As the world faces more extreme weather, what should preparing for education in the aftermath of a natural disaster look like?

• Israeli airstrikes: Israel carries out a series of massive airstrikes overnight in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
• Port strikes suspended: The union representing 45,000 striking United States dockworkers at East and Gulf Coast ports reaches a deal to suspend a three-day strike until Jan. 15 to provide time to negotiate a new contract.
• Congo boat accident: Congolese authorities launch investigations into two recent deadly boat accidents, including the capsizing of an overcrowded boat on Lake Kivu on Oct. 3, which killed at least 78 people. Many of the remaining 278 on board are still unaccounted for.
• Tunisia election: Tunisia’s President Kais Saied faces few obstacles to winning another term in the country’s presidential election on Oct. 6. His major opponents have either been imprisoned or left off the ballot.

Read these news briefs.

Today, we launch a series of snapshot articles on where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand on key issues in the presidential campaign. First up: the economy. Stay tuned for more over the next few weeks.

California's first reparations legislation includes a formal bipartisan apology to Black residents and a $12 million package of racial justice laws. Experts consider it transformative for the national conversation.

The supervillian origin story “Joker” broke box-office records in 2019 and raised questions about violence in storytelling. Five years later, with the debut of sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the Monitor’s film critic and chief culture writer sit down to consider, What’s changed?

Instead of trying to understand Old Dhaka through a Westerner’s lens, it helps to see what Bangladeshis see: community, life, togetherness.

When English novelist Frank Cottrell-Boyce was asked to prepare the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, he took a poll of the workers – from all over the world – who were building the sports stadiums. “When you think of Britain, what do you think of?” he asked. The most common answers included characters from children’s books. “Winnie-the-Pooh, Harry Potter, Mary Poppins ... they just started listing characters,” he told The Times.

A dozen years later, that lasting imprint of childhood imagination is reflected in a poll of 5,000 British children ages 8 to 16. It found half engaged regularly with poetry, whether by reading, writing, performing, or listening to it read aloud. The survey, by the British National Literacy Trust, found that children from poorer families were more apt to enjoy the rhythmic delights of poetry than those from wealthier homes. And the younger the listener, the keener the ear.

The study coincides with a renaissance of youthful enthusiasm for metaphor and euphemism driven through popular culture. The Globe Theatre in London engaged 48,000 children this year in a poetry performance competition. Michael Rosen, one of Britain’s most beloved children’s authors currently working, has 142 million views of his YouTube channel for poetry readings.

In some countries, rap is now a staple of college literature courses. So is Taylor Swift. “I love it, because it’s like she’s training the literary critics out there to do the work,” Elizabeth Scala, a professor who teaches a course in the literary devices of Ms. Swift’s lyrics at the University of Texas at Austin, told Education Week.

Some American high schools are turning to poetry to help students cope with social issues like gun violence, identity, and loneliness. That approach underscores the ability of the word, whether written or spoken, to cultivate empathy, innocence, and a confidence that excellence is innately possible.

“None of us have the slightest idea about what the future holds for our children,” Mr. Cottrell-Boyce, newly appointed as Britain’s children’s laureate, told The Times. But the “experience of being read to in your early years and of finding consolation in a book – that builds the apparatus of happiness in the child.”  It is a happiness that can stir the heart decades later, as the construction workers for the Olympics informed Mr. Cottrell-Boyce.