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The Earth itself is our greatest ally in this effort. Ecosystems like California’s kelp forests absorb about half of the greenhouse gases humans emit, studies show. Without them, warming would be even worse. Nature shields us from the worst consequences of our own actions, forgiving the sins we refuse to repent.

If we hope to solve climate change, humanity must also address this biodiversity crisis — restoring ecosystems and the creatures that inhabit them.

One way to revitalize ecosystems: protect the ground they grow from.Think of the soft, spongy soil of an old-growth woodland. Here, a towering oak tree draws up water and nutrients via threadlike fungi attached to its roots. In exchange, the fungi take sugar from the oak, funneling carbon from the air into the ground.Now imagine a leaf from that oak drifting slowly to the forest floor. Perhaps it becomes food for an earthworm. Then microbes attack the earthworm’s droppings, breaking down the residue further still.Eventually, the carbon that was once a leaf can become trapped in clods of earth. Other atoms may form strong chemical bonds with minerals like iron, which prevents them from reacting with oxygen and returning to the air. Under the right conditions, carbon might stay locked away in dense, dark earth for centuries. Soils contain more carbon than the entire atmosphere and all the world’s plants combined.

This makes soil both a ticking time bomb and an overlooked climate solution

“And because soil is such an important reservoir,” Berhe said, “a small change in the release of that carbon can lead to a big change in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

A 2020 analysis in the journal Nature Sustainability found that better soil stewardship could reduce emissions by at least 5.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year — about 15 percent of current annual emissions.

“Once that happens,” Berhe said, “it’s not just the carbon status of the soil that’s improved. The soil literally becomes softer. It holds more water and nutrients. It’s easier for plants to grow in … and serve as a home for the most abundant and diverse group of organisms that we know of.

Enhancing carbon in soils is just the beginning. In 2017, an international team of scientists set out to determine how much carbon the planet could pull out of the atmosphere, if humans would only give it a chance. In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they concluded natural climate systems are capable of storing almost 24 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly two thirds of what people emit.

About half of that sequestration would be cost-effective, meaning enacting the necessary protections would cost less than the consequences of keeping that carbon in the air.

Of the climate solutions they studied, few delivered more carbon bang per buck than mangroves — lush systems of salt-tolerant shrubs and trees that thrive where freshwater rivers spill into the sea. Though these forests occupy just 0.5 percent of the Earth’s shorelines, they account for 10 percent of the coast’s carbon storage capacity.

But the unique ecosystems are too often dismissed as unproductive swamps, good for no one but the mosquitoes. In the past half-century, more than a quarter of the world’s mangroves have been destroyed — drained for development, converted for shrimp farms, poisoned by fertilizer and drowned by dammed-up streams.

Yet the Earth cannot compensate for all of humanity’s pollution, said William Schlesinger, former dean of Duke University’s School of the Environment and a co-author on the 2017 PNAS study. Unless people also reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we emit, no amount of ecological restoration will save us.

“The bottom line is we’ve got to get off of using fossil fuels in transportation and heating and lighting and everything else,”

In public talks, he puts it this way: “It’s easier to patch a hole in a bag than to pick up the marbles that fall out.”

Since the end of the last ice age, the frozen expanse at the top of the world has acted as a protective shield. During the summer, when the sun shines 24 hours a day, Arctic sea ice reflects about two-thirds of the light that hits it back into space. By contrast, the dark open ocean absorbs the majority of the sun’s heat.

If the Arctic loses its perpetual ice cover, it would add half a degree Celsius of warming to the global average temperature, studies suggest. The world is hurtling toward that milestone. Since 1979, the volume of ice left at the end of the summer has shrunk about 75 percent.

There is just one way to save it, she said: by stopping global warming. Only by ending the use of fossil fuels and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions can people prevent the Arctic from heating further and give the ice a chance to recover.

If we do nothing, models indicate, it will be a matter of decades before the summertime Arctic is ice-free for the first time in human history. Sea levels will surge, coastal communities will be deluged, and we will no longer have the planet’s air conditioning unit to help us cool our world down.

Our species evolved and our civilization was built under fairly stable climate conditions. When things changed, they changed slowly, giving us time to adapt.

The rapid transformation of our planet doesn’t just endanger ecosystems; humanity will suffer. People have never lived on a planet without mangroves, or peatlands, or summertime ice. We’ve never had to go without the benefits the Earth provides.

Today in China, several insurance companies market directly to “Double Income, No Kids” households. Matchmaking agencies are advertising their services to single men and women who don’t want children.

According to the latest census, the average household size is now 2.62, down from 3.1 in 2010.

“If I got married and had a child, I would still belong to the bottom class,” Mr. Huang said, referring to his background as a child of struggling factory workers. “When the time comes, I could also leave my child at home just like my parents. But I don’t want that.”

Choosing voluntary sterilization, especially as a young unmarried man, is still seen as culturally taboo in China’s patriarchal society. In many cities, doctors require a proof of marriage certificate and a partner’s consent.

“Raising a child is a high-price, low-return task,” he said. “I think having one is very troublesome.”

“They just refused to do it for me and said, ‘Because you’re unmarried without any children, you are openly going against the country’s birth policy,’” said Mr. Jiang, who is single.

For decades, Chinese people were conditioned to have children out of tradition, filial obligation and, ultimately, a fallback for retirement. But an expanding social security net and a proliferation of insurance plans have given people more options.

China now has the world’s largest number of single people. In 2018, the country reported 240 million of them, accounting for about 17 percent of the total population. Although the percentage is still smaller compared to the United States, the number has risen by about a third since 2010.

According to a 2018 study published by the Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies, the direct economic cost of raising a child from 0 to 17 years is about $30,000, seven times the annual salary of the average Chinese citizen.

Mr. Huang, a 24-year-old graduate student in computing in the city of Wuxi, said he met his prospective partner, a 28-year-old woman, on a DINK forum. “I constantly tell her how high and scary the costs of childbirth are to women,” he said.

Mr. Huang, 27, is striving for a lifestyle known as “Double Income, No Kids,” or DINK. The acronym has been around for decades, but only recently entered the mainstream in China, where rising costs and other economic woes have caused many young people to avoid parenthood.

“For our generation, children aren’t a necessity,” said Mr. Huang, a bachelor in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. “Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”

The announcement was meant to encourage couples to make more babies, but men like Mr. Huang say they would rather remain childless — even going under the knife to ensure it.

Housing agents offer apartments that cater to childless couples. Bedrooms once pitched as future nurseries are being converted into home gyms.

Todd C. Peppers, a professor at Roanoke College who has written extensively about the death penalty in Virginia, said the Supreme Court had long served as a more significant check on the state’s use of the death penalty than any change in public opinion. In 2000, the state executed a man who was 17 when he murdered his girlfriend’s parents. About five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the execution of those who were minors at the time of their crimes was unconstitutional. Additionally, a case out of Virginia prompted the Supreme Court in 2002 to abolish the death penalty for those with intellectual disabilities.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain said on Twitter on Tuesday that his priority was to “get the situation back to normal” in Ceuta.

“The most important thing now is that Morocco continues to commit to prevent irregular departures, and that those that do not have the right to stay are orderly and effectively returned,” said Ylva Johansson, the European Union’s commissioner for home affairs.

Human rights organizations have warned against the use of excessive force against the migrants and condemned the return of more than 2,700 of them.

The Spanish authorities said they were not summarily returning minors, yet Ms. Sunderland questioned whether Spain may have sent back children or vulnerable people, given the speed with which the authorities had deported nearly half of those who had crossed the border.

Until this week, around 4,800 people had crossed the Western Mediterranean to Ceuta, Melilla or mainland Spain so far this year, according to government figures, and 106 have died while attempting the crossing, according to the International Organization for Migration. At least 126 have died while trying to reach the Canary Islands.

Estrella Galán, the director general of CEAR, a Spanish group that helps asylum seekers and refugees, said Morocco was using migration as leverage against Spain.

“This is what happens when we convert other countries into gendarmes of our own borders,” Ms. Galán said.

For me at least, reading Haque is like trying to hold a conversation with somebody who only speaks in apocalyptic jazz scat.

I read a tweet the other day that said, “looking at Twitter is like microdosing poison.” It’s true

How? The internet of 2020 is ruled by the “attention economy”. People’s attention is commodified in a way that never happened before. In the attention economy there’s an arms race to capture clicks and reads. Nuance, painstaking insight and subtlety does not deliver attention.

Marshall McLuhan wrote “The medium is the message”. What he meant by that is that the medium through which information is transmitted structures that information. It does so either through changing the behaviour of the author or the receiver of the information, or both. It is the medium that shapes the character of interaction.

From a very basic perspective, think of a lightbulb in a windowless room. The lightbulb is the medium by which people in the room can see each other. It enables people to behave in a way that they wouldn’t or couldn’t if there was no lightbulb in the room.

Now think of Twitter as a medium, how do you convey nuance and deep insight into a 280 character “microblog”? Is it any wonder that scrolling on Twitter feels like you’re speeding through hell in a convertible? You feel the sizzle of rage but somehow come out intact.

His articles read like old school sales letters: each short paragraph makes you read the next. He “twists the knife”, as copywriters say, by layering agitation on agitation, directly addressing his reader:

The text is breathless, rhythmic with machine-gun punctuation, and imaginatively vivid

If you read the articles, you’ll see that Haque is well-meaning. He wants positive change. And to be fair, he has his own answers to society’s problems. He has credentials too, he’s a trained economist, he’s been a contributor to some serious academic publications and an author of books, real books.

Believe me, I’m sold on the destination but feel a bit carsick on the journey. The tone is so hysterical as to be meaningless. It serves only to entrench people deeper into their world-views rather than engaging and enlightening them.

Navalny rose to fame for his investigations that exposed corruption, and for political mobilization against Putin's regime. He recently reprised that role, releasing a bombshell video that accuses Putin of using a slush fund to build a palace on the Black Sea. That report has now been viewed nearly 100 million times on YouTube.

With Navalny now ordered to remain in jail, a court will weigh imposing a prison sentence on Feb. 2 stemming from the earlier case, according to state-run media.

Navalny says his fraud conviction was retribution for his activism. Election officials have also cited the mark on his record as justification to reject his attempt to run against Putin for the presidency.

When Navalny was in Germany, he spent weeks in a medically induced coma as doctors sought to help his body recover from a variant of Novichok, a lethal Soviet-era nerve agent.

"There has been a lot of speculation lately that the convict Navalny was unable to show up at the inspectorate as he was in a coma," said Yelena Korobkova, a department head at the FSIN. "However, he had systematically violated the terms of his probationary period even before his hospitalization," she said, accusing Navalny of missing other dates in the first half of 2020.

As the Islamic State's self-declared caliphate collapsed in Syria, tens of thousands of men, women and children who had lived in it ended up in squalid camps and crowded prisons run by the Kurdish-led militia that had partnered with the United States to defeat the jihadists.

But now that a military incursion by Turkey against Kurdish forces has set off a new wave of violence and weakened their control over the area, uncertainty has grown over the fate of the huge population of people who survived the toppling of the Islamic State and have been warehoused since then in prisons and detention camps.

their governments have instead chosen to leave them in the custody of a Kurdish-led force that lacks the resources to house, feed and protect them, much less to investigate the adults and provide the children with education and rehabilitation.

Most of their home countries have refused to take them back,

The detention crisis in northeastern Syria is a bleak byproduct of the war against the Islamic State.

Mr. Polat’s prison is a converted industrial institute that now holds more than 5,000 people. One-quarter of them are Syrians, the rest hailing from 29 other countries, including Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, the Netherlands and the United States.

Most of the 400 men in a vast medical ward wore them. Many of them were sick or wounded. Men with metal braces holding broken bones in place lay on thin mattresses, while others shuffled to the bathroom on crutches or dragged their legs on the ground behind them. A few were so emaciated that their cheekbones stuck out and their legs were as thin as arms. When one man made the call to prayer, many of the prisoners prayed sitting down because they were too injured or ill to stand.

The Kurdish guards assumed that most of the men had been fighters and still followed the Islamic State’s ideology, but the prisoners themselves played down their roles in the world’s most fearsome terrorist organization.A Palestinian man with a broken leg said he had come to Syria because he “wanted to help.” A mechanic from Trinidad said he had not fought because he had been too busy fixing cars. A tall, muscular Russian said he had been a cook — in an elementary school.In dozens of interviews in two prisons, no one admitted to being a fighter.

The boys in prison said they received almost no services.“The situation is pretty bad here, so if they could hurry up and decide,” said a 16-year-old boy from Mauritius. “Months like this without knowing what is going to happen, people could start going crazy. They could say these guys were terrorists before with ISIS, but they are still human.”

he displayed a talent for languages and could speak Latin and understand Greek, among other languages.

After Pepin’s death in 768, the Frankish kingdom was divided between Charlemagne and his younger brother Carloman (751-771).

In order to carry out this mission, he spent the majority of his reign engaged in military campaigns.

Charlemagne waged a bloody, three-decades-long series of battles against the Saxons, a Germanic tribe of pagan worshippers, and earned a reputation for ruthlessness.

He embarked on a mission to unite all Germanic peoples into one kingdom, and convert his subjects to Christianity

He promoted education and encouraged the Carolingian Renaissance, a period of renewed emphasis on scholarship and culture.

He instituted economic and religious reforms, and was a driving force behind the Carolingian miniscule, a standardized form of writing that later became a basis for modern European printed alphabets.

Charlemagne was interested in athletic pursuits.

he enjoyed hunting, horseback riding and swimming

Louis became sole emperor when Charlemagne died in January 814, ending his reign of more than four decades. At the time of his death, his empire encompassed much of Western Europe.

Charlemagne was canonized for political reasons; however, the church today does not recognize his sainthood.

In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan created a “light bulb” by enclosing carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. And by 1860 he had a working prototype, but the lack of a good vacuum and an adequate supply of electricity resulted in a bulb whose lifetime was much too short to be considered an effective prodcer of light.

They built their lamps with different sizes and shapes of carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. Woodward and Evans attempted to commercialize their lamp, but were unsuccessful.

However, he continued to test several types of material for metal filaments to improve upon his original design and by Nov 4, 1879, he filed another U.S. patent for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires."

Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.

1906 - The General Electric Company were the first to patent a method of making tungsten filaments for use in incandescent lightbulbs. Edison himself had known tungsten would eventually prove to be the best choice for filaments in incandescent light bulbs, but in his day, the machinery needed to produce the wire in such a fine form was not available.

1920s - The first frosted lightbulb is produced and adjustable power beam bulbs for car headlamps, and neon lighting.

Modern incandescent bulbs are not energy efficient – less than 10% of electrical power supplied to the bulb is converted into visible light. The remaining energy is lost as heat. However these inefficient light bulbs are still widely used today due to many advantages such as: wide, low-cost availability easy incorporation into electrical systems adaptable for small systems low voltage operation, such as in battery powered devices wide shape and size availability

with LED prices falling significantly, the future does seem to belong to the LED.

when the Earth begins its long, long recovery from this strange, technological blitzkrieg in the millions of years to come—and sediment finally begins to stack up in respectable quantities—I presumed that that would be a new

To touch an outcrop of limestone in a highway road cut is to touch a memory, the dead, one’s very heritage, frozen in rock hundreds of millions of years ago—yet still somehow here, present. And because it’s here, it couldn’t have been any other way. This is now our world, whether we like it or not.

The Anthropocene, for Wing, simply states that humans are now a permanent part of this immutable thread of Earth history. What we’ve already done means that there’s no unspoiled Eden to which we could ever return, even if we disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow.

that’s what the Anthropocene means. It means: Let us recognize that we have permanently deflected the course of evolution. We have left this pretty much indelible record in sediments that is very comparable to, say, if you were looking around, 100 years after the [dinosaur’s] asteroid

In the particulars—the extent to which humans are destroying and have destroyed the living world, and have dramatically warped the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere—we agreed.

The difference was perspective. In my essay I framed these planetary injuries in the context of our geologically brief human history. Severe, yes, but at 75 years old (according to Wing’s group) far, far, far too fast,

In Faulkner’s work, memories, the dead, and the inescapable circumstance of ancestry are all as present in the room as the characters who fail to overcome them. Geology similarly destroys this priority of the present moment, and as powerfully as any close reading of Absalom, Absalom!

If we wipe ourselves out tomorrow it will still be the Anthropocene a million years from now, even if very little of our works remain.

Where, in my essay, I emphasized the potential transience of civilization, Wing and colleagues on the Anthropocene Working Group emphasize the eternal mark left on the biosphere, whether our civilization is transient or not. This, they argue, is the Anthropocene.

if you want to be a sentient species you have to reckon with the degree to which you have already changed things.”

And that change—whether through tens of thousands of years of human-driven extinctions, our spreading of invasive species across the face of the Earth, converting half of its land surface to farmland, or warming the planet and souring the seas—is undoubtedly profound.

consider the disruption inflicted on the planet by the rise of land plants more than 300 million years earlier. In the Paleozoic, land plants conquered the continents and geoengineered the planet, possibly contributing to, or even causing, at least 10 extinction pulses over 25 million years, including one of the worst mass extinctions in Earth history. Land plants profoundly and permanently altered Earth’s geochemical cycles, underwrote the flourishing of all subsequent life on land, and might have sequestered so much carbon dioxide that they kicked off a 90-million-year ice age.

“What motivates me, I confess, is not my concern for future geologists but my belief that this is philosophically a good thing to do because it makes people think about something that they otherwise wouldn’t think about,” Wing said

Ten million years from now, humans went extinct—give or take a few thousand years—10 million years ago. Huge grazing herbivores and cursorial predators move carbon and nitrogen around the landscape.

Though no one is alive to tell us what epoch it is, these creatures have nevertheless inherited a planet forever diverted by our legacy—as surely, in Faulkner’s words, “as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although they had not been there to see the deluge.

Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point between Europe and Asia.

In the west, constant attacks from German invaders such as the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only territory left under Roman control. In 476, the barbarian Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and Rome had fallen.

The eastern half of the Roman Empire proved less vulnerable to external attack, thanks in part to its geographic location.

As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome.

Even after the Islamic empire absorbed Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the seventh century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of most eastern Christians.

Justinian I, who took power in 527 and would rule until his death in 565, was the first great ruler of the Byzantine Empire

Justinian also reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal code that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the state.

By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa (among other territories) to Islamic forces.

Known as Iconoclasm—literally “the smashing of images”—the movement waxed and waned under various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael III ruled in favor of the display of religious images.

Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more international prestige than under Justinian.

Monks administered many institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals) in everyday life, and Byzantine missionaries won many converts to Christianity

The end of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Near East from 1095 to 1291.

During the rule of the Palaiologan emperors, beginning with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine state was crippled, and never regained its former stature.

The fall of Constantinople marked the end of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire.

In the centuries leading up to the final Ottoman conquest in 1453, the culture of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, art, architecture, law and theology–flourished even as the empire itself faltered.

Long after its end, Byzantine culture and civilization continued to exercise an influence on countries that practiced its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, among others.

we have been able to piece together a comprehensive prehistory of the valley beginning several millennia ago.

One significant time period is known as Paracas; it lasted from roughly 800 to 200 B.C. This is the time when the first complex societies developed in the region, the origin of civilization in this part of the ancient world.

he Paracas peoples built linear geoglyphs: designs etched into the desert landscape that they lined with small field stones.

Our research indicated that a number of these small structures and many of the lines pointed to the June solstice sunset.

consumption of food and drink in ritually prescribed times and places—known technically as feasting—is one of the cornerstones of heightened sociality and cooperation throughout human history

Excavations by Tantaleán and his team in one of these patios yielded a rich trove of artifacts, including textiles, foodstuffs, pottery, decorated gourds, stone objects, reeds, miscellaneous objects and human offerings.

Cerro del Gentil, in fact, was a classic archaeological example of a very significant feasting place

there was plenty of evidence that from time to time many people were present to eat, drink and even make human sacrifices together, probably at particular special times of the astronomical calendar.

This case study demonstrates that the earliest successful complex societies in the south coast of Peru circa 400 B.C. involved a wide catchment of people and objects.

that cooperation in non-state societies is achieved by “ritualizing” the economy.

They therefore promote sustained group behavior toward common goals and solve what is famously known as the “collective action problem” in human social life—how do you get everyone to work together toward something that’s in everyone’s long-term self-interest? Feasting is a key component of this kind of sociality and cooperation.

The price paid for this achievement is that the communications system lacks any means to convince nongroup members. How can you convince people when they cannot understand what on Earth you are talking about?

Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and the others have fenced off conservative Americans from the rest of American society. Within that safe space, insiders hear only what is familiar and comforting. When those protected insiders step outside into the larger world, they find themselves completely unprepared for it

The job of Republican members of Congress at the hearing was not to win converts. Their job at the hearing was to enforce orthodoxy and punish heresy—not to convince, but to corral. They had better hope that enforcement will be enough, because enforcement is all they still know how to do.

Young Americans demanding more power, control, and justice have veered sharply to the left. This lurch was first evident in the two elections of Barack Obama, when he won the youth vote by huge margins

Obama won about 60 percent of voters younger than 30 in the 2008 primary. Bernie Sanders won more than 70 percent of under-30 voters in the 2016 primary, which pushed Hillary Clinton to the left and dragged issues like Medicare for All and free college from the fringe to the mainstream of political debate.

Joe Biden polled at 2 percent among voters under 30, within the margin of error of zero. Nationally, he is in single digits among Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Yet Biden is the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination, thanks to his huge advantage among old voters and black voters, who are considerably more moderate than younger Democrats.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, leads all candidates among voters under 30 and polls just 5 percent among voters over 65

age divides young leftists from both Republicans and Democrats. Democrats under 30 have almost no measurable interest in the party’s front-runner. Democrats over 65 have almost no measurable interest in the favored candidate of the younger generation.

age—perhaps even more than class or race—is now the most important fault line within the Democratic Party. 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c

It might be most useful to think about 2cyoung progressives as a third party trapped in a two-party system.

they are a powerful movement politically domiciled within a larger coalition of moderate older minorities and educated suburbanites, who don’t always know what to do with their rambunctious bunkmates.

this progressive third party’s platform look like?

justice: Social justice, sought through a reappraisal of power relationships in social and corporate life, and economic justice, sought through the redistribution of income from the rich to the less fortunate.

This group’s support for Medicare for All, free college, and student-debt relief is sometimes likened to a “give me free stuff” movement.

every movement wants free stuff, if by free stuff one means “stuff given preferential treatment in the tax code.” By this definition, Medicare is free stuff, and investment income is free stuff, and suburban home values propped up by the mortgage-interest deduction are free stuff. The free stuff in the tax code today benefits Americans with income and wealth—a population that is disproportionately old.

Medicare for All might be politically infeasible, but it is, taken literally, a request that the federal government extend to the entire population the insurance benefits now exclusively reserved for the elderly. That’s not hatred or resentment; it sounds more like justice.

across ethnicities, many Americans have a deep aversion to anything that can be characterized as “political correctness” or “socialism.”

this might be the biggest challenge for the young progressive agenda

While Medicare for All often polls well, its public support is exquisitely sensitive to framing. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the net favorability of eliminating private insurance or requiring most Americans to pay more in taxes—both part of the Sanders plan—is negative-23 points.

The young left’s deep skepticism toward capitalism simply isn’t shared by previous generations.

Gen X is firmly pro-capitalist and Baby Boomers, who came of age during the Cold War, prefer capitalism over socialism by a two-to-one margin.

Social Security and Medicare are, essentially, socialism for the old, but that’s not the same as converting them into Berniecrats.)

“This is only the halfway point of an epochal change in Western politics following the Great Recession,” Keir Milburn says. The far right has responded with calls for xenophobic nationalism to preserve national identity, while the left has responded with calls for social democracy to restore socioeconomic justice

the far right is ascendant, but they have no answer to the future because they’ve given up on the future. The young left has identified that the future of adulthood no longer feels viable to many people, and it’s putting together a different vision.”

The three decades of reform that started in the late 1970s loosened controls over society, allowing the revival of all religions and many traditions that had been proscribed

Xi Jinping’s rise to power in late 2012 marks a new era, the third, in the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s religious policies. Instead of the destruction of the Mao years and the relatively laissez-faire approach of the reform period, the state has embarked on a form of highly curated revivalism.

The state recently issued a landmark plan to improve social mores, the first such program since 2001.

in contrast to the previous such document from 2001 — which made only passing reference to Chinese traditions — it calls the past a “rich source of morality.” The plan orders party officials to promote “ancient and worthy sages,” as well as to “deeply expound” traditional concepts such as “ren’ai” (benevolence), “zhengyi” (righteousness) and “jianyi zhengwei” (standing up bravely for the truth).

This effort is not an attempt to replace Communism with Confucianism. Yet it is fair to say that for the first time since China’s imperial order collapsed in 1911, a central government is embracing the ideas that made up the political-religious order that ran China for much of the past 2,500 years

Democratic lawmakers have accused Trump of abusing his office by withholding hundreds of millions in assistance in order to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.

The Office of Management and Budget blocked the Defense Department from spending money designated by Congress on July 25,

a 1974 law that governs budget procedure within the government "does not permit OMB to withhold funds for policy reasons,"

Documents and testimony released during and after House impeachment hearings revealed some administration officials had raised concerns that the Ukraine hold might have violated the law known as the Impoundment Control Act.

If the White House wants to delay or deny funds, it must first alert Congress.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, asked the GAO to assess Trump's decisions to freeze the Ukraine aid.

Van Hollen said he thought the report vindicated Congress' decision to impeach Trump.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opposes the introduction of fresh witnesses or evidence into a Senate trial, arguing the Senate's role is to assess the House's fact-finding, not to do new investigations on its own.

After release of the GAO report, the OMB said it disagrees with the findings.

"OMB uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the president's priorities and with the law," said OMB spokeswoman Rachel Semmel.

in early January that Defense Department emails showed repeated warnings from the department to OMB that the delays put its ability to distribute the aid at risk.

Back in 2016, as she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, Laura Hubka could feel her county converting.

"People were chasing me out the door, slamming the door in my face, calling Hillary names," Hubka recalled.

In 2012, Howard County voted for then-President Barack Obama by 21 percentage points. In 2016, it voted for candidate Donald Trump by 20 points.

Of Iowa's 99 counties, 31 swung from voting for the Democrat Obama in 2008 and 2012 to the Republican Trump in 2016,

oward County, with its 41-point shift, saw the biggest swin

National reporters have descended on the county, trying to understand the massive shift

Whatever the reason, local Democrats want to make sure they can win back some voters.

they're torn on how to do that.

Hubka is not supporting the former vice president. Instead, she's backing Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. So is Dale Ernst.

"I think he's just kind of a calm voice in the middle of the chaos, which is what we're in the middle of now,

"I just don't think it's reasonable," he said. "I just really don't. I think for people younger than 65, they see this more free than, really, the cost of it."

The 66-year-old is skeptical of "Medicare for All."

"Amy Klobuchar is kind of right in the middle," Godwin said. "I like what she has to say."

"I will do my best to try to get this county back," said Hubka, the party chair. "I don't have high hopes. ... I don't know in November that it'll flip completely. I hope that I can get at least 10 of the points back or, you know, 15."

"Coming to a place like here, where the swing was 20 [for Obama] to 20 [for Trump], I think it steers the ship," he said. "It gives a good idea of where we should go."

The last time the county went for a Republican prior to Trump was in 1984 for Ronald Reagan. Four years later, it turned blue again.

Howard County, with its 41-point shift, saw the biggest swing.

"Republicans stand behind their candidate," Hubka said. "Like, the Democrats have to fall in love. We have to be, like, 'Oh, Barack Obama.' You know, I don't feel like people are, like, 'Oh, Joe Biden,' you know — and that's a problem."

I met Ernst recently, along with some 20 other Democrats, at the local chamber of commerce, which also houses the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame. (Random fact: Tiny Howard County is home to multiple Olympic wrestlers.)

Ernst, like some other folks at the Democratic committee meeting, is looking for a moderate candidate. And he's worried about some ideas on the left of his party. The 66-year-old is skeptical of "Medicare for All."

"Amy Klobuchar is kind of right in the middle," Godwin said. "I like what she has to say."

"I will do my best to try to get this county back," said Hubka, the party chair. "I don't have high hopes. ... I don't know in November that it'll flip completely. I hope that I can get at least 10 of the points back or, you know, 15."

Democrats can turn to history for some hope. The last time the county went for a Republican prior to Trump was in 1984 for Ronald Reagan. Four years later, it turned blue again

A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by nearly two dozen young people aimed at forcing the federal government to take bolder action on climate change, saying the courts were not the appropriate place to address the issue.

three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday the young plaintiffs had "made a compelling case that action is needed,

The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, was filed in 2015 on behalf of a group of children and teenagers who said the U.S. government continued to use and promote the use of fossil fuels, knowing that such consumption would destabilize the climate, putting future generations at risk.

it was unclear if the court could compel the federal government to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess greenhouse gas emissions as the plaintiffs requested.

"Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power,"

The decision reversed an earlier ruling by a district court judge that would have allowed the case to move forward.

Both the Trump and Obama administrations opposed the lawsuit. All three of the judges involved in Friday's ruling were appointed under Obama.

In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response

yet presses ahead toward calamity," she wrote. "It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses."

Kids' Climate Case 'Reluctantly' Dismissed By Appeals Court

Mars won't just be a harsh environment for humans, but the fungi as well. The fungi will need cyanobacteria to survive. Cyanobacteria uses solar energy to convert dioxide and water in oxygen and food.

they might at least help clarify the choices that will define the future of our economy.

How did two men, whose work is widely respected, reach such different conclusions from data about the same economy? As I read their papers, I realized that they simply asked different questions.

Hubbard was fascinated by analyzing the ways in which government intervention can distort otherwise efficient markets; many of Summers’s papers explored the reasons markets aren’t always perfectly efficient.

I met Summers and Hubbard in a small, well-appointed room at the Council on Foreign Relations on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to hear them battle it out as if they were preparing to brief the president and leaders of Congress on what must be done to fix our economy right now

I wanted to hear their answers, of course, but I was also interested in how they made them. I wanted to understand the extent to which empirical economic research can provide objective guidance for policy — and at what point even brilliant, highly trained economists resort to articles of faith.

Hubbard quickly zeroed in on the issue that has defined his career. In regard to the size of the government, Hubbard said the real challenge is the steady rise in so-called entitlement spending

His views all seemed to coalesce around a fairly simple idea: the U.S. economy is better off when the government gets out of the way.

Summers’s worldview seemed to take into account more moving pieces. “It would surely be better to address long-run fiscal issues sooner rather than later,” he said. “But this needs to be done in a balanced way. The highest priority is getting the economy growing.”

Their views were especially incompatible when the talk veered to rising inequality.

Summers said he would limit benefits for the rich like “carried interest” rules that allowed private-equity managers (including, I recalled, Mitt Romney) to convert their income, which would be taxed close to 40 percent, into something that looked just like capital gains, which are taxed at 20 percent. He also said that the very wealthy should pay higher inheritance taxes. Dynastic wealth is “highly problematic in a society committed to freedom of opportunity,” he said.

For Hubbard, though, the rich aren’t the problem. The pursuit of wealth, he said, is an engine that powers the economy, and it makes no sense to address inequality by redistributing the very thing that fuels growth. “The real question is ‘What can we do to improve the earnings of lower- and middle-income Americans?’ ” he said. “That’s about increased education and skills training, and that may require higher government spending.” (Hubbard’s belief in more education financing sets him apart from more doctrinaire conservatives.) Hubbard also dismissed Summers’s concerns about dynastic wealth. So few Americans have that kind of money, he said, that taxing them doesn’t make a major impact on the nation’s finances.

In the end, it became clear that Hubbard sees many of our economic challenges — rising entitlements, inequality and even the financial crisis — as different manifestations of the same basic problem: unsustainable debt. Those challenges also have the same solution. If Congress and the White House can agree on a long-term plan to reduce the entitlements, everything will begin to look better. With a permanent solution in sight, investors will gain confidence from the fact that their country’s finances are in good shape and that their future tax burden will be lower; companies will hire workers. Then, once the big fiscal problem is solved, the government can redouble its efforts on education and help the truly needy.

. “There is no serious statistical evidence in support of the view that tax rates at current levels have a major disincentive effect on economic growth,” he said. He suggested, pointedly, comparing the rapid economic growth during the Clinton years with the comparatively worse performance of the post-tax-cut Bush period.

Summers settled on his point: The United States, he said, is not simply facing one unified problem that could be solved through one straightforward solution. The country is facing myriad challenges, starting with unemployment and slow growth. These immediate challenges, he said, can be addressed with a 10-year commitment by the government to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure.

both men took evident satisfaction in sticking to their guns, leaving me feeling the frustration that many do these days: Why can’t these two sides just work something out?

t he has come to think of the presidential election of 2016 as a battle between whoever will hire Larry Summers and whoever will hire Glenn Hubbard

Because somewhere in those following four years, he said, the fiscal crisis will become unavoidable, Congress will have to act, and it will have to work with the White House.

The essence of Christianity revolves around the life, death and Christian beliefs on the resurrection of Jesus. Christians believe God sent his son Jesus, the messiah, to save the world. They believe Jesus was crucified on a cross to offer the forgiveness of sins and was resurrected three days after his death before ascending to heaven.

Christians contend that Jesus will return to earth again in what’s known as the Second Coming.

The Holy Bible includes important scriptures that outline Jesus’s teachings, the lives and teachings of major prophets and disciples, and offer instructions for how Christians should live.

Both Christians and Jews follow the Old Testament of the Bible, but Christians also embrace the New Testament.The cross is a symbol of Christianity.The most important Christian holidays are Christmas (which celebrates the birth of Jesus) and Easter (which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus).

Most historians believe that Jesus was a real person who was born between 2 B.C. and 7 B.C.

According to the text, Jesus was born to a young Jewish virgin named Mary in the town of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem in modern-day Palestine.

he aimed to reform Judaism—not create a new religion.

Some of the main themes that Jesus taught, which Christians later embraced, include:Love God.Love your neighbor as yourself.Forgive others who have wronged you.Love your enemies.Ask God for forgiveness of your sins.Jesus is the Messiah and was given the authority to forgive others.Repentance of sins is essential.Don’t be hypocritical.Don’t judge others.The Kingdom of God is near. It’s not the rich and powerful—but the weak and poor—who will inherit this kingdom.

Many scholars believe Jesus died between 30 A.D. and 33 A.D.

Jesus was arrested, tried and condemned to death. Roman governor Pontius Pilate issued the order to kill Jesus after being pressured by Jewish leaders who alleged that Jesus was guilty of a variety of crimes, including blasphemy.

The Christian Bible is a collection of 66 books written by various authors. It’s divided into two parts: The Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Old Testament, which is also recognized by followers of Judaism, describes the history of the Jewish people, outlines specific laws to follow, details the lives of many prophets, and predicts the coming of the Messiah.

The New Testament was written after Jesus’s death. The first four books—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—are known as the “Gospels,” which means “good news.” These texts, composed sometime between 70 A.D. and 100 A.D., provide accounts of the life and death of Jesus.

According to the Bible, the first church organized itself 50 days after Jesus’s death on the Day of Pentecost—when the Holy Spirit was said to descend onto Jesus’s followers.

Early Christians considered it their calling to spread and teach the gospel. One of the most important missionaries was the apostle Paul, a former persecutor of Christians.

Many historians believe Christianity wouldn’t be as widespread without the work of Paul. In addition to preaching, Paul is thought to have written 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament.

Early Christians were persecuted for their faith by both Jewish and Roman leaders.

n 64 A.D., Emperor Nero blamed Christians for a fire that broke out in Rome. Many were brutally tortured and killed during this time.

tarting in 303 A.D., Christians faced the most severe persecutions to date under the co-emperors Diocletian and Galerius. This became known as the Great Persecution.

When Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, religious tolerance shifted in the Roman Empire.

In 313 A.D., Constantine lifted the ban on Christianity with the Edict of Milan. He later tried to unify Christianity and resolve issues that divided the church by establishing the Nicene Creed.

When the Roman Empire collapsed in 476 A.D., differences emerged among Eastern and Western Christians.

In 1054 A.D., the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox church split into two groups

Between about 1095 A.D. and 1230 A.D., the Crusades, a series of holy wars, took place. In these battles, Christians fought against Islamic rulers and their Muslim soldiers to reclaim holy land in the city of Jerusalem.

In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther published 95 Theses—a text that criticized certain acts of the Pope and protested some of the practices and priorities of the Roman Catholic church.

Luther’s ideas triggered the Reformation—a movement that aimed to reform the Catholic church.

As a result, Protestantism was created, and different denominations of Christianity eventually began to form

Catholic, Protestant and (Eastern) Orthodox.