American forestry has been a stage of conflict between timber interests and conservation. A new generation of ecological foresters wants both to flourish.

• Health insurance and DACA: A group of Republican-led states filed a lawsuit Aug. 8 seeking to block the Biden administration from allowing up to 200,000 participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to access federally run health insurance.
• Thai reformists: Just two days after being disbanded by court order, Thailand’s main progressive Move Forward Party has regrouped under a new name of the People’s – or Prachachon – Party.
• Waiting periods: Maine gun retailers are now requiring a three-day wait for purchases under a new law adopted after the state’s deadliest mass shooting in October 2023. Maine joins a dozen other U.S. states with similar laws.
• 3D-printed neighborhood: A printer more than 45 feet wide and weighing 4.75 tons is finishing the last few of 100 3D-printed houses in Wolf Ranch, a community in Georgetown, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin.
• Perseid meteor shower: The shower reaches its peak early Aug. 12. Astronomers say it’s one of the brightest and most easily visible showers of the year. This year’s peak activity coincides with a moon that is 44% full.

Read these news briefs.

This fall, both U.S. political parties will be seeking any edge in voter turnout that they can get. For Democrats, the new Harris-Walz ticket is energizing an important demographic – young people – as our reporter learned at a rally this week.

Resegregation has become a big problem across the U.S. Parents and educators in one Mississippi Delta town are building barns, planting gardens, and coming out of retirement to help their public schools.

Amid high unemployment and higher-education scandals, young Indians are questioning traditional, merit-based paths to prosperity. And after protests rooted in similar issues came to a head in Bangladesh, some wonder: Could the same happen here?

Our reporter at the 2024 Olympics stayed upright through some hard-charging days, but also fell hard for host city Paris. We’ll let him tell you all about it – in this first-person report and on a podcast episode that we’ve embedded.  

In just four days, two groups in Bangladesh – student protesters and the army – have pulled off something remarkable in the South Asian nation. They forced a longtime autocrat to flee and ushered in a broadly accepted transitional government. What happens now depends in part on a man chosen to restore democracy: Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.

He got off to a good start by pleading for an end to all violence and putting together a diverse interim Cabinet. If he can provide a quick path to credible elections, he will have laid the groundwork for an inclusive, secular rule in a region lacking models of healthy democracy.

An innovator in antipoverty approaches, Dr. Yunus argued that a stable democracy depends on creating grassroots entrepreneurs. Fifty years ago, as a young professor of economics, Dr. Yunus launched a bank to lift people out of deep poverty through small loans given on patient terms. Since 1974, the Grameen (meaning “Village”) Bank project has disbursed close to $40 billion in loans, often as small as $100, to nearly 11 million borrowers. The bank operates in almost every village of Bangladesh. Borrowers become co-owners of the bank. Nearly all are women. Their default rate is negligible.

In his Nobel acceptance speech in 2006, Dr. Yunus said societies should be structured to “make room for the blossoming” of the “limitless ... qualities and capabilities” inherent in each individual.

“A human being is born into this world fully equipped not only to take care of him or herself, but also to contribute to enlarging the well-being of the world as a whole,” he said. Too many antipoverty programs “[underestimate] human capacity,” he said. They fail “at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people.”

Little wonder he was the consensus choice as interim leader. Politics, he said, must now stop being backward-looking and score-settling. It must rely on a new generation focused on the future. 

After 15 years of corrupt and autocratic rule, Bangladeshis are ready to take a cue from someone who knows how to build the kind of trust predicated on the inherent dignity and capacity of each individual.