HONG KONG — Before she became a funeral planner, Connie Wong was a flight attendant for a Hong Kong airline. The sudden end of a career she had cherished for six years brought its own kind of grief, she said. It was one of many such losses experienced by residents of the Chinese territory. Hong […]
States in the Colorado River basin are scrambling to propose steep cuts in the water they’ll use from the river next year, in response to a call by the federal government for immediate, drastic efforts to keep the river’s main storage reservoirs from reaching critically low levels. The request comes with the Southwest still in […]
A colleague recently drew my attention to a story that ran in The Times a couple of years ago about the late 1960s board game Group Therapy, in which players take turns drawing cards that pose intimate questions and psychological challenges. (A sample: “You have been accused of overintellectualizing your hang-ups. Respond — without falling […]
BRUSSELS — There are many moving parts to the grain deal Russia and Ukraine reached, which officials didn’t think was even possible until last week, not least because the war is continuing and trust between the parties is extremely low. Here’s what to know about the grain problem, and how it might now be addressed. […]
After months of gas prices making life more expensive, they have quietly started to go down — providing financial relief for many Americans. The average nationwide price this week was $4.49 a gallon, down from a peak of $5.01 in June. The average price of gas is still about $1.30 higher than it was a […]
Russia is threatening to ban a major Jewish nonprofit agency that helps people emigrate to Israel from operating in the country, a sign of the Kremlin’s deteriorating relationship with Israel and of the far-reaching fallout from the war in Ukraine. Russia’s Justice Ministry is seeking to liquidate the Russian branch of the nonprofit, the Jewish […]
The Covid virus has a Darwinian quality. As variants emerge, they compete with one another to become dominant. The most contagious variants tend to win the competition because they can spread more quickly. It’s survival of the fittest. That is why the virus has become more contagious over time. Today, the most contagious form of […]
Five Star, which won 33 percent of the vote in 2018 and is, as a result, still the largest party in the government, has since cratered. It has dreaded elections for years, but as the country’s next scheduled elections approach in early 2023, the downside of early elections has decreased. Still, the party, which has […]
LONDON — For the first time on record, Britain suffered under temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius — 104 Fahrenheit — on Tuesday, as a ferocious heat wave moved northwest, leaving a trail of raging wildfires, lost lives and evacuated homes across a Europe frighteningly ill-equipped to cope with the new reality of extreme weather. While […]
More than a dozen Chinese cities are grappling with a spate of Covid-19 outbreaks driven by Omicron subvariants, prompting widespread lockdowns and mass quarantines of millions of people that could worsen China’s slumping economy. Just days after China’s economy reported its worst quarterly performance in more than two years, officials have shown no sign of […]
