Those taking their government-approved daily walk have been warned not to pick wildflowers - or risk facing an eye-watering £5,000 fine.

POLICE have praised the jail terms handed to two men who launched a drink and drug-fuelled ‘campaign of terror’ across west Oxfordshire.

Mandy Smithberger

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John Nichols

The post Bernie Sanders Reflects on the Power of International Solidarity appeared first on The Nation.

Elie Mystal

The post Covid Is About to Become the Newest Excuse for Police Brutality appeared first on The Nation.

Elie Mystal

The post We Didn’t Need Video to Know Ahmaud Arbery Was Lynched appeared first on The Nation.

Data showed the domestic equity market gave up half the gains that it had amassed.

Directives from the Centre have to be executed at the state level. So, there are many things that are not in Modi’s hands, says Raamdeo Agrawal.

Newly discovered documents have revealed the first telegraph messages and joy when England was linked for the first time with India on 23 June, 1870.

BusinessWeek's 'The Infotech 100', has ranked Bharti Airtel at the 21st position followed by Reddington India (55th) and RCom (66th). Successful business formula

The falling rupee will severely affect the small companies, whereas the big ones will be impacted moderately. Get rid of Debt | Adopt correct investment strategies

South African Breweries, one of the world's largest brewers, says it may have to destroy 400 million bottles of beer as a result of the country's ban on alcohol sales that is part of its lockdown measures to combat the spread of COVID-19.

For some celebrities, finding a name for their child is an opportunity to get creative. Here are some of the most unique and unusual names.

Magnolia, from Ross, California, was chosen among 327,000 contestants who submitted their photos, videos and stories through Gerber's contest website.

Out this weekend: Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber's new duet, Michelle Obama's documentary on Netflix and the season finale of "Saturday Night Live."

SXScreeners: Shorts and soundtracks rule this Amazon-hosted digital film fest

Gervais signed a new contract which will see him making new scripted shows as well as stand-up comedy specials.

What's new this week?

Asked about sometimes conflicting COVID-19 advice, experts generally say yes, if you avoid busier areas and keep your distance. But there are key exceptions.

Have the Seoul Dynasty been exposed? Is Echo a must-pick hero? We dive into some hot topics before Week 14 kicks off.

Big East commissioner Val Ackerman discussed the hurdles for sports to return to her league in 2020-21.

Let's spotlight a new appreciation for Jordan's greatness, the art of rebounding and the Trae Young-John Collins duo.

The full regular-season schedule is out. The Chiefs open defense of their Super Bowl title vs. Houston.

Kevin Love's Cavs became one of the first teams in the NBA to reopen their practice facility for voluntary individual workouts, a process that Love described as "weird" but also "pretty uplifting."

'We've never been apart for sixty plus years, we don't do apart,' says Sidney Moore

UK population is suffering from 'high levels of psychological distress', according to the research

The actor on walking the red carpet while having an allergic reaction, her controversial Calvin Klein campaign and dressing like Michael Jackson

I’m not known for wearing outfits that are as completely covered up as this. Often, you are uncomfortable on the red carpet, worried that something is going to pop out, unzip or break. There was something about this look that felt like protection and armour to me. I wore it to the 2018 CFDA fashion awards and I loved how extreme it felt: chic and strong, slightly androgynous but with a femininity to it. It came together nicely with no stress – until I was in the car, when I realised I was having some kind of allergic reaction to my makeup! One of my eyes swelled up right before I was stepping out on to the red carpet. I panicked and put on my reading glasses to camouflage the fact that one eye was almost completely shut!

As a teenager, my relationship with apparel was fraught because I never cultivated my own style. My mom and I bought everything from thrift shops – I would wear the same jeans all year and then cut them into shorts – but every time I would go on a set I would be decked out in designer clothes. There was a disconnect: clothes were just something belonging to other people that I would embody, and then shed.

With her clashing animal prints and penchant for comfort over taste, the drama’s new character is the perfect lockdown fashion icon

When Sam Perry was pulling together costumes for season three of Killing Eve last year, she wasn’t to know that, come April, tens of millions of us would have watched a show called Tiger King about the big cats and bigger characters of the US’s exotic wildlife scene. But, even before Villanelle returned to our screens last month, many of us were seeing spots thanks to the gun-toting and sometime libertarian candidate for governor of Oklahoma, Joe Exotic.

Yet Dasha, a new character to Killing Eve in season three who occupies a senior role within The Twelve, is the Tiger King-adjacent dresser whose wardrobe feels particularly of the moment.

What’s hot and what’s not in fashion this week

Kaia As in Gerber, who joins the likes of Alexa and Jane Birkin – she now has a bag named after her, by Saint Laurent. Style icon status: confirmed.

From Matilda the Hun to the first fleet, test your knowledge with the Weekend quiz

1 Which South American was the world’s first female president?
2 What was the destination of the First Fleet?
3 Who lived at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque?
4 Which epic poem is based on the Battle of Roncevaux?
5 What animal is a sarcastic fringehead?
6 What German car was last made in Mexico in 2019?
7 Pollex is the medical name for what part of the body?
8 Thomas Neuwirth won Eurovision under what stage persona?
What links:
9 Norwich; Newlyn; St Ives; Camden Town; Bloomsbury?
10 Platypus and four species of echidna?
11 Renren; QQ; Sina Weibo; WeChat?
12 Sydenstricker; Stearns; Staples; Surajprasad?
13 Colonel Ninotchka; Mt Fiji; Zelda the Brain; Matilda the Hun?
14 Harmost; satrap; voivode; bey; subahdar?
15 Ridley Scott; James Cameron; David Fincher; Jean-Pierre Jeunet?

From a mysterious toilet flush to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaking from the hospital, here are the highlights — including audio clips — from a historic week for the high court.

NPR's Ron Elving talks about the historic U.S. unemployment rate, and the Justice Department's move to drop its criminal case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The new amendments allow the president to to take measures to contain the virus, but they also include expanded powers to ban public and private meetings, protests, celebrations and other forms of assembly.

Police say the recovery operation in Truro, N.S., will continue over the weekend after a three-year-old boy disappeared from his grandmother’s yard Wednesday afternoon.

Ontario health officials reported 346 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday morning, the lowest number of new cases since April 6.

Any big weekend plans? Don't worry, we've got you covered. Every weekend, E! is giving you the top binge picks, including new and old TV series, movies and specials. And this...

Break out the popcorn, because this Mother's Day weekend there are plenty of amazing films to watch! Tomorrow is Mother's Day (so if you are just remembering now, be sure to grab...

Jeremy Corbyn's allies have been accused of using a report to "smear whistleblowers" and "discredit allegations" of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party during his tenure.

Follow our live coronavirus updates here Coronavirus: the symptoms

Follow our live Covid-19 updates HERE

Political editor Joe Murphy watches the new Labour leader in his first Commons test

"You can select a regional test site drive-through appointment or home test kit.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson led the sixth national applause for frontline workers as his fiancee Carrie Symonds tweeted she had "another wonderful reason to thank the NHS this week too".

The UK will begin the first round of post-Brexit trade deal talks with the US this week.

Netflix has capitalized on the huge success of their docuseries Tiger King by releasing an “aftershow” special. Here are 5 things we learned.

What is this pandemic doing to our minds? Polls repeatedly show it’s having an adverse effect on our mental health. Physical distancing, for some, means social isolation, which has long been shown to encourage depression. Previous disasters have been followed by waves of depression, exacerbated by financial distress. The situation also puts us in a state of fear and anxiety—anxiety about financial strain, about being lonely, about the very lives of ourselves and our loved ones.

This fear can also bring out some of the everyday irrationalities we all struggle with. We have trouble thinking about numbers—magnitudes, probabilities, and the like—and when frightened we tend toward absolutes. Feeling powerless makes people more prone to conspiracy theories. We naturally believe that big effects should have big causes, and we see with the current coronavirus, as we did with AIDS and SARS, conspiracy theories claiming that the virus was engineered as a weapon.

We are seeing the theory of “collective resilience,” an informal solidarity among people, in action.

These psychological ramifications can make us fail to behave as well as we should. We have what psychologists call a “behavioral immune system” that makes us behave in ways that, in general, make us less likely to catch infectious disease. Things we perceive as being risky for disease makes us wary. An unfortunate side effect is that it increases prejudice against foreigners, people with visible sores or deformities, and people we perceive as simply being ugly. Politically, this can result in xenophobia and outgroup distrust. Coronavirus-related attacks, possibly encouraged by the misleading term “Chinese virus,” have plagued some ethnic Asian people.

And yet, in spite of all of the harm the pandemic seems to be wreaking on our minds, there are also encouraging acts of kindness and solidarity. In turbulent times, people come together and help each other.

In the days after the World Trade Center fell, it wasn’t just the police, hospitals, and firefighters who came forward to help, it was normal citizens who often put themselves at risk to help other people out. An equities trader named Sandler O’Neill helped rescue a dozen people and then went back to save more. A tour guide at the Pentagon helped victims outside, and then went back in the burning building to help more. We find these kinds of behaviors in every disaster.

During this pandemic, we see the same thing. Some acts are small and thoughtful, such as putting encouraging signs in windows. Others have made games out of window signs, putting up rainbows for children on walks to count. Some show support for health care and other frontline workers, applauding or banging on pots on their balconies and at windows in a nightly ritual. Others are helping in more substantial ways. In the United Kingdom, over half a million people signed up to be a National Health Volunteer, supporting the most vulnerable people, who have to stay home.

John Drury, a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex, England, who studies people’s behavior in disasters, has seen these acts of kindness in his own neighborhood over the past month. He and his neighbors set up a WhatsApp group to help one another with shopping. “I think that translates across the country and probably across the world,” Drury says. “People are seeing themselves as an us, a new kind of we, based on the situation that we all find ourselves in. You’ve got this idea of common fate, which motivates our care and concern for others.”

We have always been a social species who rely on each other for happiness and our survival.

Drury is the pioneer of a theory known as “collective resilience,” which he describes as “informal solidarity among people in the public.” Drury’s study of the 2005 London bombing disaster found that mutual helping behaviors were more common than selfish ones. This basic finding has been replicated in other disasters, including the crash of the Ghana football stadium and the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile. In disasters, Drury says, people reach heights of community and cooperation they’ve never reached before.

It turns out that being in a dangerous situation with others fosters a new social identity. Boundaries between us, which seem so salient when things are normal, disappear when we perceive we’re locked in a struggle together, with a common fate, from an external threat. People go from me thinking to we thinking. Respondents in studies about disasters often spontaneously bring up this feeling of group cohesion without being asked. The greater unity they felt, the more they helped.

Popular conceptions of how people respond in a crisis involve helplessness, selfishness, and panic. In practice, though, this rarely happens. “One of the reasons people die in emergencies isn’t overreaction, it’s underreaction,” Drury says. “People die in fires mainly because they’re too slow. They underestimate risk.” The myth of panic can lead to emergency policies that do more harm than good. At one point during Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana governor at the time Kathleen Blanco warned looters that National Guard troops “know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.” A few days later, New Orleans police officers shot six civilians, wounding four and killing two.

People revert to selfishness when group identity starts to break down. Drury describes how people acted when the cruise ship, Costa Concordia sank off the coast of Italy in 2012. “There was cooperation until one point, when people got to the lifeboats and there was pushing,” Drury says. “Selfishness isn’t a default because many times people are cooperative. It’s only in certain conditions that people might become selfish and individualistic. Perhaps there isn’t a sense of common fate, people are positioned as individuals against individuals. After a period of time, people run out of energy, run out of emotional energy, run out of resources, and that goodwill, that support, starts to decline. They just haven’t got the resources to help each other.”

Perceptions of group behavior can shape public policy. It’s important that policymakers, rather than seeing groups as problems to be overcome, which can lead to riots and mob behavior, take account of how people in groups help one another. After all, we have always been a social species who rely on each other for happiness and our survival. And groups can achieve things that individuals cannot. This understanding couldn’t be more important than now. We can build on people’s naturally arising feelings of unity by emphasizing that we are all in this together, and celebrating the everyday heroes who, sometimes at great cost, go out of their way to make the pandemic a little less awful.

Jim Davies is a professor of cognitive science at Carleton University and author of Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power. He is co-host of the Minding the Brain podcast.

Lead image: Franzi / Shutterstock

Steve Inskeep talks to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the coronavirus threat within the ranks of the military, and guarding against a power competition with China.

Blogger Ed García Conde, who runs the Instagram page Welcome2TheBronx, captured contrasting park photos on May 2 that show differences in how the NYPD is enforcing social distancing.

Amid the pandemic, many people are trying to avoid touching cash, which could be contaminated with the coronavirus. Is it time to go cashless?