Results for world

Former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s assassination at an election campaign event in Nara, Japan, is both shocking and puzzling. It is shocking because Japan has known almost no political violence for at least a half-century, and because gun ownership in the country is tightly controlled. It is puzzling because Abe, having stepped down as prime minister in 2020, had no formal government role; yet the killing was plainly a political act. By Bill Emmott.

New York Times News Analysis: An era that began two decades ago with the shock of hijacked planes flying into American skyscrapers drew to a close this week with desperate Afghans clinging to American planes as they tried to escape the chaos of Kabul. Some fell; one was found dead in the landing gear. A colossal bipartisan investment of U.S. force, treasure and diplomacy to defeat a hostile ideology bent on the creation of an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has failed. Over four presidencies, two Republican and two Democratic, more than 2,400 Americans gave their lives, and more than $1 trillion was spent, for shifting Afghan goals, many of which proved unattainable.

New York Times reporting: California’s Death Valley reached 130 degrees Farenheit (54.44 Celcius) and matched a previous record set less than a year ago, in August 2020 — it might be the highest temperature ever recorded on earth, barring a disputed 134-degree reading from 1913. The scorching temperatures from the West’s third heat wave of the summer, compounding already dry conditions from a drought deepened by climate change, fuelled quick-spreading wildfires and fears of power outages over the weekend. The sweltering conditions reached into places that rarely see triple digits.

Vaccinating the world against COVID-19 is one of mankind’s most critical non-wartime efforts ever. Many countries have developed ambitious, politically sensitive, and carefully sequenced vaccination plans, but executing them successfully will be a challenge. To succeed, policymakers should build three realistic assumptions into their vaccination planning for 2021 and beyond. First, delays are inevitable. By Swee Kheng Khor

New York Times reporting: A nation numbed by misery and loss is confronting a number that still has the power to shock: 500,000. Roughly one year since the first known death by the coronavirus in the United States, an unfathomable toll is nearing — the loss of a half-million people. More Americans have perished from COVID-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined. By now, about 1 in 670 Americans has died of it.

New York Times reporting: In his new book, the astrophysicist Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. In October 2017, a telescope in Maui, Hawaii, captured an exotic speck speeding across the sky. It was interstellar — recognized as the first object we’ve ever seen that originated outside our solar system. In the past few years there has been a flurry of new interest in the search for aliens. Tech billionaires are funding novel efforts to scan the heavens for evidence of life, and after decades of giving the field short shrift, NASA recently joined the search. By Farhad Manjoo.

America and China should cooperate in space. Although the United States can no longer take its extraterrestrial dominance for granted, it remains the leading player, while China’s space capabilities are growing fast. Most important, both countries, along with the rest of the world, would benefit from a set of clear rules governing the exploration and commercialization of space. By Anne-Marie Slaughter and Emily Lawrence.

New York Times reporting: The first in a parade of three new visitors to Mars has arrived. On Tuesday, the United Arab Emirates became just the fifth nation to successfully send a spacecraft to Mars when its robotic probe, named Hope, began orbiting the red planet. By Kenneth Chang

Just as political leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have forced a reckoning about the historical persistence of fascist politics, so have their disastrous responses to the COVID-19 pandemic renewed the relevance of the concept of genocide. How else are we to come to grips with so many culpably avoidable deaths? As in Brazil, Indigenous communities in the US have suffered disproportionately from the pandemic. By Federico Finchelstein and Jason Stanley.