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As Bangladesh prepared for general elections on Sunday, a truck driver named Nur Islam was trying to haul a load of potatoes to Dhaka, the capital, along a route he knew would be targeted by protesters allied with the opposition.

He took precautions, strapping on a helmet and leaving in the dead of night, but was still terrified after his truck was surrounded — not once, but twice — by young men hurling bricks.

Street protests often accompany elections in Bangladesh, but political violence intensified in 2013, resulting in around 150 deaths, according to Human Rights Watch.

Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Sunday sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking for an emergency declaration in order to get additional funding for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration as safety concerns mount following the US Capitol breach.

"I have determined that the plans and resources previously assigned to the Inauguration are insufficient to establish a safe and secure environment as a direct result of the insurrectionist actions that occurred on January 6. Based on recent events and intelligence assessments, we must prepare for large groups of trained and armed extremists to come to Washington, DC."

"We are seeing ... chatter from these white supremacists, from these far-right extremists -- they feel emboldened in this moment," said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks and counters hate. "We fully expect that this violence could actually get worse before it gets better."

Buddhism is probably the most pacifistic of the major world religions.

His teachings stand in stark contrast to those of the other major religions, which advocate execution and warfare against people who fail to adhere to the religions' tenets.

To an outsider with a perhaps stereotypical view of Buddhism as introspective and serene, it is more surprising to learn that Buddhist monks have also participated in and even instigated violence over the years.

I’ve been rehearsing all the reasons to think that it’s useless to try to have a civil conversation with a zealot, that you’ve just got to exile them, or confront them with equal and opposite force.

For example, you can’t have a civil conversation with people who are intent on destroying the rules that govern conversation itself. It’s fruitless to engage with people who are impervious to facts. There are some ideas — like racism — that are so noxious they deserve no recognition in any decent community. There are some people who are so consumed by enmity that the only thing they deserve is contempt.

You’re not going to change these people’s minds anyway. If you give them an opening, you’re just going to give them room to destroy the decent etiquette of society. Civility is not a suicide pact. As Benjamin DeMott put it in a famous 1996 essay for the Nation, “When you’re in an argument with a thug, there are things much more important than civility.”

Activist Israel Kaunatjike journeyed from Namibia to Germany, only to discover a forgotten past that has connections to his own family tree

Black and white people shared a country, yet they weren't allowed to live in the same neighborhoods or patronize the same businesses. That, says Kaunatjike, was verboten.

A few decades after German immigrants staked their claim over South-West Africa in the late 19th century, the region came under the administration of the South African government, thanks to a provision of the League of Nations charter.

Which makes the thrill of becoming a magical initiate in the Potterverse remarkably similar to the thrill of being chosen by the modern meritocracy, plucked from the ordinary ranks of life and ushered into gothic halls and exclusive classrooms, where you will be sorted — though not by a magic hat, admittedly — according to your talents and your just deserts.

blogger Spotted Toad, who wrote a fine post discussing how much the Potter novels and movies trade upon the powerful loyalty that their readers feel, or feel that they should feel, toward their teachers and their schools. But not just any school — not some suburban John Hughes-style high school or generic Podunk U. No, it’s loyalty to a selective school, with an antique pedigree but a modern claim to excellence, an exclusive admissions process but a pleasingly multicultural student body. A school where everybody knows that they belong, because they can do the necessary magic and ordinary Muggles can’t.

Thus the Potterverse, as Toad writes, is about “the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools” — Ivy League schools, elite schools, U.S. News & World Report top 100 schools.

When his defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, and his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, told him that he would be crazy to intervene in Libya — a country where, in Mr. Gates’s words, the United States had “no significant national interests” — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Donilon’s successor, Susan E. Rice, recalled the massacre of 800,000 Rwandans during the Clinton presidency, and said Mr. Obama could not allow another genocide in the making. Reluctantly, Mr. Obama agreed, and ordered a bombing attack, alongside NATO and the Arab League. America could not stand by, he said later, because “that’s just not who we are.”

last month, as he debated with his staff what looked like imminent American strikes on Syria, he talked about how the box he found himself in differed from what he had faced on Libya. “He made the case that Libya was a lot simpler,” one participant in the conversation said recently, recounting the stages the president went through as he moved from tentatively embracing a bombing plan, to a failed effort to secure Congressional authorization, to the Russian-authored diplomacy now in place. “In Libya, he had only a narrow window of time to make the decision, or it would have been too late. He had a U.N. Security Council resolution.” The president, the aide said, ran through his long list and concluded that in Syria, “all that is missing.”

Mr. Obama had absorbed some bitter lessons. His decision to stay on in Afghanistan had not enhanced the perception of American power in the region, and Libya, once the bombing was over, descended into new chaos. Mr. Gates said last week that he saw, in the Syria gyrations, a president absorbing the lesson of a decade of American mistakes, and coming to the right conclusion after the worst possible process. “Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action?” Mr. Gates asked.

soccer, really, is not “the world’s game.” Though it has the highest global participation rate of any sport, there are quite a few countries where it is not the most popular game. Those include eight of the world’s 10 most populous countries. On the whole, people in China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia—the top four in population—play soccer but have other sports they prefer. Only in No. 5 Brazil and No. 7 Nigeria does soccer have a clear edge.

All the countries who have ever won a World Cup have at least one thing in common: Soccer has no real competitor for athletic talent.

There were years of painstaking building of teams and leagues before a national squad could be assembled that was good enough to challenge at World Cup level. (For a brief history, I recommend National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist.)

The United Nations and Western governments voiced alarm on Friday over threats by Myanmar’s military that have stirred fears of a coup in the aftermath of an election the army says was fraudulent.

the army has said it would take action if complaints about the election are not addressed. An army spokesman on Tuesday declined to rule out the possibility of seizing power.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a resounding victory in the Nov. 8 poll, only the second election deemed free and fair by international observers since the end of direct military rule in 2011.

They are on to something, and that is why they won, just as Trump won because he intuited a seeping anger that too many liberals had ignored.

They are right that almost three decades of globalization since the end of the Cold War has left too many people behind in too many Western democracies, starved them of hope or even a say, and given them the impression that the system was rigged by elites in Brussels or other metropolitan hubs.

The 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent euro crisis came and went with near total impunity for those responsible. Until Western democracies confront their failings, the tide of popular rage won’t abate.

Lind’s originating interest seems to be this

American democracy worked in a certain way in the three decades after World War II, it stopped working that way, and oligarchy ensued. At the heart of the old way was what Lind calls “war-inspired class peace treaties.” In various sectors of the economy and polity, the working class benefited from power-sharing arrangements with business and government, often the result of wartime mobilization. Strong unions helped keep wages high, local political power brokers and party bosses made sure that working-class needs were represented in the marble corridors, and mass-membership organizations put a check on runaway greed by elites.

starting in the 1970s, Lind says, what he calls the neoliberal “managerial elite” challenged this power-sharing and began turning the country into a casino where it always won

Herd immunity is typically generated through vaccination, and while it could arise through widespread infection, “you don’t rely on the very deadly infectious agent to create an immune population,” says Akiko Iwasaki, a virologist at the Yale School of Medicine. And that seemed like the goal.

Vallance and others certainly made it sound like the government was deliberately aiming for 60 percent of the populace to fall ill. Keep calm and carry on … and get COVID-19.

He says that the actual goal is the same as that of other countries: flatten the curve by staggering the onset of infections. As a consequence, the nation may achieve herd immunity; it’s a side effect, not an aim.

he Vox writer currently is under fire for signing a letter critical of “cancel culture.” For criticizing cancel culture, Yglesias might very well end up being canceled.

It begins, as these things do, with a tiny little voice squeaking about being made unsafe by the expression of contrary opinions. Emily (formerly Todd) VanDerWerff, a critic at Vox, is incensed that Yglesias would sign his name alongside that of such great monsters of our time as Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and other “prominent anti-trans voices,” a letter that allegedly contains “many dog whistles towards anti-trans positions.” Such an outrage, VanDerWerff wrote, “makes me feel less safe at Vox.” What else? “I don’t want Matt to be reprimanded or fired” — Mr. Chekhov gently lays down his revolver — but “I do want to make clear that those beliefs cost him nothing.”

VanDerWerff no more felt threatened by Yglesias’s name on a letter than Amy Cooper felt threatened by that Ivy League bird-watcher in Central Park. This is simply the weaponization of victim status by vindictive, sophomoric busybodies who cannot bear the fact that someone else sees the world in a different way.

How Great Britain and France secretly negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement

before the final outcome of the Great War has been determined, Great Britain, France, and Russia secretly discussed how they would carve up the Middle East into "spheres of influence" once World War I had ended.

 The Ottoman Empire had been in decline for centuries prior to the war, so the Allied Powers already had given some thought to how they would divide up the considerable spoils in the likely event they defeated the Turks

The Stonewall Inn isn't having any big, in-person events to kick off Pride Month. It hosted a virtual event instead. But across the street from the historic bar, a slow stream of visitors stops to admire Greenwich Village's Stonewall National Monument. It's a small, gated park circled by rainbow flags and photographs of the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

Menendez usually celebrates by marching in the New York City Pride parade and walking around Greenwich Village. He expects a lot of joy this Pride, because over the past few weeks New York City has relaxed many restrictions on dining and gathering. "The streets are going to be on fire and alive, and I think people are going to be everywhere celebrating," he says.

A year ago, most Pride celebrations were completely off the table due to the pandemic. This year, Pride organizers are planning events throughout the month of June and trying to bring back the joy, while still navigating COVID-19 restrictions.

This year, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports, under the guise of protecting women and girls. Bills have already passed in Mississippi and Idaho.

The quest to block trans girls from competition has some prominent supporters.Former President Donald Trump embraced female athletes in February, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was “so important” to “protect women’s sports.”

The cause is catching on: One recent Politico poll found that 46 percent of women support a ban on transgender athletes (as do 43 percent of young adults born since 1997).

A substantial Covid-19 outbreak that this week has sidelined the National Hockey League’s Ottawa Senators—despite the entire team being vaccinated—carries a warning

even with blanket immunization, pandemic disruptions are far from over.

Even in a league with a 99% vaccination rate, breakthrough cases on the Senators have now infected more than 40% of the roster.

Silicon Valley’s start-ups have always had a recruiting advantage over the industry’s giants: Take a chance on us and we’ll give you an ownership stake that could make you rich if the company is successful.

Now the tech industry’s race to embrace artificial intelligence may render that advantage moot — at least for the few prospective employees who know a lot about A.I.

Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence, banking on things ranging from face-scanning smartphones and conversational coffee-table gadgets to computerized health care and autonomous vehicles.

It turns out that Turkey these days is neither a bridge nor a gully. It’s an island — an island of relative stability between two great geopolitical systems that are cracking apart: the euro zone that came into being after the cold war, and the Arab state system that came into being after World War I are both coming unglued

The island of Turkey has become one of the best places to observe both these worlds. To the east, you see the European Monetary Union buckling under the weight of its own hubris — leaders who reached too far in forging a common currency without the common governance to sustain it. And, to the south, you see the Arab League crumbling under the weight of its own decay — leaders who never reached at all for the decent governance and modern education required to thrive in the age of globalization.

Europeans failed to build Europe, and that is now a big problem because, as its common currency comes under pressure and the E.U. goes deeper into recession, the whole world feels the effects

The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.

They also appear to confirm what scientists have said for years: that playing football increases the risk of developing neurological conditions like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that can be identified only in an autopsy.

Concerns that the fund might run dry are largely moot now because the N.F.L. agreed in June to pay an unlimited amount in awards to address concerns raised by the judge