Tens of thousands of people are fleeing civil war and unrest to find new homes in Europe—sometimes with tragic consequences. The U.N. estimates that more people have been displaced than at any time since World War II. Scroll down to see the stories on this topic.
The boy was found today on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum. He was reported to be one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned while trying to reach Greece.
The Syrian civil war has produced more than 4 million refugees. Nearly half of them are children. Here’s the breakup from UNHCR:
The crisis is being described as the worst since World War II.
Just last month, 107,500 migrants crossed into Europe, and the U.N. estimates that the number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean this year exceeds 300,000. Nearly 2,000 landed in Greece overnight.
We decided to look at where the migrants are coming from and which EU countries they are going to using data for the first quarter of this year from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency. Here’s what we found:
Europe’s refugee crisis has been described as the worst of its kind since World War II, at the end of which there were more than 40 million refugees in the region.
The crisis led to the creation of international laws and organizations that would become the foundation of the world’s refugee response today.
Hungary has closed the main train station in Budapest to migrants—many of them refugees—to prevent them from traveling through the European Union.
The move appears to be an attempt by the country, itself an EU member, to enforce the rules of the bloc, which requires that migrants be first processed in the EU country they enter. Hungary had earlier allowed the migrants to board trains without registering them or checking their paperwork.
EU officials will meet for an emergency session in Brussels on September 14 as Europe tries to tackle the flow of people—many of them fleeing civil wars in Syria and Libya—into the region.
The announcement comes following last week’s discovery in Austria of the bodies of 71 migrants in an abandoned truck, and after hundreds of people died when the boats carrying them capsized in the Mediterranean.
A great deal—even though the terms are often used interchangeably.
But the distinction becomes important because the world is witnessing the worst refugee crisis since World War II—one with sometimes-tragic consequences. Here’s how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees defines refugees:
This post was updated on August 28 at 9 a.m. ET
Here’s what we know this morning about the bodies that were found in an abandoned truck in Austria on Thursday:
-- Officials now say there were 71 people in the truck, and that it’s likely the Syrian migrants suffocated.
-- Three people were arrested in Hungary in connection with the discovery. One of them is reported to be the truck’s owner; the other two the drivers.
Austrian authorities say up to 50 migrants were found dead today in a truck abandoned on the side of the highway in the eastern part of the country.
The discovery coincided with a meeting in Vienna in which European leaders discussed the worst migrant crisis since World War II.
If vaccinated people are less likely to transmit the coronavirus, maybe they should be able to test out of isolation.
For most fully vaccinated people, a breakthrough coronavirus infection will not ruin their health. It will, however, assuming that they follow all the relevant guidelines, ruin at least a week of their life.
That very frustrating week began for Joe Russell on November 11, the day he found out he’d tested positive for the virus, just one month after getting a Pfizer booster, and about five or six days after he’d first felt an annoying tickle in his throat. Russell, a 35-year-old hospital-supply technician in Minnesota, dutifully cloistered himself in his basement, far from his fully vaccinated wife and his fully unvaccinated 2-year-old son, and phoned in sick to work. He stayed there through the 15th—the requisite 10 days past his symptoms’ start. Then, fearful of passing the pathogen to his family, he tacked on one more day, before venturing upstairs on the 17th, still in a mask.
January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.
The political education of Peter Meijer
Late at night on the second Tuesday of January, Peter Meijer, a 33-year-old freshman congressman from West Michigan, paced the half-unpacked rooms of his new rental apartment in Washington, D.C., dreading the decision he would soon have to make.
Six days earlier, Meijer had pulled a smoke hood over his face and fled the U.S. House of Representatives as insurgents broke into the lower chamber. They were attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Meijer had been on the job for all of three days. Once the Capitol was secured, he cast his vote to certify the election results. It was his first real act as a federal lawmaker—one he believed was perfunctory. Except that it wasn’t. The majority of his fellow House Republicans refused to certify the results, launching an assault on the legitimacy of American democracy.
As we peer around the corner of the pandemic, let’s talk about what we want to do—and not do—with the rest of our lives.
At the bleakest moment in the pandemic, when you felt your most stressed, most scared, least centered, you probably heard some variation of the phrase This is really hard. Maybe you read it; maybe your manager said it to you; maybe you said it to yourself. But that’s the truth: Our nearly two years of living through a pandemic have been hard. And like everything else in the United States, that difficulty has not been evenly distributed. It has been hardest for those on the front lines, those afraid of how customers will react to their requests to put on a mask, those out of work or in constant fear of the way COVID variants are whipping through their community. It has been hard, in different ways, for those attempting to work and supervise school from home, for those in complete isolation, for those terrified of being around other people. It is fucking hard, in so many intersecting and unfair ways.
For months and months, we’ve been told that rapid COVID testing is the key to getting back to normal. It didn’t work out that way in other countries, though.
At a White House press briefing yesterday, NPR’s national political correspondent Mara Liasson asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki a question that’s been on many people’s minds: “There are still a lot of countries, like Germany and the U.K. and South Korea, that basically have massive testing, free of charge or for a nominal fee,” she said. “Why can’t that be done in the United States?”
Psaki gave a vague response about the administration’s efforts to increase test accessibility and decrease costs, but Liasson followed up: “That’s kind of complicated, though. Why not just make ’em free and give ’em out and have them available everywhere?”
Psaki responded with a sarcastic smile. “Should we just send one to every American?” she asked.
Why is Hollywood still hiring this raging anti-Semite?
Every day, as dawn’s rosy fingers reach through my window, I arise and check in with Twitter, to see what fresh hell awaits. Generally, by about 6:30, I’ve been made furious by the outrage du jour. But recently, I experienced more of a sense of bemusement than ire, as I took in Deadline’s headline: “Mel Gibson in Talks to Direct Lethal Weapon 5.”
Gibson is a well-known Jew-hater (anti-Semite is too mild). His prejudices are well documented. So my question is, what does a guy have to do these days to get put on Hollywood’s no-fly list? I’m a character actor. I tend to take the jobs that come my way. But—and this hurts to write—you couldn’t pay me enough to work with Mel Gibson.
Now, I love the Lethal Weapon movies (at least the first few). And Danny Glover’s a gem. But Gibson? Yes, he’s a talented man. Many horrible people produce wonderful art. Put me down as an ardent fan of Roald Dahl, Pablo Picasso, and Edith Wharton; can’t get enough of what they’re selling. But these three had the good taste to die. That makes it a lot easier to enjoy their output. Gibson lives. And Tinseltown need not employ him further.
Any time I want to talk with my daughter about an issue between us, she tells me she doesn’t have time and it’s not a priority for her.
Dear Therapist,
Six years ago, my retired husband and I moved to be close to our grandkids, and three years ago, our daughter’s family and ours bought houses with adjoining backyards. My husband was the “manny” four days a week until each child was old enough to go to preschool a couple of days a week.
That changed with the pandemic. My daughter already worked remotely, and my son-in-law moved to a remote position because he has a health issue that makes him higher-risk. The kindergartner and 3-year-old were now home and my husband was taking care of both of them five days a week instead of only one child all day twice a week and both kids after school four days a week.
My husband never asks our daughter or son-in-law to pick up the kids by a certain time. The one thing he asked over the summer was that they have the kids at our house by 7:45 a.m. so he could take them out for a walk or a bike ride before it got too hot. Almost every morning, he had to call my son-in-law and ask what the kids’ status was, despite repeatedly stating this wish. He also mentioned it to our daughter, but there was still no consistency in getting them here on time.
The Illinois representative thought the GOP was filled with democracy-loving internationalists. Now he sees the party as a corrupt shell of itself.
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Political courage is a fascinating phenomenon, particularly at moments when it is largely absent. Which is why I’m so interested in the imperiled career of Representative Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who has described Donald Trump’s demagogy for what it is—a danger to the republic—and who possesses spine enough to excoriate members of his own party for succumbing to Trump’s imbecilic authoritarianism.
As Anne Applebaum described so well in her Atlantic cover story last year, “We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.” Her essay, “History Will Judge the Complicit,” made the argument that collaboration, and not dissent, is the default posture of frightened humans, including and especially careerist politicians. Dissent can often lead to social and political death (and sometimes, physical death), and, as we’ve learned in the months following the insurrection of January 6, most Republicans would sooner cast people like Kinzinger into the wilderness than risk ostracism.
‘Virgin birth’ might be more common in animals than we thought.
When you get to be as endangered as the California condor, your sex life becomes a highly public affair. Since 1983, when the number of California condors in existence was a mere 22, biologists have been carefully breeding the birds in captivity. They kept track of who mated with whom, how many offspring they had, and when those offspring were released into the wild. All of this is logged in the official California-condor “studbook.”
So it was quite a shock when, a few years ago, scientists conducting DNA tests as part of routine research found two condors with unexpected paternity. These two birds—known by their studbook numbers as SB260 and SB517—were not related to the fathers recorded in the studbook. Actually, they had no fathers at all. A full 100 percent of their DNA had come from their respective mothers. “We were confronted with this inexplicable data set,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Movies that affirm the vitality of the medium, no matter the size of the screen
At the end of last year, I pondered whether the pandemic was irrevocably changing cinema or merely interrupting it; whether the medium would soon return to being a public, collective experience or overwhelmingly remain an at-home event. With another year gone, I still don’t know for sure. In 2021, we’ve seen the resumption of blockbusters showing at multiplexes, but as with so many aspects of life, a return to “normal” still feels distant, and many people aren’t attending theaters regularly.
As such, this has been an odd year for films. Some of my favorite works of 2021 have yet to be released, while others have had limited runs to qualify for awards contention and will roll out widely in the coming months. But cinema still has the power to excite and amaze, no matter the size of the screen. New films from around the world have ranked among the most enthralling viewing experiences I’ve had in my life. Even as we continue to rethink the idea of what a movie is, this year has affirmed for me the conviction that movies aren’t going anywhere.
From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.
Ryan Carson, the CEO of Treehouse, discusses the benefits of a four-day workweek and why more companies can, and should, do it.
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