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A person wearing a protective suit sits in the Beijing Railway Station after China lifted its COVID-19 restrictions in Beijing, January 20, 2023.
Hard Numbers: China zeroes out zero, German tanks run low, Turkey jails a journalist, Greek train crash, police find ‘spiritual girlfriend’ in Peru
0 x 0: Remember China’s zero-Covid strategy? No you don’t, at least not if you’re the Chinese Communist Party, which is now aggressively zeroing out public mentions of the draconian lockdowns that kneecapped the country’s economy and provoked rare widespread protests against Xi Jinping. Here’s our own portrait of zero-Covid life from last spring.
62: Despite promising to give tanks to Kyiv, Germany and other NATO allies have struggled to rustle up enough of them — 62 to be precise — to fill two Ukrainian battalions worth. Part of the problem is that no one on the continent has planned for a major European land war in 30 years, so tanks, parts, and trainers are limited.
10: Turkey has sentenced a journalist to 10 months in prison for posting an unsubstantiated allegation that police officers and soldiers had sexually assaulted a young girl. This is the first jail term handed down under a new law meant to combat disinformation that critics fear will be used to stifle criticism of the government.
36: A train collision has killed at least 36 and injured dozens more near the city of Larissa in northern Greece. Railway employees reported that there were issues with electric coordination of traffic control, despite recent modernization of Greece’s railway system, which is operated by Italy’s state-owned railway company Ferrovie dello Stato Italiene.
1.5: The sentence you are about to read does not end the way you think it will: Police searching a delivery man who was acting drunk at a Peruvian archaeological site found in his backpack a 1.5-meter tall pre-hispanic mummy named “Juanita.” He said the mummy, which once belonged to his dad, lives with him as “a kind of spiritual girlfriend.” We love this LatAm remake of "Fin de Semana at Bernie’s.
Graphic Truth: Where do most US state names come from?
One is "snow-covered." Another is named for the "virgin queen" of England. A third means "near the great-little mountain." Many of the names of US states come from Spanish, English, and French — the languages of the empires that colonized North America. But by far the greatest number derive from the languages of the Native American peoples who were displaced or killed as part of that sweep of history. Here's a look at where the names of the 50 US states come from.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of the graphic mistakenly identified Delaware as being a name of Native American/Indigenous origin. In fact, the state — like the river and bay — was named for the Baron of De La Warr, a British peerage title held by Thomas West, colonial governor of neighboring Virginia. History buffs will note that De La Warr is itself a title of French origin, but insofar as the state was named for a British lord, we have coded it as such.