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A comet is currently brightening faster than expected, giving hope that it will become a prominent object visible with the unaided eye in May. An image of Comet C/2019 ATLAS taken from Walmer, Kent, UK, on March 12th, 2020. Image credit: Paul Sutherland The celestial visitor is labelled C/2019 Y4 ATLAS, indicating that it was discovered in 2019 by a sky survey called the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). This robotic survey, based in Hawaii, searches for small objects to help defend Earth against possible future impacts, and has found several comets as well as asteroids. Comet C/2019 Y4...

Utahans reacted to Sen. Mitt Romney’s decision to break Republican ranks with a mixture of pride and dismay Wednesday, with some in this majority-Mormon state even suggesting that his vote to remove President Trump from office recalled a prophecy attributed to the church founder Joseph Smith. Although generally debunked as apocryphal by modern historians, the so-called White Horse Prophecy dates to 1844 when Smith himself was a candidate for president of the United States. The Mormons — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — have long regarded the U.S. Constitution as a divinely inspired document. According...

The removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored, says Tom Gross It is not surprising, given the sheer scale of the Holocaust and its sadism, that it has dominated contemporary discourse among Jews and others. But, while the extermination of European Jews has rightfully (though belatedly) generated a great deal of study and research, the removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored. This ignorance extends to policy-makers at the highest level. Some journalists and politicians I have spoken to have expressed surprise when I even mentioned that Jews...

Throughout the 20th Century, Karl Marx’s visage often appeared on communist banners in the guise of a mighty, bearded prophet, the first and greatest in an array of great thinkers that also included Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. So it may be slightly odd and amusing to think of him in his mid-20s living in Paris as the editor of a magazine. Digging into the letters and writings that Marx produced in those years, and the writings of those who knew him, always turns up something interesting—and occasionally something utterly fascinating. The year was 1844. Hoping to unite German and...