10 Days Before Christmas, Statehouse Tree Drops Its Needles

When Kabul fell to the Taliban, returning the country to the fundamentalist group’s control after two transformative decades, scores of Afghan women were compelled to flee. Those who remained faced a reality in which they could no longer be who they are: journalists deleted evidence of their work, artists destroyed their creations, and graduates set fire to their degrees. While the Taliban forced many Afghan women to abandon their workplaces and universities, some chose to fight back.

BEIJING — The death toll from a collapsed highway in southeastern China climbed to 48 on Thursday as searchers dug for a second day through a treacherous and mountainous area. One side of the four-lane highway in the city of Meizhou gave way about 2 a.m. on Wednesday after a month of heavy rains in Guangdong province.

The British royal family is celebrating Princess Charlotte’s 9th birthday with a new portrait taken by her mother, Kate Middleton. The image—shared to the official Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) accounts of the Prince and Princess of Wales on Thursday morning—shows Charlotte in a garden, smiling beside a pink flower bush.

It’s been more than 50 years since Columbia University became the site of student demonstrations amid unrest over the Vietnam War, but the spirit of protest on campus remains strong. Late Tuesday night, dozens of protestors sieged Hamilton Hall—the iconic site of numerous student occupations over the course of history—and unfurled a banner to reveal the building’s new name by protestors: “Hind’s Hall.” The designation was in honor of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli troops in Gaza.

(CHICAGO) — For five days, the shouts of student protesters and supporters rang out from Northwestern University’s Deering Meadow as they joined demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war unfolding on college campuses nationwide. But the meadow on the suburban Chicago campus fell silent hours after student organizers and the school announced an agreement late Monday to curb protest activity in return for the reestablishment of an advisory committee on university investments and other commitments. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] By Tuesday, only two unoccupied tents remained, surrounded by abandoned folding chairs, cases of bottled water and other supplies. By quickly defusing the protests in Evanston and avoiding the longer standoffs that happened on other campuses, the agreement at Northwestern offered an example of successful negotiations between anti-war demonstrators and administrators.

For Pia Hollenstein, the long-awaited ruling at the European Court of Human Rights for a case brought against the Swiss government by her group, KlimaSeniorinnen, came at an inconvenient time. At 73, the retired nurse and former Parliamentarian from St. Gallen is an avid climber, and on the day of the verdict, she was planning to hike the Grisons Alps.