Gov. Brian Kemp was endorsed by President Donald Trump in Georgia’s 2018 Republican primary, and became a hero to many of the state’s conservative voters earlier this year when he refused to impose COVID-19 restrictions. A group of conservative economic experts recently ranked him second among the nation’s governors. 

But at campaign rallies for Georgia’s two Republicans senators this week, Governor Kemp’s name generates loud boos and even chants of “lock him up!” – the same treatment once given to Hillary Clinton.

The governor’s sin? Defending the integrity of his state’s November election, which was recertified as a win for Joe Biden for the third time on Dec. 7. In the weeks since the vote, President Trump has insisted, contrary to all evidence, that he won Georgia and other key swing states, as well as the election overall. He has attacked Mr. Kemp on Twitter, calling him a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and encouraging other Republicans to run against him in 2022. 

Mr. Trump has always put a premium on personal loyalty. But this postelection period – in which he has continued to press unfounded claims of fraud, even as President-elect Biden prepares to take office – has presented Republicans across the country with a stark test, and created new fissures in the party. In many cases, the divide between those who back Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud and those who admit, however regretfully, that he lost the election aligns with whether those officials have actual responsibilities over elections or are simply lobbing criticism from the sidelines.

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who previously had a close relationship with Mr. Trump, became the target of critical tweets by the president after he certified Mr. Biden’s victory in his state. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who waited six weeks before finally congratulating Mr. Biden on his win, also found himself the subject of an angry presidential tweet.  

In Georgia, the party fracture is particularly acute, and has created an awkward messaging problem for Republicans as the state moves toward two Jan. 5 runoff elections that will determine control of the U.S. Senate.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

“The Republican Party is splintered right now, and I think it will continue to splinter more depending on what happens with President Trump,” says Marjorie Taylor Greene, representative-elect for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.

Incumbent GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have conspicuously sided with the president in bashing their own state’s election apparatus and the Republican officials in charge of it. They’ve accused GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of failing to deliver “honest and transparent elections,” and called for him to resign. This week, Senator Loeffler declined to rule out disputing Mr. Biden’s win when Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College results next month, which could force members to vote on the matter (though the outcome would almost certainly not change).

By amplifying Mr. Trump’s baseless fraud charges, the senators could undermine their own reelection efforts – since fueling doubts about the integrity of Georgia’s voting could conceivably depress GOP turnout. At Mr. Trump’s rally in Valdosta, when Senator Loeffler tried to talk about the importance of holding on to Georgia’s Senate seats, she was interrupted with chants to “stop the steal.”

Yet both senators, like many other Republicans, seem to have calculated that their political survival depends upon remaining in Mr. Trump’s and his supporters’ good graces. And keeping those supporters angry over a “stolen” election could in fact prove to be a powerful political motivator, even after Mr. Trump has left the White House.

“The Republican Party is splintered right now, and I think it will continue to splinter more depending on what happens with President Trump,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, representative-elect for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, tells the Monitor. “If he’s not in the White House over the next four years, you’re going to see his base, the MAGA base, continue to grow.”

“You have to vote”

Ms. Greene, who co-owns a commercial construction business with her husband, shocked many in America with her successful congressional campaign as an unapologetic purveyor of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which contends that many prominent Democrats are actually Satan worshippers and child sex traffickers. 

In the shadow of an empty shopping mall parking lot in Duluth, Ms. Greene, who has been embraced by the president, is welcomed with cheers and selfie requests. It’s one of more than a dozen scheduled stops on a “Save America” bus tour to rally GOP voters ahead of the Georgia runoffs. 

“No matter what you hear on social media, you have to vote,” Ms. Greene tells a crowd of a hundred or so voters with MAGA flags and shirts that read “Stop the Steal.” Other speakers on the tour – including former vice presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, and Utah Sen. Mike Lee – make similar appeals about the importance of voting.

The tour is an effort to reverse the apathy and disappointment canvassers were hearing from Republican voters after the election was called for Mr. Biden, says David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, which organized the tour and has put $10 million toward get-out-the-vote efforts.

More specifically, he says, it’s an attempt to counter some of the less helpful GOP messaging around the runoffs.   

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Becky Strobel, a medical assistant, attends the Pence rally on Dec. 10, 2020, in Augusta, Georgia. She believes fraud occurred in November and may occur again in the Senate runoff elections, but hopes Republican turnout will be so strong that it won’t make a difference.

At a press conference earlier this month, pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell encouraged Republican voters in Georgia to sit out the Senate runoffs as a form of protest. In an interview with Ms. Powell, Lou Dobbs, an anchor on the Fox Business Network, said, “If the people in Georgia are dumb enough, after what they have gone through in the Nov. 3 election to then go toward Jan. 5 in a runoff and think that changing nothing will change the outcome, then the people of Georgia aren’t half as smart as I believe them to be.”

Many Republican voters attending a recent rally with Vice President Mike Pence outside the Augusta airport say they hope election officials have learned from their “mistakes” in November.

“Maybe now, with more attention, they won’t try it again in January,” says Rhonda McNeely, who works at Big Lots. “But we can’t take our eye off the ball.” 

Becky Strobel, a medical assistant, says she does plan to vote – but anticipates that fraud will occur. “The more of us who turn out and vote, the harder it is for them to steal it,” says Ms. Strobel. “Obviously they can still steal it, like they did in November, but it makes it harder to argue.” 

“It all comes down to the Peach State,” trumpets Mr. Pence from a stage decorated with Christmas trees and big red bows. From the risers behind him, a man yells, “Kick Kemp out!” and the rallygoers around him laugh.  

“If Kemp doesn’t stand up for Trump like Trump stood up for him, I won’t vote for him again,” says Ms. Strobel. “This will all come back to bite Kemp.”  

View from Richmond County

For the GOP officials trying to defend the integrity of the election process, refuting fraud allegations has felt like a never-ending saga – with new rumors seeming to spring up as quickly as they can be put down. 

“Every day you whack one idea down – it’s a rumor whack-a-mole – and then another one pops up. It’s just endless,” Mr. Raffensperger commented in a recent virtual discussion with other secretaries of state. “But there is no proof to anything. Everything they have said, there are facts on our side.”

As part of his ongoing effort to reassure the public, Mr. Raffensperger recently announced a signature audit in Cobb County – something President Trump had pushed for – though he said it would not change the outcome of the presidential election.

Few Georgia officials straddle this line in the sand more than Sherry Barnes, an Augusta attorney who serves as both chair of the Richmond County GOP and vice chair of its Board of Elections. From her office near the courthouse in downtown Augusta, Ms. Barnes says she doesn’t dispute the general claims of voter fraud. But she insists it didn’t happen in her jurisdiction.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Sherry Barnes, an Augusta attorney who serves as both chair of the Richmond County GOP and vice chair of its Board of Elections, says she doesn’t dispute the general claims of voter fraud, but insists it didn’t happen in her jurisdiction.

Richmond County had the largest turnout in its history, she says, and the fact that they held a safe and secure election amid COVID-19 was impressive. Like Mr. Kemp, Ms. Barnes might be in a position to address any instances of fraud if actual evidence were to emerge. In the absence of any such evidence, however, she suggests that problems might have occurred elsewhere in the state – perhaps Atlanta and its suburbs – but not here.

“Even with our recount, we only came up with seven votes different out of 87,530 votes,” says Ms. Barnes. “What we did was right.” 

She’s had voters call her office to ask about rumors of election officials hiding suitcases of ballots underneath tables, and tried to reassure them that in Richmond County, they don’t allow tablecloths. But she doesn’t reject the idea that something like that could have occurred elsewhere.

“We have it out in the open here. But if the other counties did that, that’s wrong,” says Ms. Barnes. “It tends to make people question the validity of the election.” 

Regardless, she adds, Georgians need to focus on reelecting Senators Perdue and Loeffler. 

Right now, it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort to win the Senate runoffs, agrees Congresswoman-elect Greene. Republicans need to turn out despite any grievances they may have with other party officials. There will be time to deal with those concerns later, she says.

“Leading into the 2022 elections,” she says, “we’ll handle our family business then.” 

The polished “confession” video of Iranian opposition leader Habib Chaab looks similar to many produced over the years by Iran’s spy services.

But how Mr. Chaab was abducted abroad and spirited back to Iran in October is part of an increasingly used – and relatively successful – tactic that Iran is employing to demonstrate its “offensive” intelligence reach abroad, as it absorbs a spate of recent intelligence failures at home.

Set to sinister music, the video broadcast by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence last month is interspersed with images of explosions and bloodied victims – including from a September 2018 attack on a military parade in Ahvaz, which killed 25 people and was claimed by Mr. Chaab’s separatist Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz, or ASMLA.

The video shows Mr. Chaab removing his blindfold, then revealing purported details about the Ahvaz “terrorist operation” and taking cash from Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Muslim world rival.

What Mr. Chaab doesn’t say is how he ended up in Iranian custody: lured in a honey trap from exile in Sweden to Istanbul, by a female Iranian agent, and then abducted, drugged, and driven in a van more than 1,000 miles east across Turkey and smuggled into Iran, in a complex operation orchestrated by Iranian intelligence.

Mr. Chaab is the latest in a string of at least three high-profile Iranian dissidents – one of them, Ruhollah Zam, executed earlier this month – who returned to the region from the U.S. or Europe, only to be abducted beyond Iran’s borders, spirited back into the country, and put on state TV to confess to “crimes.”

A response to failures

The actions appear designed as much to restore faith at home in Iran’s intelligence and security apparatus as to exact vengeance, analysts say, amid headline-grabbing failures that include Israel’s Mossad stealing thousands of pages of nuclear documents from a Tehran warehouse in 2018, and multiple explosions last summer, one of which damaged Iran’s nuclear centrifuge facility at Natanz.

In addition, Iran has this year witnessed the assassinations of two of its most important men: Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani by the United States, in Baghdad; and top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, apparently by Israel, outside Tehran.

“There is no doubt we have seen more of these cases,” of Iran abducting dissidents abroad, says Tara Sepehri Far, the Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch.

“They want to send the message, ‘Look, this is the capability of the Islamic Republic, to bring these people back to Iran,’” she says. Forced public confessions have featured in Iran long before the Iranian revolution in 1979, but the Islamic Republic has perfected the practice with hundreds of examples.

“You can’t interpret the use of televised confessions in any way other than the propaganda machine,” says Ms. Sepehri Far. “It’s a public messaging tool. They need to send this message to the base, to convince the public they are doing something.”

Pivot to kidnappings

The game has stepped up for Iran since May 2018, when President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from a landmark nuclear deal and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then told Ministry of Intelligence staff that “we need offensive measures” because “the enemy is waging a widespread and complicated intelligence war.” That year, the ministry’s new Foreign Intelligence Organization saw a doubling of funds.

But Iran’s tactics appear to have evolved from assassinations and bomb plots attributed to it by European officials from 2017 to 2019 – including the gunning down in The Hague of Ahmad Molla Nissi, the founder of ASMLA, which has a history of bombing civilians and pipelines in Iran.

Iran instead appears to now favor much more involved efforts to coax dissidents to leave their well-protected safe havens, then snatch them.

Mr. Zam, for example, who was a Paris-based opposition activist and director of the Amad News website, was convinced by Iranian agents to come to Iraq in October 2019. His capture by the intelligence wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was an “indisputable sign of their intelligence power versus the weakness of their [global] rivals,” Ali Shamkhani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said at the time.

Mr. Zam was executed Dec. 12, accused of “corruption on earth” for his website’s role in helping foment nationwide protests in 2017, and alleged “links” to Western intelligence agencies.

Amad News has been described as the “Breitbart of Iran.” Aside from detailing protest venues and timings, it was often used by Iran’s competing intelligence agencies to reveal information damaging to rivals. Its popular Telegram channel was shut down, accused of posting instructions for making Molotov cocktails, only to reemerge – just as popular – under a new name.

Domestic constituencies

Another case involves Jamshid Sharmahd, the California-based leader of the militant opposition Kingdom Assembly of Iran, whose armed wing, Tondar, claimed responsibility for a mosque blast in Shiraz in 2008 that killed 14 people.

Mr. Sharmahd was picked up in late July in Dubai, en route to a business meeting in India. He was apparently driven from the United Arab Emirates across the border to Oman and to the coast, where his phone signal disappeared, The Associated Press reported. He then appeared on Iran state TV, a captive.

“These operations are not just a signal to the exiled regime-change ‘opposition,’ but also to Iran’s domestic constituencies as well as to the outside world, particularly the Western powers, which have been in a state of heightened tension with Tehran since Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA [nuclear deal],” says Maysam Behravesh, an intelligence analyst on contract with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security from 2008 to 2010.

“The message to each audience is different,” says Mr. Behravesh, now a Swedish-based researcher with Clingendael, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. “To the opposition, they are meant to signal that you are not safe as long as you are working to overthrow the Islamic Republic. To Iranian public opinion ... it means, ‘We are not as incompetent and toothless as the critics claim we are.’”

To the West, the message is one of “defiance and indignation within [Iran’s] limited maneuvering space,” adds Mr. Behravesh.

Hard-line media in Iran hailed the abduction operations.

“In this new era of [intelligence work], the identifying and hunting down of the mercenaries working for foreign intelligence services is not restricted to Iranian territory and is rather broadened overseas,” wrote Kayhan, a newspaper close to Ayatollah Khamenei’s office, in an editorial Tuesday.

“Turning weakness into strength”

Still, creating spectacles to engineer social compliance has been a factor in Iran for millennia, says Ali Alfoneh, an Iran analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“The overarching theme for most, if not all, of these cases is the weakness of the central government and its need to project strength and terrorize the domestic public into submission,” says Mr. Alfoneh, author of books on the Revolutionary Guard and political succession in Iran.

“The Iranian state has perfected this method since antiquity, as the rulers every once in a while would lure princes and satraps from remote parts of the empire to the capital, just to behead them,” he says.

The Islamic Republic inherited “the art of turning weakness into strength by the way of theatrical spectacles,” adds Mr. Alfoneh. “The regime is not capable of preventing Mossad from stealing truckloads of documents [or] assassinating nuclear scientists ... but it is more than capable of creating tragicomical spectacles of eliminating so-called enemies of the state.”

And in Turkey, with the abduction of Mr. Chaab of the ASMLA, the scale of that Iranian operation was clear in details, evidence, and video collected by Turkish counterterrorism officials, first leaked to The Washington Post and Sky News.

Footage gathered by an array of closed-circuit cameras shows the “honey trap” Iranian agent, identified by Turkey as Saberin Saedi, getting off the flight from Tehran in Istanbul, taking a bus to the terminal, having her fake Iranian passport stamped, and communicating with a black-clad Iranian handler who arrived on the same flight.

The Turkish file includes video of two men, before the abduction, buying two sizes of cable ties from an Istanbul hardware store, which Turkey says were later used to bind Mr. Chaab for the long drive to Iran.

Turkey announced this week it had detained 11 people involved in the abduction. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this illegal operation by the Iranian intelligence,” Turkey’s presidential office told Sky in a statement.

Henry Romero/Reuters

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador listens to the national anthem before he addresses the nation on his second anniversary in office, at the National Palace in Mexico City, Dec. 1, 2020. Reforms to a security law that the president proposed have been passed by Mexico's legislature.

Over the past four years, Mexico’s relationship with the United States has faced any number of tests – from Donald Trump’s infamous statements about Mexican citizens on the 2016 campaign trail, to his hanging tariffs over Mexico’s head if it didn’t cooperate on immigration.

But none made diplomatic waves like the arrest of a former Mexican official in Los Angeles.

In October, U.S. agents arrested Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, the previous Mexican administration’s top defense official, on charges of assisting a drug cartel during his years in office. Mexico was blindsided, straining relations across the border. And this week, the repercussions escalated.

New reforms to a security law were approved by the legislature on Tuesday, restricting foreign agents, such as Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, on Mexican soil, and stripping their diplomatic immunity. Although it doesn’t directly target the U.S., President Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed the reform following General Cienfuegos’ arrest, and it is expected to disrupt security cooperation between the two countries.

The U.S. and Mexico have a long history of diplomatic tussles over sovereignty, most iconically after the U.S. took upward of 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory following the Mexican-American War. But the timing of this security reform – amid a presidential transition in the U.S., following two years of what many have perceived as Mexico kowtowing to U.S. demands on migration, and at a time when violence in Mexico and drug-related deaths in the U.S. are at all-time highs – is particularly high-stakes. And the tensions that emerged from General Cienfuegos’ arrest have brought a resurgence of accusations against the U.S. of “meddling” and ignoring Mexico’s sovereignty.

“Mexico is renewing its message of nonintervention,” says Analicia Ruiz, a professor of global studies at the University of Anáhuac Mexico.

That message, she says, is directed at President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration. Despite Mr. Trump’s unvarnished approach to politics, “at the base of it all, Trump didn’t really question the Mexican government,” says Dr. Ruiz. But with all the unknowns around a new U.S. administration, Mexico is using this as an opportunity to “set out its terms” upfront, she says.

President Lopéz Obrador, often referred to by his initials, AMLO, was one of the last leaders in the world to congratulate Mr. Biden on his electoral victory. In the brief letter sent this week, he noted the importance of nonintervention.

Affront to the army

It’s not just U.S. political transitions dictating Mexico’s move to limit DEA agents in its territory.

The amended law, now awaiting President López Obrador’s signature, would force foreign agents to share information with Mexican counterparts. Any meeting with local officials would need to be approved by a federal government security committee and be attended by a foreign ministry official. Government employees would have to submit reports if and when they’re contacted by a foreign agent, limiting the role of DEA informants, observers say.

“This is backlash from the Cienfuegos case,” says Alejandro Hope, a Mexican security analyst. But the pressure to react, he says, is coming from the army.

“I don’t think in any other previous administration the army had the political clout to force a confrontation with the U.S. that it has now,” Mr. Hope says. AMLO has chosen to work with the army on a long list of priorities, from the construction of Mexico City’s new airport, to overseeing the new National Guard, and soon delivering COVID-19 vaccines.

Mr. Hope says the army has a long memory, and the arrest of one of its own, General Cienfuegos, was a personal affront. “The relationship between the DEA and the army has always been tense.”

Carolyn Kaster/AP/File

From left, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Mexican Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos; and Adm. Vidal Francisco Soberon Sanz, the Mexican secretary of the navy, stand for the U.S. national anthem at the Pentagon, May 22, 2017. General Cienfuegos was arrested in Los Angeles in October 2020, though the U.S. soon dropped the charges.

Many here were angered by the apparently unilateral investigation and arrest. “Security is the central theme of bilateral relations with the U.S., and what happened with Cienfuegos, that it wasn’t carried out as a team, broke civility and trust,” says Professor Ruiz. U.S. prosecutors dropped the charges in November and returned him to Mexico, pointing to foreign policy considerations. So far, he faces no charges here, and many critics doubt he ever will.

Cooperation, and corruption

Observers say both countries will suffer from the reform. “It will translate into more violence in Mexico and translate into more drugs coming into the U.S. The only winners in this whole scenario are the drug traffickers,” says Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations. He says the law will stifle cooperation and information sharing. “Who is going to take your call if they have to write a report every time they talk to you?” he asks.

Mr. Hope predicts things will simply become more secretive: DEA agents in Mexico “will move undercover, basically,” he says. Their work will continue, but information sharing and joint efforts will dramatically diminish. “There used to be a saying in Mexico when orders came from the Spanish crown: ‘Obey but do not follow,’” he says. “That’s going to be the approach.”

And although some say they don’t blame Mexico for trying to keep better tabs on foreign agents operating here – would the U.S. tolerate foreign agents acting the way the DEA does in Mexico? – there are concerns over what this means for Mexico’s battle against corruption.

“There’s endemic corruption in Mexico and within its security forces. This will compromise agents, informants, operations, and investigations,” says Mr. Vigil.

AMLO came into office two years ago pledging to strip the country of corrupt actors. “We’ll clean the government as if we’re sweeping a staircase,” he famously pledged, committing to rid the government of corruption from the top down. In 2019, Transparency International ranked Mexico 130th out of 180 countries in its Corruption Perceptions Index.

“AMLO is angry at the US for arresting a corrupt Mexican general and exposing the corruption within the Mexican military,” wrote analyst James Bosworth in a tweet this week. “AMLO doesn’t seem angry at the corruption within the military. That’s a huge problem.”

Marianne Denton was looking forward to seeing the rock band Tool in concert this summer with her husband and adult son. But then the pandemic hit, and the show was canceled. 

So Ms. Denton turned her attention to a different stage: the night sky. With the concert tickets refund, Ms. Denton bought her first telescope so that she could explore the cosmos from her backyard in Reno, Nevada. 

“It gives me a chance to explore when I can’t go anywhere,” Ms. Denton says.

Ms. Denton isn’t alone. Telescope retailers typically see an uptick during celestial events like eclipses or comets. Indeed, a rare event next week, when Jupiter and Saturn align in what some are calling a “Christmas star” because of the timing, is generating stargazing excitement. It is predicted to appear in the sky on Monday evening, which happens to be the same day as the winter solstice.

But this year, sales have gone through the roof, no cosmic alignment needed.

“There’s no single day event that’s going to lift the entire industry as much as something like what we’re experiencing now where people have the time, they have the reason,” says Dustin Gibson, CEO of Oceanside Photo & Telescope in Carlsbad, California. In the company’s 74 years, he says, this is the largest influx of amateur astronomy customers ever.

Many more people have been gazing at the night sky during the pandemic, often seeking to fill voids left in their lives. With travel restrictions, theaters closed, parties banned, and concerts canceled, amateur astronomy offers a tantalizing replacement. 

“If I hadn’t gotten that ticket refund,” Ms. Denton says, “I would’ve gone to that concert and I wouldn’t have purchased a telescope.”

Finding connection from afar

The pandemic makes astronomy a fitting hobby, says Mr. Gibson. People can do it alone in their backyard. But it also offers ways to connect with others virtually, as people post their astrophotography on social media and share celestial experiences at a time when they can’t be physically together.

Furthermore, the night sky itself can be a unifying view, says Shannon Schmoll, director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University. 

“Right now, we’re all separated. We don’t get to see our families right now. We don’t get to see our friends. We don’t get to see other people. But all over the world, everyone sees the same stars,” she says. “And so we have that shared experience by going outside to look up … and that is something that can connect us.”

Some amateur astronomers, like Mike Kieran in Palo Alto, California, have also found ways to share stargazing with a few friends in a socially distanced manner, setting up telescopes six or more feet apart under the same sky.

Gerry Broome/AP

Astrophotographer and amateur astronomer Johnny Horne gazes into the northern sky as he prepares to photograph comet NEOWISE at Grandfather Mountain in Linville, North Carolina, July 17, 2020.

“It rekindles one’s sense of wonderment,” Mr. Kieran says. “When you look at the night sky, you appreciate the depth and the distances and the scale and the unbelievable beauty.”

A cosmic boom 

The pandemic has been almost too good for telescope makers. 

“We’ve been sold out of telescopes really since the middle of summer,” says Michael Bieler, president of Astronomics in Norman, Oklahoma. Since his father founded the company in 1979, Mr. Bieler says this is the biggest boom they’ve seen – and the industry wasn’t prepared.

“It caught every manufacturer flat footed because they don’t have inventory,” he says. And as a result, some orders placed over the summer are just now being filled.

While many telescope orders this year have come from people exploring the hobby for the first time, Mr. Bieler says some of the boom has also come from what he calls “zombie astronomers.” 

These are people who bought or were gifted telescopes long ago but haven’t used them in perhaps decades. During the pandemic, they’ve sought to resurrect the hobby. Mr. Bieler estimates about 10% of phone calls this year have come from such customers looking for replacement parts or user manuals.

Tom Frazier in Vienna, Virginia, is one of those amateur astronomers who dusted off his old telescope. 

“I figured, well, if I can’t go anywhere, I’ll just go visit the planets,” he says.

Mr. Frazier had purchased the telescope 15 years ago to peer at Mars in a year when it was particularly prominent. But since then, the telescope and tripod had been collecting dust in his garage.

“It was like a reeducation. What I had managed to learn, I had forgotten,” he says. “There was a long time when I wasn’t using the telescope, but I’m still glad I bought it.”

Retailers aren’t the only ones who’ve noted a rise in amateur astronomy during the pandemic. The Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University puts out a sky calendar for stargazers to know what to look for each month. Not only has there been a notable uptick in subscribers, says planetarium director Dr. Schmoll, but many people who let their subscription lapse a decade or two ago have also renewed it this year.

“We can’t do a lot right now,” Dr. Schmoll says. “But people, I think, are also getting tired of screens and looking for a screen-free way of engaging.”

No telescope needed

The cosmos is accessible to anyone – you don’t need a telescope, says Dr. Schmoll. “You can just go outside and look up.”

With the naked eye, she says, you can watch the moon change phases. You can see planets. You can see meteor showers. “You can go outside and see this surprise comet that we had this summer,” she says, referring to the comet NEOWISE. “That was fantastic. That was a really nice bright point this year, pun intended.”

Another unique opportunity for stargazing comes this weekend into next week. Jupiter and Saturn currently appear in our night sky at the same time. And, in the twilight on Monday night, they will be passing so close to each other’s path that they might appear as one object, which is being called a “Christmas star.” Although the two planets’ paths converge every 20 years in our sky, they rarely pass so closely to each other and typically aren’t visible from Earth when they do. Saturn and Jupiter haven’t appeared this close together and visible from Earth in centuries. 

This celestial event is also particularly compelling for Earthlings, says Dr. Schmoll, because, as long as there are no clouds, you can see it from anywhere in the world – including in some places where light pollution blots out the stars. 

“We can all go outside and see Jupiter and Saturn converging, all over the world,” Dr. Schmoll says. 

Stargazing can also offer a much-needed escape from reality at a time when Americans’ mental health is growing precarious. During the pandemic, depression among adults has tripled and alcohol consumption has risen 262%, according to two studies in September in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“When it’s dark outside and you’re with a telescope and you’re looking at a nebula or a planet, that’s all you’re thinking about,” Mr. Bieler says. “It becomes like meditation. ... You are stuck in the moment and not worried about anything else outside of you.”

AP

A group of more than 300 schoolboys gather following their release after they were kidnapped Dec. 18, 2020, in Katsina, Nigeria. Nigeria’s Boko Haram jihadi rebels claimed responsibility.

For as long as there have been groups that resort to violence to advance their political grievances, governments have faced a dilemma over how to respond. Is terrorism an act of war, requiring a military response, or a crime better handled through courts and social reforms?

Nowhere is that question more urgent than in Nigeria, where towns in the north are caught between splintered jihadi groups and the security forces trying to contain them.

The recently released Global Terrorism Index 2020, an annual survey published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, based in Sydney, reported the encouraging news that terrorism worldwide has decreased for a fifth consecutive year. The largest drop occurred in Afghanistan, aided by coordinated international and local security efforts.

Nigeria recorded the second-largest decrease in deaths from acts of terrorism. But there the picture is more complex. While violence between Muslim herdsmen and Christian farmers has waned, fatal attacks against northern villages increased.

When President Muhammadu Buhari, a retired major general, was elected in 2015, he promised to eradicate the scourge of violence in Nigeria. His most notable target was Boko Haram, a jihadi group that emerged in the northeast in 2009 bent on replacing Western education with Islam.

A year before Mr. Buhari took office, the group raided a predominantly Christian girls school in the town of Chibok and kidnapped 276 students. Many were forced to marry; some were sent on suicide missions. More than 100 remain missing.

The conflict between jihadi groups and Nigerian and regional security forces has escalated under Mr. Buhari. In 2018, Boko Haram raided another girls school in Dapchi, kidnapping more than 100 students.

In a worrying sign that the group’s influence is spreading, Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a raid last Friday on a boys school in the northwestern state of Katsina. At least 344 students were abducted and marched into the forest.

By last night, the government had secured the release of most of the boys, but it is not known how.

Human Rights Watch estimates that Boko Haram and a splinter faction, Islamic State in West Africa Province, have killed nearly 500 civilians this year, including 70 farmers in the town of Jere on Dec. 1.

Human rights observers say that atrocities against civilians by Nigerian and regional security forces are a major cause of the jihadi abductions in the country’s north.

One program shows that the government is starting to understand this. The military has begun a pilot program called Operation Safe Corridor that offers jihadis amnesty and a way to integrate back into society. So far more than 160 Boko Haram fighters have laid down their arms.

However modest, it is a start toward a more law-based approach to countering terrorism.

“You often hear this: that states have to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind their back –that essentially that’s the price of civilization, of being lawful. That’s not it at all,” argues Tom Parker, a British counterterrorism expert and former United Nations war crimes investigator. “What you’re really being taught by the law and by human rights standards – it’s more like being trained by a really good trainer. You’re being taught to swing not wildly, not just lashing out, you’re being taught to control your punches.”

The purpose of terrorism is to provoke. Nigeria may be learning that countering terrorism requires balancing the use of force with the power of restraint and compassion.