Welcome to Bihar flood relief 2008: Ukraine war has exposed the folly - and unintended consequences

Ukraine war has exposed the folly - and unintended consequences - of 'armed missionaries'

The evening before Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed to many observers – me included – nearly unimaginable that Putin would carry through with weeks of a threatened military attack. As I wrote at the time, Putin is not as erratic or rash as he is sometimes painted.

I had failed to take into account that Putin is, in the words of French statesman and revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre, an “armed missionary.” Writing in 1792, Robespierre explained, “The most extravagant idea that can take root in the head of a politician is to believe that it is enough for one people to invade a foreign people to make it adopt its laws and constitution. No one likes armed missionaries; and the first advice given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.”

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Turning 50? Here are 4 things you can do to improve your health and well-being

When the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve to mark the beginning of 2023, I came to grips with the fact that I would turn 50 years old this year.

Entering a new decade is often a time to pause and reflect on our lives, particularly when reaching middle age. For 50-year-old American men, the average remaining life expectancy is 28 more years; for women, it’s 32.

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7 ways to take the stress and worry out of sending your child to summer camp

Of all the things that can get in the way of summer camp, one of the biggest is not just anxiety among children worried about what camp will be like, but rather parental anxiety over whether the camp will be caring and safe for their child.

Separation, along with related worries like an inability to communicate with their child and the need to place trust in camp directors and staff they don’t know, may be difficult barriers for a parent to overcome.

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15-minute cities: how to separate the reality from the conspiracy theory

Conspiracy theories aren’t a new thing, and for as long as they’ve been around they’ve ranged from the benign to the absurd. From the six moon landings being faked to the earth being flat, or our ruling class being lizards, we’ve all likely come across them in one form or another.

Yet, in a surprise twist, the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023 comes from an unlikely corner: town planning. This relates to the idea of “the 15-minute city” and has even gone so far as to be mentioned in UK parliament by an MP who called the idea “an international socialist concept” that will “cost us our personal freedom”.

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Extra SNAP benefits are ending as US lawmakers resume battle over program that helps low-income Americans buy food

Millions of Americans will find it harder to put enough food on the table starting in March 2023, after a COVID-19 pandemic-era boost to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits comes to an end. Congress mandated this change in budget legislation it passed in late December 2022.

Roughly 41 million Americans are currently enrolled in this program, which the government has long used to ease hunger while boosting the economy during downturns.

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The 61-year-long search for artificial hearts

Nothing shows more clearly the perfect engineering of the heart than our own failed attempts to imitate it. This history of the total artificial heart is punctuated with both brilliant innovation and continual clinical failure.

In 1962, John F. Kennedy challenged the scientific community to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade. In 1964, cardiovascular surgeon Michael DeBakey persuaded President Lyndon B. Johnson to fund a programme to develop the first functional self-contained artificial heart, launching a race to successfully make one before the moon landing. In 1969 both aims were apparently achieved, with the Texas Heart Institute implanting the first total artificial heart just three months before the launch of Apollo 11. However, while the moon landings have led to the Space Shuttle, Mars Rover, and International Space Station, and (despite a long lull) the newest aims to develop a moon base to bring us to Mars, a reliable off-the-shelf total artificial heart is still just out of reach.

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How to Become a Digital Nomad

If you could work from anywhere, where would you go? For more and more people, it’s not a hypothetical question: Young or old, single or with a family, full-time employee or contractor, the digital nomad life is more accessible than ever before. But of course, becoming a digital nomad isn’t without its challenges and risks. From determining where you can legally and safely travel to making sure you’re set up for success when you arrive, this comprehensive guide offers tactical steps to help anyone truly put the “remote” into remote work. So ask yourself: Are you ready to take the leap?

In 2007, I had just finished up a freelance telecommunications project in Australia. My next client was based in Europe, but instead of hopping on the first plane home, I decided to start working on the project remotely from Southeast Asia. It was my first experience with digital nomadism — and it wouldn’t be my last. Today, I continue to embrace the digital nomad lifestyle, working and living along with my family all around the world.

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Asking This 5-Word Question Is a Sign You're an Emotionally Intelligent Leader

Instead of assuming you have all the information you need, ask this simple question.

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Neuroscience Says This Simple Food Boosts Memory and Grows Brain Cells. (It Tastes Like Opportunity)

"Boosts nerve growth and enhances memory."

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Scientists have discovered how to make almost any vaccine more potent

Northwestern University researchers have found that they can supercharge cancer vaccines simply by structuring their ingredients in a precise way — and if the discovery translates from mice to people, it could forever change how we design vaccines.

“The collective importance of this work is that it lays the foundation for developing the most effective forms of vaccine for almost any type of cancer,” said study author Michelle Teplensky. “It is about redefining how we develop vaccines across the board, including ones for infectious diseases.”

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How the west is finally hitting back against China's dominance of cleantech

Michael Jacobs is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute. In a personal capacity he is a member of the Labour Party.

Climate change policy has entered a new era. The growing row between the United States and the European Union over the impacts of the new American green subsidy regime makes that all too clear. Yet in many ways, this story is ultimately about China.

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Africa's agribusiness sector should drive the continent's economic development: Five reasons why

Africa’s agriculture sector accounts for about 35% of the continent’s gross domestic product, and provides the livelihood of more than 50% of the continent’s population. These shares are more than double those of the world average and much higher than those of any other emerging region.

Dependence on agriculture has declined in other emerging regions. For example in Southeast Asia, agriculture’s share of GDP dropped from 30-35% in 1970 to 10-15% in 2019. In Africa it has remained unchanged for decades, according to World Bank data. At the same time, Africa’s agriculture sector is the world’s least developed, with the lowest levels of labour and land productivity. Value added per worker in agriculture is about a quarter of the world’s average and less than a fifth of China’s.

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5 Super Effective Ways to Show Your Emotional Intelligence On the Job

Your emotional intelligence does matter. A lot.

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Neuromarketing: What You Need to Know

The field of neuromarketing, sometimes known as consumer neuroscience, studies the brain to predict and potentially even manipulate consumer behavior and decision making. Over the past five years several groundbreaking studies have demonstrated its potential to create value for marketers. But those interested in using its tools must still determine whether that’s worth the investment and how to do it well.

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5 Tweets That Changed the World, and What You Can Learn From Them

From founders, ordinary citizens, and a former president, these are the tweets that made history.

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The Massive Tesla Recall Is A Much Bigger Problem Than It Seems

If you're haggling over the word, you've already lost.

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'Picard's New Starship Took Inspiration From â€œRetroâ€ Star Trek Canon

The best new starship in Star Trek canon isn’t the Enterprise! In Star Trek: Picard Season 3, the bold new adventure will happen onboard a new starship even more retro than the Enterprise-D. Of all the new stars of Picard Season 3, the USS Titan is perhaps the most exciting for longtime fans.

But how does this ship fit into the Trek timeline? Is it an old ship? A new ship? A bit of both? Inverse got in touch with Picard showrunner Terry Matalas and production designer Dave Blass to get the details on the latest and greatest ship in Starfleet. Spoilers ahead for Picard Season 3, Episode 1, “The Next Generation.”

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Refugee families being moved from London to Leeds - our research shows what is lost when newcomers have to leave a neighbourhood

Just over a year after fleeing the Taliban and seeking asylum in the UK, more than 150 Afghan refugees, including children, are facing more upheaval. In a matter of weeks, the Home Office has given dozens of refugee and asylum seeker families short notice that they will be moved from their accommodation in London to hotels in Yorkshire and Bedfordshire, hundreds of miles away.

Our work involves speaking to newcomers, learning about their experiences since arrival, spending time in local places that feature in their lives, and working alongside people that provide services and support.

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Harry Styles is winning big because his music is a breezy pop antidote to our post-pandemic blues

At this year’s Brit Awards, British artist Harry Styles took home the most coveted award of the night, album of the year, for Harry’s House. He beat the likes of grime artist Stormzy, indie group The 1975 and the other big winners of the night, indie band Wet Leg. Styles also took home the awards for British artist of the year, song of the year (for As It Was) and best pop/R&B act.

Styles swept all categories in which he was nominated. He also found great success at this year’s Grammys, winning three of the six awards he was nominated for, one of which was the ceremony’s most sought-after award, Album of the Year – beating Beyoncé.

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How High Achievers Overcome Their Anxiety

A surprising number of extremely successful people are often wracked by anxiety, the author writes. They suffer from what psychologists call thought traps and others might refer to as cognitive distortion or thinking errors: negatively biased and untrue patterns of thought that arrive automatically and often ensnare us, preventing us from seeing clearly, communicating effectively, or making good reality-based decisions. To combat thought traps, some anxious achievers turn to overwork, others to coping mechanisms such as substance use, avoidance, or passive-aggressiveness. Aarons-Mele explains the 11 most common thought traps—all-or-nothing thinking, labeling, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, filtering, discounting the positive, “should” statements, social comparison, personalization and blaming, ruminating, and emotional reasoning—and recommends strategies for overcoming all of them.

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The war in Ukraine hasn't left Europe freezing in the dark, but it has caused energy crises in unexpected places

Through a year of war in Ukraine, the U.S. and most European nations have worked to help counter Russia, in supporting Ukraine both with armaments and in world energy markets. Russia was Europe’s main energy supplier when it invaded Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin threatened to leave Europeans to freeze “like a wolf’s tail” – a reference to a famous Russian fairy tale – if they imposed sanctions on his country.

But thanks to a combination of preparation and luck, Europe has avoided blackouts and power cutoffs. Instead, less wealthy nations like Pakistan and India have contended with electricity outages on the back of unaffordably high global natural gas prices. As a global energy policy analyst, I see this as the latest evidence that less wealthy nations often suffer the most from globalized oil and gas crises.

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Wash Your Hands and Pray You Donâ€™t Get Sick

In one very specific and mostly benign way, it’s starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2020: Disinfection is back.

“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.

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How Sylvia Plath's profound nature poetry elevates her writing beyond tragedy and despair

I cannot stop writing poems! … They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth.

Popular perceptions of Sylvia Plath tend to dwell on a deeply troubled version of the young poet due to her well-documented difficulties with depression and the morbid imagery found in some of her poetry. So the idea that nature inspired her writing may come as a surprise.

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Fastelavnsboller: A Danish pastry for Fastelavn

"The secret to a good fastelavnsboller," said Thomas Spelling, owner of neighbourhood bakery Rondo in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, "is that it has to be rich, beautiful to look at and ugly to eat."

His words rang in my ears as I bit into one of the soft, ganache-topped cakes later in the day, ending up with thick cream all over my hands, cheeks, and inexplicably, my leg and the floor. It certainly looked beautiful, rounded and with a dark glossy top, and it filled my mouth with an explosion of soft, yielding cake and rich, smooth and thick cream – but it was absolutely impossible to eat without making a mess.

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These Are the 13 Android Phones Worth Buying

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The best Android phone means something different to everyone—it's hard to find one that'll cater to your every need. But chances are, there's a smartphone that comes close to what you're looking for. From the bottomless pit of phone choices, these are our favorite Android handsets, including the Google Pixel 6A, our top pick. All the phones we've selected here have their own advantages, and we've laid them out as best we can based on our extensive testing.

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Twitter's Two-Factor Authentication Change 'Doesn't Make Sense'

Twitter announced yesterday that as of March 20, it will only allow its users to secure their accounts with SMS-based two-factor authentication if they pay for a Twitter Blue subscription. Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, requires users to log in with a username and password and then an additional "factor" such as a numeric code. Security experts have long advised that people use a generator app to get these codes. But receiving them in SMS text messages is a popular alternative, so removing that option for unpaid users has left security experts scratching their heads.

Twitter's two-factor move is the latest in a series of controversial policy changes since Elon Musk acquired the company last year. The paid service Twitter Blueâ€”the only way to get a blue verified checkmark on Twitter accounts nowâ€”costs $11 per month on Android and iOS and less for a desktop-only subscription. Users being booted off of SMS-based two-factor authentication will have the option to switch to an authenticator app or a physical security key.

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3 Productivity Tips You Can Start Using Today

When a major product is about to launch or your team is scheduled to make an important presentation, it’s easy to ride the wave of deadline-induced adrenaline spikes and push yourself to work every waking moment. But of course that’s not sustainable, and we inevitably crash. So how can you make productivity habitual and lasting?

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3 Mistakes First-Time Marketers and Product Designers Make

A common mistake among first-time marketers who are increasingly involved not just in promoting a new product, but also contributing to the design and testing of it is assuming that the customer is just like them. Whether designing a product, marketing a brand experience, or selecting a present for a loved one, it comes down to giving others the gift of understanding. It’s the singular way to become a more thoughtful gift giver and and more customer-centric with the power to surprise and delight others. Here are three common gift-giving errors to avoid.

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How much immunity do we get from a COVID infection? Large study offers new clues

After a COVID infection, whether it’s a first, second, or even a third, many of us wonder how long we might be protected against a reinfection, and whether we’ll be susceptible to new variants. Also, if we do catch COVID again, will the immunity we’ve acquired from this infection reduce the severity of the next one?

A new study published in The Lancet set out to answer these questions, looking at the strength and duration of natural immunity by COVID variant.

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How Jazz Can Unlock Your Teamâ€™s Next Breakthrough

“Generative conversations,” in which multiple perspectives are integrated to kindle new solutions, are a powerful way to address the complex challenges facing organizations. Experts from Wharton and SEB explain the neuroscience behind why they work.

As a society, and as organizations, we are struggling with complex challenges with no easy solutions. So called “generative conversations,” in which multiple perspectives are integrated to kindle new solutions, are a powerful way to address these challenges. The Swedish bank SEB reported breakthroughs and new opportunities after implementing structured generative conversations to make progress on complex business problems. In this article, Wharton scientists Vera Ludwig and Elizabeth Johnson, Wharton professor Michael Platt, and SEB’s Per Hugander describe neuroscientific insights that may explain how generative conversations enhance creative idea generation and lead to novel, impactful solutions. They also explain how Hugander introduced a surprising element — jazz — to facilitate these conversations.

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In 3 Shocking Moves, M&M's Gave Tucker Carlson a Masterclass in Brand Strategy. And Broke the Internet.

Never has candy been so controversial.

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5 Things You Need to Know About Rihanna's Inspiring $1.4 Billion Business Empire

You don't have to be a Grammy-winning singer to make these lessons work.

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Reintroducing top predators to the wild is risky but necessary - here's how we can ensure they survive

Large carnivores are critical to the balance of an ecosystem. In Yellowstone National Park in the western US, grey wolves keep elk populations at a healthy level. This prevents vegetation from being overgrazed and leads to taller woody plants which allow other species, such as beavers, to flourish.

But habitat loss and persecution have eliminated many large carnivores from their historical environment. The Eurasian lynx could be found in the UK over a thousand years ago and wolves roamed the country until the mid-18th century.

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The Age of AI Hacking Is Closer Than You Think

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Its feasibility depends on the specific system being modeled and hacked. For an AI to even begin optimizing a solution, let alone develop a completely novel one, all of the rules of the environment must be formalized in a way the computer can understand. Goals—known in AI as objective functions—need to be established. The AI needs some sort of feedback on how well it is doing so that it can improve its performance.

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What to Stream: A Lost Seventies Classic About a (Rather Sympathetic) Stalker

Hollywood sneaks exemplary works of audacious modernism into plain sight at the multiplex. Some of them boldly trumpet their filmmakers’ ambitious artistry (think of David Lynch), but others arrive (and often depart) far more modestly. One such secret masterwork, Alan Rudolph’s 1978 romantic melodrama “Remember My Name,” never reached the mainstream. Despite a cast that features Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Alfre Woodard, and Jeff Goldblum, it was scantly released and tarred with negative reviews; it is rarely screened, has apparently gone unreleased on VHS or DVD, and has remained widely unseen owing to the vagaries of the marketplace. Yet it’s one of the most unusual and original films from nineteen-seventies Hollywood, a decade of innovation and renewal. It’s a double display of the quasi-musical power of cinematic images and of the image-like authority of great music in movies. And now it’s streaming on Prime Video (for subscribers) and on Tubi (free, with commercials).

Rudolph, born in 1943, was raised as a Hollywood insider (his father, Oscar Rudolph, was a longtime assistant director of movies and a major director of such TV series as “Batman” and “The Brady Bunch”) and worked as an assistant to Robert Altman on “The Long Goodbye” and “Nashville.” Altman, who produced “Remember My Name,” was a myth buster, opening the doors of Hollywood traditions to the sharp winds of reality, whereas Rudolph (who’s seventy-nine) is an embellisher, endowing ordinary lives with the grandeur of cinematic mythology and the refined styles that go with it. “Remember My Name” is an understated, involuted film noir in coolly natural color, a drama of stark motives that give rise to delicately intricate surfaces. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, it’s the story of a stalker—albeit an unusually sympathetic one.

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Encyclopedias: Pliny the Elderâ€™s radical idea to catalog knowledge

Among the achievements of the ancient Roman Empire still acclaimed today, historians list things like aqueducts, roads, legal theory, exceptional architecture and the spread of Latin as the language of intellect (along with the Latin alphabet, memorialized nowadays in many popular typefaces). Rome was not known, though, for substantially advancing basic science.

But in the realm of articulating and preserving current knowledge about nature, one Roman surpassed all others. He was the polymath Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, the original compiler of scientific knowledge by reviewing previously published works.

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Cuba: why record numbers of people are leaving as the most severe economic crisis since the 1990s hits -- a photo essay

Record numbers of Cubans are fleeing their country as the island suffers its worst socio-economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The number of Cubans seeking entry to the US, mostly at the Mexican border, leapt from 39,000 in 2021 to more than 224,000 in 2022. Many have sold their homes at knockdown prices to afford one-way flights to Nicaragua and travel through Mexico to the US.

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Zillow Rate Your Neighbors? A Designer Reimagines Apps

Back in 2015, the music streaming company launched Wrapped, a year-end recap for each user that offered insights into their music listening habits and the year’s most popular artists. Other brands began borrowing the idea, a shameless if entertaining ploy to ratchet up engagement. This December, Iverson, a digital designer, wondered what Wrapped would look like when applied to our most basic apps.

Using the interface design tool Figma, Iverson mocked up a Wrapped for Google Maps, Robinhood, and Starbucks and shared the images to Twitter. The tweets received a modest amount of attention, garnering hundreds of likes each, but Iverson was just getting started. Nearly every day since, he has imagined clever new features that add unexpected touches to our most well-worn apps. There’s ChatGPT, but in Apple Messages. Instagram, but with the option to pay a fee to undo “deep likes.” Lyft-style reviews, but for Tinder (“Looked Like Pics!”). And, the ones that went certifiably viral: Beat Minesweeper to cancel your subscription, and iOS alarms, but for the whole household, so the alarm is only disabled once everyone is up.

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WhatÃ¢Â€Â™s Behind the Chinese Spy Balloon

Earlier this month, the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had travelled over a large swath of North America. According to the Biden Administration, the balloon was "part of a larger Chinese surveillance-balloon program," which the White House argued had violated the sovereignty of nations all over the world. The Chinese government accused the U.S. of overreacting, and signalled that it views the response as a sign of American decline. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled a diplomatic trip to China that was to include meetings with high-level officials, including President Xi Jinping, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader in a generation. (U.S. and Canadian authorities have shot down several more objects flying over the two countries in recent days, but there is no evidence of any connection between those objects and the Chinese balloon.)

To talk about China's military strategy, and the future of U.S.-China relations, I recently spoke by phone with M. Taylor Fravel, a professor of political science at M.I.T. and the director of its Security Studies Program. He is also the author of "Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949." During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how China has modernized its military during the past twenty-five years, how Xi has taken control of military policy, and why the diplomatic fallout from the balloon incident may be much more dangerous than the usual spy games.

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Who Would Win: Thanos vs. Kang? The Strongest Marvel Villain, Revealed

When Kang (Jonathan Majors) meets Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, his first question is a simple one: “Have I killed you before?” The time-traveling despot has traveled across the multiverse killing variants of the Avengers to the point he can no longer remember who is who. But what about the Avengers’ greatest adversary?

In their plan to defeat Thanos (Josh Brolin), The Avengers, accidentally allowed a variant of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to escape in Avengers: Endgame, inadvertently setting off the chain of events that led to Kang coming into power, as seen in Loki.

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How far must employers go to accommodate workers' time off for worship? The Supreme Court will weigh in

Imagine you own a business with a few dozen employees. One, who is Muslim, asks if she can use a meeting room a few times a day for brief prayers – one of the five pillars of Islam. Another, who observes the Jewish Sabbath, says he cannot work on Saturdays. Yet another, a Christian, requests to no longer work on Sundays, one of the shop’s busier days.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon address the extent to which employers must accommodate employees, if at all, in similar circumstances.

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Home power backup systems -- electrical engineers answer your questions

South Africa’s electricity utility Eskom has made it clear that “loadshedding” – rolling scheduled power cuts – isn’t going to end any time soon. This reality, and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement during his annual state of the nation speech on 9 February 2023 that tax incentives for solar power use are imminent, mean that many people are considering alternative electricity supply systems for their homes.

But deciding on the best system isn’t a simple matter. There’s a bewildering array of jargon to sift through and many elements to consider, from the right kind of inverter to the size of your solar panels.

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The Floods, the Farms, and the River That Roared Back

This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On the surface, the Salinas River, which courses through the agricultural heart of California’s Central Coast, seems more like an ex-river. Even after major winter storms, it is rarely more than a creek. In Paso Robles, California, an old Spanish outpost that has since become a wine-growing mecca, the mostly dry riverbed cuts through an unprepossessing stretch of land surrounded by heaps of garbage and makeshift structures built by the city’s growing unhoused population.

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Razer BlackWidow V4 Pro review: More than enough buttons, too much software

If you've ever wished your keyboard had more buttons, Razer's BlackWidow V4 Pro may be for you. It expands the full-size keyboard layout to include a column of macro keys and three non-mechanical buttons on the keyboard's left edge. The keyboard also has a volume roller and a so-called Command Dial, which lets you twist your inputs to control zoom, scroll through a long spreadsheet, or tweak the size of a Photoshop brush.

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A National Experiment in Refugee Resettlement

In January, the State Department announced the launch of a program called the Welcome Corps, proclaiming it to be the “boldest innovation in refugee resettlement in four decades.” Under the plan, groups of five or more American citizens or permanent residents can apply to privately sponsor the resettlement of refugees. These groups will raise the required money—at least two thousand two hundred and seventy-five dollars per refugee—to place refugees in local communities and will help them find housing, identify job opportunities, and enroll children in schools. The first refugees under the new program will arrive in April. Private sponsorship is not an entirely new idea, but the Biden Administration has good reasons, both compelling and lamentable, to promote the Welcome Corps now.

Citizens have played a role in refugee resettlement for a long time. Under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Europeans—including Catholics, Protestants, and Jews from Poland, Germany, Latvia, and the U.S.S.R.—resettled in the United States. After the Cuban Revolution, Cuban parents sent more than fourteen thousand children to states across the country. In the nineteen-seventies, around a hundred and thirty thousand Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees were resettled in the United States under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. In the nineteen-eighties, participants in the sanctuary movement helped resettle a large number of Central Americans fleeing civil wars—surreptitiously, as the Reagan Administration opposed their efforts. Since the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.S. has admitted more than three million refugees. The government sets caps on the number of refugees who can enter the country and provides substantial funding, but receives assistance from non-governmental organizations, many of them faith-based.

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How you can tap into the power of giving (and not get taken advantage of)

Like Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s Fairy Tales before it, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is as a dark tale that serves as a warning for children. The story centers on the relationship between a Boy and a Tree. The Tree desires nothing more than to make the Boy happy, and so she gives him whatever he wants. At various stages of his life, she offers him her fruit to sell, her branches to build a home, her trunk to carve a boat, and, when she is nothing more than a stump, herself as a place for him to rest.

The moral of the story is clear: Giving is a sucker’s game. Better to be the taker and get what you want. It’s a lesson many seem to carry into adulthood. Consider the qualities commonly perceived to drive success. Are they kindness, generosity, and compassion? Nope. Successful people are viewed as savvy, ambitious, results-driven, and on a mission to own all the apples. And there’s some truth to that.

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A Year of the War in Ukraine

In the year since Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have shown incredible fortitude on the battlefield. Yet an end to the conflict seems nowhere in sight. “Ukraine is winning in the sense that [it] didn’t allow Russia to take that whole country,” Stephen Kotkin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of Russian history, tells David Remnick. “But it’s losing in the sense that its country is being destroyed.” Remnick also speaks with Sevgil Musaieva, the thirty-five-year-old editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, an online publication based in Kyiv, about the toll that the war is taking on her and her peers. And Angela Bassett talks about preparing for some of her most iconic roles, from Tina Turner to Queen Ramonda of Wakanda.

David Remnick talks with the historian Stephen Kotkin and the Kyiv-based journalist Sevgil Musaieva about a year of disaster, and what a Ukrainian victory would look like.

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Expert Q+A: why do people commit murder-suicides?

The deaths of Epsom College Head Emma Pattison and her daughter Lettie are a possible example of the rare and tragic phenomenon of murder-suicide. Pattison’s husband is believed to have shot his wife and child before taking his own life. We asked Sandra Flynn, an expert in forensic mental health at the University of Manchester, about why people commit this horrific act and what we should understand about it.

Researchers have examined the motive for past cases, which have included mental health, relationship problems, alcohol and substance use, physical health problems, criminal and legal issues, job or financial difficulties and domestic violence. More recently, a review of cases found negative childhood experiences to be risk factors, as are characteristics like gender, age and financial situation.

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The US plan to become the world's cleantech superpower

In a huge hangar in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, welders are aiming blazing torches at sheets of aluminum. The hulls of three new ships, each about 27 meters long, are taking shape. The first will hit the water sometime in the spring, ferrying workers to service wind turbines off the New England coast.

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'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey' Review: A Hundred Acres Far Away From Good

Horror is inherently a transgressive genre, with scares often achieved by taking the “safe” and rendering it “unsafe.”

It makes sense that one of the genre’s more successful perennial trends is specifically the transmogrification of childhood elements into sources of horror, from dangerous dolls (Child’s Play, Annabelle) and imaginary friends (Daniel Isn’t Real), to even mothers (The Babadook) and children themselves (Children of the Corn, Sinister). It’s no surprise that, given certain beloved children’s books are now in the public domain, we’re seeing these classic, heartwarming characters adapted into maniacal murdering monsters. Enter the horrific corruption of author A.A. Milne’s greatest creation in Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.

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The Soul of a Start-Up

But all too often, companies lose their souls as they mature. Firms add new systems and structures and bring in experienced professionals—and in the process somehow crush their original energizing spirit. In research into more than a dozen fast-growth ventures and 200-plus interviews with founders and executives, the author has discovered how firms can overcome this problem. His work shows that there are three crucial dimensions to a start-up’s soul: business intent, or a loftier reason for being; unusually close customer connections; and an employee experience characterized by autonomy and creativity—by “voice” and “choice.” All three provide meaning to stakeholders.

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AI's threat to Google is more about advertising income than being the number one search engine

Google’s dominance as the most visited website has been undisputed since it rose to prominence as the leading search engine in the early 2000s. However, that position could now be facing its biggest ever threat, with the arrival of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT, which can answer people’s questions online.

Google is countering by developing its own AI products. But its chatbot, Bard, didn’t have the most auspicious start. This month, a Google advert showed that Bard had provided an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb space telescope.

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Magic Mike and the new age of the male stripper

One does come to a Magic Mike film for the plot. Until recently, the world of male stripping was not perceived as an aspirational one, or a particularly deep one. Male strip shows may have been popular a choice of entertainment among hen parties et al, but the male stripper was seen as a laughable figure within popular culture – you only have to think of hit British film The Full Monty (1997), whose humour rested on the fact that a group of ordinary steelworkers were "reduced" to taking their clothes off as a result of being in dire financial straits. More like this: – Magic Mike's Last Dance review – The sex scenes too taboo for Hollywood– Is the romcom truly back?

Nowadays, though, the profession has gone through a complete image overhaul – and that's all thanks to Magic Mike. The multi-pronged franchise, which comprises multiple films, live shows around the world, and an HBO talent show, has single-handedly given the male revue a glossy new allure: last week, the third and supposedly final movie, Magic Mike's Last Dance hit cinemas.

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The Schools That Ban Smartphones

Phones can be addictive and distracting, and take a toll on teen mental health. Some schools are pushing back.

Last October, I accepted an invitation to speak (for—full disclosure—an honorarium) at St. Andrew’s, a small Episcopal boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. It was beautiful in the expected ways: the lake on which the school’s champion crew teams practice, the mid-autumn foliage, the redbrick buildings. But it was also beautiful in one unexpected way, which revealed itself slowly.

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The Glass Ceiling, Still Intact: Women and Power in Washington

The California senator Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week. First elected in 1992, she became one of the most powerful senators in the chamber and was often spoken of as a possible Presidential contender, although she never ran. Also this week, Nikki Haley announced her bid to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination. In Democratic circles, there have been new reports of hand-wringing over Vice-President Kamala Harris’s political prospects. That got the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos thinking about 1992—the Year of the Woman, as it was known—and about what has and hasn’t changed for women in politics in the three decades since.

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Can Low Expectations Make You Happy?

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

At the end of each issue of The Atlantic is a short ode by my colleague James Parker. He has praised many of life’s realities, most of them completely ordinary: naps, barbecue potato chips, chewing gum, cold showers.

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When New-Age Music Gets Real

If you’d told any music connoisseur living in the year 1994 that one of the hottest albums of the year 2023 would sound like Pure Moods, the relaxing compilation CD then being sold on TV commercials for $17.99 (plus shipping and handling), that person might have laughed. But if you’d told me the same thing in 1994, I’d have said that the future sounded cool. I was 7 years old. Pure Moods ads, laden with unicorns and Enya, were welcome bursts of enchantment between Nickelodeon episodes.

Caroline Polachek, a 37-year-old pop innovator, may well have had the same relationship with those ads. During childhood, many of us Millennials only ever got to catch glimmers, like rare fireflies, of the sound known as new age. A calming blend of electronic instrumentation and global folk traditions, the style had its roots in the hippie era but became a commercial phenomenon in the late ’80s. During the ’90s, it was absorbed back into pop and rock, thanks to trip-hop and Tool and Madonna’s Ray of Light, leaving the purest of mood music to circulate mainly in crystal-healing shops. As my generation grew up, new age seemed a bit like a lost world—a faerie realm we were promised but never got to go to.

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Brenda Lucki's retirement will not fix the RCMP's structural problems

RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki announced her retirement on Feb. 15. It is easy to make Lucki the scapegoat for almost five years of RCMP crises, debacles, collapsing public support and allegations of systemic racism and employee harassment. After all, the buck stopped at her desk. But there’s no point replacing the driver when the vehicle itself is rusted out, out of fuel and mechanically unsound.

We shouldn’t have hopes for an RCMP renaissance with Lucki’s retirement. The problems with RCMP leadership are not about the gender or identity of the person in charge.

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President Biden Greets Visiting Space Alien

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You Need to Watch the Most Ingenious Time-Loop Movie on HBO Max ASAP

Live. Die. Repeat. That was the title Doug Liman wanted for the 2014 sci-fi movie Edge of Tomorrow, based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel All You Need Is Kill. The film is an interesting study of the question of whether titles matter. Edge of Tomorrow is not particularly memorable, but it’s hard to say if the two other titles would have worked any better. Warner Bros. must have thought so: they elevated Live. Die. Repeat. from tagline to title on the home media release.

Regardless of the innocuous-sounding name, Edge of Tomorrow is a memorable sci-fi movie that revitalizes an ancient trope. It just hit HBO Max, and it’s worth another look for one specific reason: it’s the only contemporary sci-fi action movie that made time-loops seem brand new again.

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A Low-Budget Character Drama With Maximalist Thrills

Freddie Benoît, the 25-year-old protagonist of Return to Seoul, presents herself as a nomad who’s wandered into a foreign country on a whim. The viewer meets her mid-drink at a bar in Seoul and quickly figures out that the friends she’s sitting with are essentially strangers, a random assortment of new pals she’s enticed while holding court and pouring soju. Freddie, short for Frédérique, is a French woman who was adopted from South Korea at birth. She’s come back to find her biological parents, a search that turns into a jagged and frustrating journey of self-discovery. She’s made the trip without informing her adopted family and with little preparation—an approach that suits the rebellious vibe she seems to be trying out for the first time in Seoul.

Played by the actor Park Ji-min in her debut role, Freddie is a whirlwind of charm and chaos, somehow coasting by even though she doesn’t speak Korean and is a novice to all of the customs. As she’s repeatedly reminded, politeness dictates that you pour drinks only for others, not for yourself, in Korean social situations; to keep her own cup full, she keeps inviting strangers to her table. But she’s also motivated to make friends because she’s trying to find new answers to questions she often can’t articulate—about her identity, her place in the world, and her path forward. The writer-director Davy Chou’s film, which had a brief Oscar-qualifying run in theaters last fall but is finally being properly released this weekend, is one of the most surprising dramas of the year thus far.

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What Did We Learn About the Georgia Grand JuryÃ¢Â€Â™s Findings?

"A majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it," a panel in Fulton County, Georgia, stated in sections of its final report released on Thursday. Whomever might they mean? Between last June, when the special grand jury began hearing evidence related to possible criminal interference in the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia, and the completion of its work, in December, it had, by its own account, heard evidence "from or involving" seventy-five witnesses, the great majority of which "was delivered in person under oath." Not all came willingly or gladly. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, fought his subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, managing only to set some limits on what he was asked; John Eastman, the former law professor who helped Donald Trump come up with the plan for what a federal judge called "a coup in search of a legal theory," took the Fifth Amendment when he came down to Georgia. After Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer, appeared, he said, "I was very happy that I satisfied my obligation." The part about his happiness might have been a lie, but it wasn't under oath.

So which witness, or witnesses, does the jury think may have committed perjury? That guessing game will continue for a whileâ€”only a few pages of the report were released, with the rest now in the hands of Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. But perjury is not the only potential state charge that should concern Trump and his associates; others include criminal solicitation of election fraud. "The allegations are very serious. If indicted and convicted, people are facing prison sentences," Willis told the Washington Post, in September. Willis began an investigation a few weeks after a January 2, 2021, phone call during which President Trump told Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to "find" him 11,780 votesâ€”one more than Joe Biden's margin of victory in the state. Not to do so, he told Raffensperger, would be "a big risk to you." Raffensperger, a Republican, did not comply; he was one of the grand jury's earliest witnesses, and testified for nearly five hours last June.

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Everything Is About the Housing Market

My neighborhood, Bernal Heights, has a number of excellent purveyors. The tasty BagelMacher opens at 8:30 a.m. on the weekends, at which point my sons have been up shrieking and destroying things for three hours. Chicken Dog, which sells the best salt bagel I have had in California, opens at the downright brunch-ish hour of 9 a.m. I come from the Bagel Belt, to co-opt a term. In my mind, bagel shops open at 6 a.m. That’s standard. That’s how it works. You should be able to feel caffeinated and carb-loaded at 6:03 a.m. every day of the year, including Christmas. But not here in the Bay Area. And the housing shortage is to blame.

That’s my pet theory, at least. San Francisco has built just one home for every eight jobs it has added for the past decade-plus, and rents are higher here than they are pretty much anywhere else in the United States. The city could stand to increase its housing stock fivefold, according to one analysis. What does that have to do with bagels? Few people can afford to live here—and especially few families who have to bear child-care costs along with shelter costs. Thus, San Francisco has the smallest share of kids of any major American city. Meaning a modest share of parents. Meaning not a lot of people who might be up at 5:51 a.m. on a Sunday morning, ready to hit the bagel store.

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A Selection of Canine Yearbook Quotes

Paleotsunamis Offer a Quiet Warning

A boulder that weighs more than 40 tons sits on the sand high above the ocean. Dwarfing every other rock in view, it is conspicuously out of place. The answer to how this massive anomaly got here likely lies not in the vast expanse of the Atacama Desert behind it but in the Pacific Ocean below: Hundreds of years ago, a tsunami slammed into the northern Chilean coast, sweeping boulders landward like pebbles.

The tsunami that lobbed this behemoth happened before written records existed in this part of Chile. But we know about it today thanks to the detective work of a small group of researchers who are uncovering signs of ancient tsunamis around the globe. Using a diverse array of scientific techniques, these paleotsunami researchers have found evidence of previously undocumented colossal waves. In the process, their work is revealing that coastal communities could be in far more danger from tsunamis than they realize.

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TNG reunion injects a little fun into Star Trek: Picard's uneven final season

Few involved in the making or watching of 2002's Star Trek Nemesis would say that it was a fantastic send-off for the beloved characters of The Next Generation. Over seven seasons, TNG became one of Trek's most nuanced and consistent entries (though still one that was capable of producing terrible, silly, and just plain weird episodes). But Nemesis is a flat action movie defined by thin characterization, a cheesy one-note villain, and distracting plot contrivances, and it did so poorly ($67 million on a $60 million budget, in a time before "maybe it will make a lot of money in China" was a thing) that it foreclosed any possibility of another sequel. The cast and those characters, the thinking generally went, deserved better closure.

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Sunday, February 19, 2023

Ukraine war has exposed the folly - and unintended consequences - of 'armed missionaries'

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