries on brazenly as a rogue state, destabilizing its neighbors and waging a covert war against democracies through cyberattacks and assassinations. In Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, a new crop of strongman rulers has emerged. The world is struggling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and is just coming to appreciate the magnitude of its economic and social fallout. Looming over everything is climate change.

Will the coming decades bring a new Cold War, with China cast as the Soviet Union and the rest of the world picking sides or trying to find a middle ground? Humanity survived the original Cold War in part because each side’s massive nuclear arsenal deterred the other from starting a hot war and in part because the West and the Soviet bloc got used to dealing with each other over time, like partners in a long and unhappy relationship, and created a legal framework with frequent consultation and confidence-building measures. In the decades ahead, perhaps China and the United States can likewise work out their own tense but lasting peace

The latest election controversy cropped up this week in California, where Republicans installed dozens of unauthorized ballot dropboxes that state officials say are illegal.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to historic interest in mail-in voting, but President Donald Trump and the GOP have spent months attacking the integrity of mail ballots and fighting in court against dropboxes. The California dispute is the latest flashpoint in this ongoing battle."Whether or not it is technically legal, it's extremely problematic for voters," said CNN election law analyst Rick Hasen, who is also a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. He said the unauthorized dropboxes were "not secure" and that the GOP was "asking for trouble."

The California Republican Party installed dozens of unauthorized ballot dropboxes in at least four Southern California counties, where there are competitive House races this year. The party claims it did this as part of an above-board effort to legally collect and return people's ballots.

I’m willing to ma

ke a fool of myself for democracy

Ms. Gibbs is driven by a sense of anger and residual shock. How could so many of her neighbors in western Pennsylvania vote for a man she saw as a threat

Signs posted at the entrance to the grocery store in northwest Montana told customers to wear a mask. Public health officials in Flathead County urged the same. Infection rates here are among the highest in the state. Infection rates in the state are among the highest in the country.

"It's absolute garbage," he said. "There has been plenty of proof that the coronavirus 'pandemic,' if you will, links back to Communist China. It's communist Marxism that they're trying to push on this country."

As health care professionals grapple with soaring numbers of COVID-19 cases across the country, they're also combatting another quick-spreading and frustrating contagion: misinformation.

As the planet continues to warm, vast new stretches of Russia will become suitable for agriculture.

A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm;

Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter.

Chinese who are oppressed by local officials have sighed, by way of explanation: “The heavens are high, and the emperor far away.”

They want the masses to believe that, even in the remotest villages, their welfare is the concern of an all-knowing leader, Xi Jinping, served by officials striving to follow his stern but wise example.

A central task of the Xi era is to transform morale among the country’s 90m party members, including millions of bureaucrats.

Together, these stories suggest that the “push-back” – the forcing away of migrating people from a country’s territory, even if it places them in harm’s way or overrides their right to asylum – is becoming an entrenched practice. Once something that would take place largely in the shadows, it is being done increasingly openly, with some governments trying to find ways to make the practice legal. The UK’s proposal has been strongly criticised by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, whose representative said it would “unavoidably” put lives at risk.

Just as shocking as the claims themselves is the fact that the revelations have largely been met with a shrug of indifference by EU officials, whose funding helps prop up border defences in both countries. Twelve member states are even demanding that the EU adjusts its rules so that it can finance “further preventive measures”, including walls and fences, at its external borders.

In south-eastern Europe, an international team of investigative journalists have revealed that Croatia and Greece are using a “shadow army”, balaclava-clad plainclothes units linked to those countries’ regular security forces, to force people back from their borders. In Croatia, these units have been filmed beating people with clubs at the border with Bosnia. In Greece, they are accused of intercepting boats in the Aegean and setting the passengers adrift on life-rafts in Turkish waters. (Croatia has promised to investigate reports of abuse, while Greece denies the practice.

THE WORLD’S monitored populations of wild animals have decreased by an average of 68% in the past 50 years

intensive farming and the changing use of land are largely to blame

More than 100 countries recognised the need to reverse species decline by 2030 and acknowledged the consequences of harmful environmental practices and climate change for biodiversity.

according to an early analysis by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), the physical damage already exceeded $68bn as of April 1st, equivalent to more than a third of Ukraine’s GDP in 2021.

$28bn worth of damage to roads

damage to bridges, ports and railways, and the infrastructure bill exceeds $58bn

“We knew the French were struggling with changing climates, but we didn’t realize how bad it was until we got to Jura,” he said. “You can taste the impact by comparing different vintages. Yesterday I tried a chardonnay from 2019 and then from 2020 and there was a big difference.”

Some of them lost everything.”

I’m an optimist and I’m hopeful for 2022, but if it continues like this, how will we continue to make Jura wine? I really don’t know.”