Beaumont

Christchurch brings global white supremacist threat into sharp relief

The setting alone was shocking: a pastoral, oceanside city in New Zealand, the country ranked the planet’s second-most peaceful, after Iceland. When a white-supremacist terrorist opened fire in two Christchurch mosques on March 15, taking 50 lives including those of a 3-year-old child and 78-year-old man, the brutal display of racial hatred – live-streamed on social media – jolted the world. The perpetrator of the deadliest terrorist attack in New Zealand history carefully calculated his actions for maximum impact on a global audience.

Trump-Netanyahu: True bromance, or marriage of convenience?

As president, Donald Trump has had his share of bromances with world leaders – certainly more than his predecessor, the cool Barack Obama, ever did. There was the short-lived fling with French President Emmanuel Macron, an early dalliance with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that failed to launch, and a cozying up to strongman leaders – from Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines – that remain a feature of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

In the growing gospel of ‘workism,’ is all work holy?

Jake Hammel kinda gets why a bunch of Hollywood celebrities and Manhattan muckety-mucks might try to spend their considerable dime trying to finagle their kids into a big-name college. “You know, wherever you’re at financially, you can just kind of scale it down and think, well, if I had a percentage of my salary that I could try to buy my kids’ way through something, would I do it?” says Mr. Hammel, a sheet metal worker in Carlyle, Illinois, a rural town in the southern part of the state.

A cyclone’s wake-up call on climate adaptation

A cyclone that struck the southern African countries of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi earlier this month has left a devastated landscape. It also left questions about how to better prepare for similar powerful storms predicted by climate scientists. Cyclone Idai caused hundreds of casualties, perhaps many more, and widespread flooding.