Dayna Galbreath and her husband had just months ago finished a renovation on their Altadena bungalow when the Eaton Fire tore through their neighborhood on January 8. Around 3:30 a.m., her phone rang out with a notification. “It basically said an evacuation order has been initiated for your area, and in big capital letters, it said, ‘GET OUT NOW.’”

An estimated 11 million people across the northeastern US are under flood risks or warnings this week after historic levels of rainfall — 1-in-1,000-year events — swept through New England, with rivers in Vermont and New York’s Hudson Valley overflowing and turning town streets into waterways.

In the early hours of Monday, February 6, residents living in southern Turkey and northern Syria were woken by violent shaking, collapsing buildings, and sweeping blackouts. The earthquake buried residents in rubble and was followed by powerful aftershocks. By the following Monday, the death toll had passed 36,000 people. “It was like the apocalypse,” Abdul Salam al-Mahmoud, a resident of Atareb, Syria, told Reuters.

To put it bluntly, worker productivity in the U.S. is anemic. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that productivity dropped 7.4 percent in the first quarter of 2022 and 4.6 percent in the second quarter. The third quarter looked a bit better, with productivity inching up by 0.3 percent.