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other research suggests everyone alive in the world today shares a common ancestor from sometime in the past 3,500 years.

As recently as the 1950s, British schoolchildren were still studying pre-World War II textbooks that divided Europeans into Germanic, Alpine and Latin “types” according to the shape of their noses.

scientists had been arguing for 50 years that all humans were too closely related to be divided into races. “The few externally visible differences like skin color or nose shape are not enough to justify divisions,” he said.

Modern Italians and Spaniards have relatively few common ancestors compared with other European populations, which may be explained by their geography and history.

“There have been many studies that we’ve been involved in showing that groups which are fighting each other furiously all the time are actually extremely closely genetically related,” Mark A. Jobling, a geneticist at England’s Leicester University, told Associated Press. “So for example Jewish and non-Jewish populations in the Middle East are extremely similar genetically, but to tell them they are genetic close relatives isn’t going to change their ways.”

In the years after 1945, the executions were not discussed much. The shock of the discovery of concentration camps was one factor. The camps had survivors, found in place, who told their unimaginable tale. By contrast, the local executions terrorized and silenced survivors in the eastern regions. In addition, after World War II, many witnesses were left behind the Iron Curtain, and no one was interested in their memories.

“in the popular mind, this subject is far less known than the Holocaust.” The executions became, he said, “in a sense, invisible.”

The killing was “secret for Western countries, at a high level,” he said. “It was ultra-public in a village.”

, the work has huge significance, given that “more Jews were killed by shooting in Ukraine” — an estimated 1.5 million — “than murdered in Auschwitz in the crematoria.”

Father Desbois and German historians noted the special role played by Jews’ determination that, if possible, the name of every person killed in the Holocaust should live on.

the aim should be “to give back the names of as many people as possible.”

Whether to focus more heavily on Jewish loss or to include the 1.3 million to 1.5 million non-Jews estimated by Dr. Pohl to have been executed by the Nazis or their Axis allies is another big question.

On Mr. Putin’s side, the Russian economy is getting a respite from the battering it has taken from falling oil prices and Western sanctions, with the ruble rebounding somewhat over the past three months. A semblance of calm on the Ukrainian front might help him argue against renewal of European Union sanctions when they expire at the end of July. The United States needs Russia’s cooperation in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have suffered setbacks, raising the question of what next. And, in Iran, where negotiations to limit Tehran’s nuclear program, in which Washington and Moscow are partners, are approaching a critical deadline.

Hitler was on a steady stream of barbiturate tranquilizers, morphine, nasal and eye drops containing cocaine and other drugs — along with bulls’ semen to boost his testosterone — thanks to his Berlin-based personal physician, Theodor Morell, according to the report

He was characterized as “a quack and a fraud and a snake oil salesman”

Hitler was shown to have signs of Parkinson's disease by the end of World War II in 1945, and the dizzying array of drugs likely contributed to his serious health issues.

his public readings are crammed with fans. I attended one the other day and was shocked to see how a teenage schoolgirl was shouted down and hustled out of the room by security guards for mildly questioning the Sarrazin thesis.

a party that would be critical of Islamic expansion in Europe and that seeks to control immigration -- could win 15 percent of the vote, thus seriously shaking up the German political system

"The crimes of the Nazi era," he told the cheering crowd, "are not an excuse for you to refuse to fight for your own identity. Your only responsibility is to avoid the mistakes of the past." The cardinal error of the interwar years, according to Wilders, was the failure to identify gathering threats against democracy. In his analogy, it was the Muslims who were the Nazis. The audience rose to its feet to applaud him. It was the first time in decades of reporting from Germany that I witnessed a passionate response to a passionately delivered political speech.

Merkel does not want to grasp the nettle of anti-immigrant populism -- one senses it stings her as much as it does the Muslims she finds herself unloading against. But if she doesn't, if she simply bides her time, she will see her Christian Democratic party crumble. Germans are restless, and they increasingly believe their political class is tone-deaf. Popular resentment is running high, and there is a powerful head of steam behind the emerging anti-Islam movement

The homegrown terrorism here, with its apparent links to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, will also be used by other far-right, nationalist and anti-immigration movements in Europe, from the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s Pegida — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. That is another reason so many European leaders from the mainstream parties of the center right and center left, from Angela Merkel of Germany to David Cameron of Britain and Mariano Rajoy of Spain, came to show their own solidarity with France and Mr. Hollande.Continue reading the main story Invitees also included the leaders of all the main French political par

So Ginsburg is planning to be on the bench when the Supreme Court decides mammoth issues like the future of the Affordable Care Act and a national right for gay couples to marry. She says she doesn’t know how the health care case will turn out. But like practically every court observer in the country, she has a strong hunch about which way gay marriage will go: “I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court retreats from what it has said about same-sex unions.”

We compliment ourselves that a generally meritocratic system is open to far more people than was true 50 years ago. And it has been — but the resulting culture of ambition paradoxically erodes middle-class confidence. Today, the vast middle of the middle fears that unless you’re on the way up, you’re on the way down.

in the 1970s, drug use was already undermining the white middle class. Since then marriage rates among high school-educated whites have declined and illegitimacy has increased.

Cultural instability compounds economic instability. A person near the median in our society is on shaky ground. He feels that what was once reliable is now eroding. This is as much a source of today’s middle-class anxiety as stagnant household incomes.

the leadership cadres of both parties aren’t just unresponsive to this anxiety. They add to it

The intelligentsia on the left rarely lets a moment pass without reminding us of the demographic eclipse of white middle-class voters. Sometimes, those voters are described as racists, or derided as dull suburbanites who lack the élan of the new urban “creative class.”

Conservatives are no less harsh. Pundits ominously predict that the “innovators” are about to be overwhelmed by a locust blight of “takers.” The message: If it weren’t for successful people like us, middle-class people like you would be doomed. And if you’re not an entrepreneurial “producer,” you’re in the way.

Our political history since the end of World War II has turned on the willingness of white middle-class voters to rally behind great causes in league with the wealthy and political elite

Today, white middle-class voters want to be reassured that they can play an active role in politics. They want someone to appeal to their sense of political self-worth, not just their interests.

voters who feel disempowered and marginalized latch on to this promise. They want to be partners with the rich and powerful in defining our future as a country, not recipients of their benevolent ministrations, which explains why they’re untroubled by Mr. Trump’s great wealth.

Mr. Sanders also appeals to the strong desire that the white middle class has to recover its central role in the national project. While he attracts support from a wealthier stratum of the middle class than Mr. Trump, the appeal is the same. He asks them to join him in fundamentally remaking our political economy.

If these candidates have traction, it’s because over the last two decades our political elites, themselves almost entirely white, have decided, for different reasons, that the white middle class has no role to play in the multicultural, globalized future they envision, a future that they believe they will run

Republican Senator Inhofe, who in 2011 “co- sponsored legislation that would prevent the federal government from ‘promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas to address climate change.’”

Based on his research, the historian believes that “in the twenty- first century, as in the seventeenth, coping with [large] catastrophes . . . requires resources that only central governments command.”

he faults the “deep-seated fear of ‘Big Government,’” manifested by Inhofe and others, “that any attempt by a Federal agency to mitigate or avert damaging climate change represents a ‘power grab’ by Washington that must at all costs be resisted.”

Although White believes that historians’ scholarship and public outreach concerning climate change will continue to improve, he is still “concerned that few historians—even environmental historians—are actively working to address what is likely to become the single most urgent public issue of the 21st century.

Few examine the historical factors and decisions that led us to fossil-fuel dependence, climate change denial, and political and diplomatic gridlock on climate policy, with an eye to identifying changes that might bring us out of our current impasse. Moreover, public discussions about climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation rarely discuss insights from historical research.”

But where does ideology come from? At any given moment a society’s ideology may seem immutable, but Piketty argues that history is full of “ruptures” that create “switch points,” when the actions of a few people can cause a lasting change in a society’s trajectory.

He describes four broad inequality regimes

First are “ternary” societies divided into functional classes — clergy, nobility and everyone else

Second are “ownership” societies, in which it’s not who you are that matters but what you have legal title to

Then come the social democracies that emerged in the 20th century, which granted considerable power and privilege to workers, ranging from union representation to government-provided social benefits

Finally, there’s the current era of “hypercapitalism,” which is sort of an ownership society on steroids.

ether Piketty is a reliable guide to such a large territory. His book combines history, sociology, political analysis and economic data for dozens of societies. Is he really enough of a polymath to pull that off?

I was struck, for example, by his extensive discussion of the evolution of slavery and serfdom, which made no mention of the classic work of Evsey Domar of M.I.T., who argued that the more or less simultaneous rise of serfdom in Russia and slavery in the New World were driven by the opening of new land, which made labor scarce and would have led to rising wages in the absence of coercion

This happens to be a topic about which I thought I knew something; how many other topics are missing crucial pieces of the literature?

Eventually, however, Piketty comes down to the meat of the book: his explanation of what caused the recent surge in inequality and what can be done about it.

For Piketty, rising inequality is at root a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a “neo-proprietarian” ideology

Indeed, this is a view shared by many, though not all, economists. These days, attributing inequality mainly to the ineluctable forces of technology and globalization is out of fashion, and there is much more emphasis on factors like the decline of unions, which has a lot to do with political decisions.

Piketty places much of the blame on center-left parties, which, as he notes, increasingly represent highly educated voters. These more and more elitist parties, he argues, lost interest in policies that helped the disadvantaged, and hence forfeited their support.

his clear implication is that social democracy can be revived by refocusing on populist economic policies, and winning back the working class.

most political scientists would disagree. In the United States, at least, they stress the importance of race and social issues in driving the white working class away from Democrats, and doubt that a renewed focus on equality would bring those voters back

Dr. Neil M. Ferguson, a British epidemiologist who is regarded as one of the best disease modelers in the world, produced a sophisticated model with a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.

I asked Ferguson for his best case. “About 1.1 million deaths,” he said.

one can argue that the U.S. is not only on the same path as Italy but is also less prepared, for America has fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than Italy does — and a shorter life expectancy even in the best of times.

up to 366,000 I.C.U. beds might be needed in the United States for coronavirus patients at one time, more than 10 times the number available. A Harvard study reached a similar conclusion.

This is an interval of quiet when the United States should be urgently ramping up investment in vaccines and therapies, addressing the severe shortages of medical supplies and equipment, and giving retired physicians and military medics legal authority to practice in a crisis

During World War II, the Ford Motor Company turned out one B-24 bomber every 63 minutes; today, we should be rushing out ventilators and face masks, but there’s nothing like the same sense of urgency.

After initial missteps in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first discovered, China adopted protocols for protective gear that are more rigorous than those in the United States, involving N95 masks and face shields, double gowns, gloves and shoe covers, plus special areas to remove protective clothing — and all this worked. Not one of the 42,000 health workers sent to Wuhan is known to have become infected with the coronavirus. The United States isn’t protecting health workers with the same determination; it seems to be betraying them.

This crisis should be a wake-up call to address long-term vulnerabilities. That means providing universal health coverage and paid sick leave — and if you think that the coronavirus legislation Trump signed on Wednesday achieves that, think again. It guarantees sick leave to only about one-fifth of private-sector workers. It’s a symbol of the inadequacy of America’s preparedness.

“We are all making dying contingency plans at this point just in case,” she said. “Wills, backup people to take care of kids, recording bedtime stories.”

The United States is in a weaker position than some other countries to confront the virus because it is the only advanced country that doesn’t have universal health coverage, and the only one that does not guarantee paid sick leave

with infectious diseases, the burden will be shared by all Americans

In Italy, 8.3 percent of coronavirus cases involve health workers. A doctor in the Seattle area who is forced to reuse N95 masks told me that she and her colleagues fear that the lack of supplies will be deadly.

We may dodge a bullet this time, but experts have been warning for decades that a killer pandemic will come;

if we, too, can be scared enough to invest in public health and fix our health care system, then something good can come from this crisis — and in the long run, that may save lives.

Ferguson questions whether South Korea and other countries can sustain their success for 18 months until a vaccine is ready, even as new cases are constantly being imported

America and South Korea reported their first Covid-19 cases on the same day, but South Korea took the epidemic seriously, promptly created an effective test, used it widely and has seen cases go down more than 90 percent from the peak.

In contrast, the United States badly bungled testing, and President Trump repeatedly dismissed the coronavirus, saying it was “totally under control” and “will disappear,” and insisting he wasn’t “concerned at all.” The United States has still done only a bit more than 10 percent as many tests per capita as Canada, Austria and Denmark.

Peter Hotez, an eminent vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me that he and his colleagues have a candidate vaccine for the coronavirus but still haven’t been able to line up sufficient funding for clinical trials.

the millennial generation (those born since 1980) “has grown much more indifferent.” Less than 1 in 3 hold a similar belief about the importance of democracy.

the New York Times reports that while 43% of older Americans thought it would be illegitimate for the military to take power if civilian government was incompetent, only 19% of millennials agreed.

While millennials may be politically liberal in their policy preferences, they have come of age in a time of political paralysis in democratic institutions, declining civility in democratic dialogue, and dramatically increased anxiety about economic security.

Defenders of democracy and the rule of law must take their case to the American people and remind them of the Founders’ admonition that: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

The second reason why the two plans must be melded into one is political. Democrats will never accept more temporary workers without the legalization of unauthorized foreigners. Republicans will not countenance any type of amnesty if growers, developers, landscapers and the health care industry are not placated by a significantly larger number of legal, low-wage, low-skill workers.

Mr. Trump, who aides said had on his mind the specter of the 2012 attacks on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, became increasingly angry as he watched television images of pro-Iranian demonstrators storming the embassy. Aides said he worried that no response would look weak after repeated threats by the United States.

When Mr. Trump chose the option of killing General Suleimani, top military officials, flabbergasted, were immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region. It is unclear if General Milley or Mr. Esper pushed back on the president’s decision.

The option that was eventually approved depended on who would greet General Suleimani at his expected arrival on Friday at Baghdad International Airport. If he was met by Iraqi government officials allied with Americans, one American official said, the strike would be called off. But the official said it was a “clean party,” meaning members of Kataib Hezbollah, including its leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Mr. Trump authorized the killing at about 5 p.m. on Thursday, officials said.

The Hungarian case, Republic of Hungary v. Simon, No. 18-1447, was brought by 14 Holocaust survivors, four of them United States citizens, who said their property was stolen by Hungary and its state-owned railway, which deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps in the summer of 1944.

Gregory Silbert, a lawyer for Hungary, said its courts should be allowed to address the matter.

Three-judge panels of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against both Hungary and Germany, saying the cases could proceed

The basic legal question for the justices in both cases is whether the disputes should be resolved by American courts

The German case, Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, No. 19-351, concerns the Guelph Treasure, a trove of medieval religious art that was once owned by a consortium of Jewish art dealers in Frankfurt and that is now estimated to be worth $250 million.

Benjamin W. Snyder, a lawyer for the federal government who argued in support of Hungary, took a position that frustrated several justices.

“The State Department simply doesn’t feel that it has sufficient information to provide the court with a recommendation,” Mr. Snyder said.

Ms. Harrington responded that her case, a potential class action, was at an early stage and that “it’s pure speculation at this point” to try to calculate her clients’ damages.

A supporting brief from Hungarian Holocaust victims argued that trying to sue in that country was pointless. It described a case brought there by a 92-year-old plaintiff whose suit was dismissed for lack of evidence beyond her sworn testimony and who was ordered to pay the government’s legal fees.

“This would put courts of the United States,” Mr. Kneedler said, “in the business of making sensitive judgments about the conduct of foreign governments, including perhaps some of our closest allies

Another issue in the current talks: How can the EU retaliate if the U.K. decides to depart from the bloc's regulations in a way that gives British businesses a competitive advantage?

Brexit deadlines have come and gone, but leaders of the main political groups in the European Parliament say they will not be able to ratify a deal unless they have it by midnight Sunday.

What happens if the EU and the U.K. can't agree on a new trade deal? The U.K. will begin trading under World Trade Organization rules, which means both sides will be free to slap tariffs on a variety of products the other produces.

Why is this so difficult? Is this about something bigger? It's about different values and different visions.

Why should Americans or anyone outside Europe care about this? The EU has many flaws. Its critics see it as hopelessly bureaucratic and something of a gravy train of sinecures for Eurocrats. But it is also a pillar — along with NATO — of the post-World War II architecture that America played a major role in designing.

How will U.K. travel, work and immigration change next year? Brexit was won, in part, on the pledge to take back control of borders and immigration from the EU. Britons will still be able to travel visa-free to most EU countries for up to 90 days in any 180-day period next year, but in 2022, they will have to apply for visa waivers.

"I cannot tell you whether there will be a deal or not, but I can tell you that there is a path to an agreement," she said Wednesday. "The path may be very narrow, but it is there and it is therefore our responsibility to continue trying."

What if there is a deal? That would be a relief to most U.K. businesses as there would be less disruption. But there would still be customs checks for the first time in decades, which is expected to slow trade across the English Channel.

Are the U.K. government and businesses ready for this fundamental change in the relationship? No. British businesses are furious that the government has not spelled out exactly how they need to prepare for these two possibilities.

On the whole, European nations still have very different understandings of the rule of law and political order, different work ethics and conceptions of citizenship

The failure of convergence is most striking in Europe. True, a tiny sliver of European society is becoming more transnational. But only 2 percent of Europeans live in a different European nation than their country of citizenship.

The United States is a single nation with a common history, a common currency and a strong identity. Yet the country has become more polarized, not less. The country has become more difficult to govern, not less.

73 percent of Germans think that economic conditions are good right now. In France, 19 percent think that, and in Spain it’s 6 percent.

Less than 40 percent of Danes believe that work is a “very important” part of their lives, compared with roughly 65 percent of the French. More than 80 percent of the Croats believe that a parent’s duty is to do what’s best for their children, even at the expense of their own well-being. Only about 55 percent of Germans agree.

people in most Western nations are becoming more distrustful of their neighbors, not less. There are huge variations across nations, but levels of social and political trust have been declining almost everywhere except the Nordic countries. If there’s convergence, in other words, it’s in our increasing agreement that we don’t trust each other.

The euro crisis is not a crisis of debt. Total European debt levels are not that high. It’s a crisis of legitimacy. Debt burdens are divergent across nations, and Europeans with one set of habits and values do not want to bail out Europeans with other habits and values.

we face the likelihood that the euro will crack up. This is not an outcome to be desired. The ensuing recession and chaos could be horrible on both sides of the Atlantic. But we should prepare for a crackup because the underlying sense of shared identity required for the euro’s survival is not there.

The most popular major European politician is Angela Merkel, who is holding tough on more bailouts. She has 80 percent approval in Germany, 66 percent approval in Britain and 76 percent approval in France.

The larger issue is, how will the world cope with its own segmentation? How do you govern amid divergence? If multilateral organizations can’t bind nations, do we simply resort to an era of regional hegemons — or chaos?

The first step, surely, is abandoning the illusions of convergence and the schemes based upon them. In 1949, Niebuhr questioned the naïve belief that history drives toward unity. He cited the book of Psalms: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.”