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Photos of the Week: Green River, Fire Ritual, Space Needle
Alan Taylor
Idrees Mohammed / AFP / Getty
A massive ballet class in Mexico City, the Night of Ghosts festival in Greece, severe tornado damage in Indiana, a garbage-strewn beach in Bali, airdrops of humanitarian aid over the Gaza Strip, a St. Patrick's Day parade in Tokyo, a robot among tulips in the Netherlands, colorful Holi celeb...
Photos: Spring in Bloom
Alan Taylor
Mark Schiefelbein / AP
Tuesday marked the first day of spring, and the Northern Hemisphere has begun to warm, with flowers and trees in bloom. Gathered below is a small collection of images from recent weeks in North America, Asia, and Europe, of people enjoying flowering fields and trees--signs of warmer days to come.
Too Much Purity Is Bad for the Left
Arash Azizi
American leftists are facing a question that has become a perennial bugbear. Come November, should they support the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump? Or, given their profound reservations about both candidates, should they abstain from voting at all?Biden's support for Israel's brutal war in Gaza has given the conundrum special urgency this year, but the question has become exhaustingly familiar. Four years ago, the country's largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socia...
Valencia's Fallas Festival: Welcoming Spring with Fire
Alan Taylor
Burak Akbulut / Anadolu / Getty
For hundreds of years, residents of Valencia, Spain, have celebrated the arrival of spring and paid tribute to San Jose, the patron saint of the carpenters' guild, by building and then ceremonially burning huge monuments made of wood, cardboard, and paper. The monuments, or fallas, consist...
Germany's Zombie Government Is Fueling the Far Right
Joseph de Weck
At a time when far-right movements are surging across Europe, Germany seems to occupy a zone of its own.On one hand, the country's far-right Alternative for Germany--the party that wants to make abortion an "absolute exception," shut down the Ramstein U.S. military base, and turn Europe into a "fortress" against migration--has been gathering strength, its poll numbers rocketing in the past two years from 10 percent to 19 percent.On the other hand, the country's civil society and politicians seem to...
Is the Destruction of Gaza Making Israel Any Safer?
Andrew Exum
Israeli forces are killing thousands of innocent civilians and badly damaging their country's standing with its most important partners, including the United States. Israel has also no doubt severely degraded Hamas's military capabilities, but the question needs to be asked: Is the country's furious response to the Hamas invasion of October 7 making Israel any safer? At best, it's still too soon to say--but on balance, what I see worries me.It sometimes takes years to fully appreciate the strategi...
A Suspicious Pattern Alarming the Ukrainian Military
Graeme Wood
Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got unusually testy over the failure of the United States to deliver anti-missile and anti-drone systems. On March 2, a strike in Odesa had killed 12 people, five of them children. "The world has enough missile-defense systems," he said. Debates over funding have kept those systems from being delivered. "Delaying the supply of weapons to Ukraine, missile-defense systems to protect our people, leads, unfortunately, to such losses."Others i...
Putin's 'Rabble of Thin-Necked Henchmen'
Anna Nemtsova
Not even the most passionate supporters of Vladimir Putin are pretending that the results of this weekend's election are in doubt: Putin, Russia's longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin, is about to embark on his sixth term. And so, with no electoral politics to debate, both pro-Putin and liberal Kremlinologists in the Russian-language mediasphere have been focusing instead on changes at the very top of Russia's power pyramid: the new elite that is coming to replace the old Putin cronies, the...
The Earthquake That Could Shatter Netanyahu's Coalition
Yair Rosenberg
The most controversial Israeli comedy sketch of the current war is just 88 seconds long. Aired in February on Eretz Nehederet, Israel's equivalent of Saturday Night Live, it opens with two ashen-faced officers knocking on the door of a nondescript apartment, ready to deliver devastating news to the inhabitants. The officers are greeted by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who is similarly stricken when he sees them."I've been terrified of this knock," he says. "Ever since the war began, I knew it woul...
Photos of the Week: Bridal Carry, Ostrich Hug, Godzilla Oscar
Alan Taylor
Marvin Recinos / AFP / Getty
X-ray analysis of an 18th-century violin in France, scenes from the Academy Awards in Hollywood, a march for International Women's Day in Mexico, the launch of a SpaceX rocket in Texas, white-water canoeing in New Zealand, Ramadan prayers in Indonesia, the Crufts dog show in England, and much...