Brasilia, 2016: Congressman Jair Messias Bolsonaro votes in favor of impeaching left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. And he dedicates his vote to the military officer who tortured her during the dictatorship (1964-1985), when she was a guerrilla fighter.

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If there is one thing no one can deny about Donald Trump it is that he is a lucky man. The president has beaten the odds more than once. Notably, when he left the presidency in January 2021 after the shameful assault on the Capitol, his political career seemed to have hit rock bottom. But not only was he acquitted in a second impeachment trial, and spared from an AR-15 rifle round that came within millimeters of blowing off his head (to name just two examples of his extreme luck); he also easily defeated Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the presidential election.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine is approaching its fifth year. Since February 24, 2022, Europe and the United States have rolled out a battery of sanctions intended to strangle the Russian economy to the point where regime change would be the only viable outcome for the Kremlin. The wave of restrictions, however, has several loopholes — some deliberately left by the West to preserve certain exchanges, such as a limited purchase of hydrocarbons.

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“This guy is a monster,” Donald Trump said in front of Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive. “And nobody knows him. What a great life! To be a monster and not have to go through this,” Trump continued, pointing at the reporters who follow him everywhere. Pichai stood beside him, waiting to speak with an expression of resigned disbelief. Before the exchange ended, Trump joked about his Indian name: “Sundarrrrr is his name.” When Pichai finally spoke, he tried to play it down: “Hopefully, that will be a better tagline than ‘I’m a monster,’” he said.

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What happens when happiness ceases to be a desire and, instead, becomes an obligation? This is a question that Carl Cederström has been posing for years. The sociologist teaches at Stockholm Business School and is the author of several critical essays on workplace culture and the happiness industry. His popular book The Wellness Syndrome (2015) is a sharp and engaging work, co-authored with André Spicer, dean of Bayes Business School in London.

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A Spanish police patrol car passes through one of Valencia’s largest parks and Lorena López, a 29-year-old Colombian woman, freezes and completely loses focus in her boxing class. She remembers the U.S. agents who held her for a year and a half at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona and the officers from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who deported her, handcuffed at hands and feet, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on April 15, 2026. When she sees the officers, she also recalls the armed men she and 14 other Latin Americans encountered at the hotel where they were held in Kinshasa for two months. But then she immediately realizes that since she was able to leave that African country in June she is free and safe in Spain.

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Pollution crosses any border. Residents of Seville saw this in August when the huge Niebla wildfire in Huelva province collapsed air quality levels in the Andalusian capital. Madrid residents experienced it days earlier when the regional government asked them to stay indoors because smoke was arriving from out-of-control fires in the Sierra Oeste and Ávila province. This pollution, laden with harmful particles, travels tens or hundreds of miles, and sometimes crosses countries and oceans. “Air quality in our cities, towns or countries is not only influenced by local activities but can be affected by pollution from neighboring or quite distant nations,” explains Ian Marnane, head of the Environment and Health Unit at the European Environment Agency (EEA).

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There was a time when moderation was a virtue and the middle ground, wisdom. Hyperbole was no more than a literary or rhetorical device. But not anymore. We live at the extremes. Raising everything to its highest possible level is the zeitgeist fate has handed us, and it comes with a suffix that colonizes the internet: maxxing. A highly versatile suffix: placed after the right word it means that, whatever you do, you are giving it your all.

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Lili Reinhart isn’t interested in being a celebrity… and the 30-year-old actress has proven this throughout her career. The moment her name started making headlines for her starring role as Betty Cooper in the TV series Riverdale (2017-2023), control over what she wanted (and didn’t want) in her life seemed to slip from her grasp. And, as her fame grew, she also had to confront her insecurities: subjected to constant media exposure, her life suddenly belonged to the public.

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