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And despite the rising interest, applicants have signaled the agency must tackle racism and improve diversity in the United States’ diplomatic ranks.

Applications to the school’s graduate programs, including its masters of science degree in foreign service, jumped 40 percent this cycle,

Foreign Service officers — who undergo a rigorous selection process that includes written exams, oral assessments, security checks and medical clearances — pledge to be nonpartisan as they become the machinery of foreign policymaking that political appointees rely on for expertise and continuity between administrations.

During Mr. Trump’s tenure, his administration installed an “America First” policy, prioritizing domestic interests over foreign policy concerns and minimizing the importance of day-to-day diplomatic work.

“That undercuts not only morale but also a policy process that depends on apolitical experts airing contrary views, however inconvenient they may be to the politically appointed leadership,

“This is a critical time in terms of America’s role in the world. We need a strong, diverse and talented pool of people from which to select our newest diplomats and aid officers.”

It “has been a difficult few years,” he said. “You are the face of America, and it matters.

In the time between Mr. Biden’s election and his inauguration, the group grew by over 2,000 members,

How could he promote American values abroad when they were being upended at home, he wondered.

“President Trump was very unusual,” Mr. Whittier said. “That’s what completely put me off of joining the Foreign Service.”

The Biden administration said that tackling the lack of diversity in the diplomatic corps would be a priority.

When she brought up issues to State Department officials, they advised her against speaking out and transferred her to Mexico City, she said.

she felt the “new administration brings a lot of hope to people who were marginalized in the past.”

“When you see more faces that look like you,” she said, “I think it definitely will bring more people to work in public service.”

Several cities reported an increase in hate crimes against Asian people in 2020. One survey reported incidents of harassment and discrimination related to the coronavirus.

After showing his scars, Wong sat back down and buttoned up his shirt. "Prejudice is hate," he told the gathered crowd. "And that hate can be changed. We are human. We need to be kinder, gentler to one another. Because we are all the same. We are one human being on this earth."

A surge in border crossings by migrant children appeared to catch a White House focused on the pandemic off guard and offered Republicans an opening as they seek to slow his momentum -- and build their 2022 attack lines against Biden's narrow Democratic congressional majority.

And with its customary sense of timing, North Korea is testing the new commander-in-chief with missile launches that are ratcheting up tensions in a showdown that no president in the last 70 years has managed to solve.

The President has maintained approval ratings above 50% in his early months in office because he arrived with a mandate to tackle the pandemic head on and executed his agenda with a steady approach that was the antithesis of the erratic

Unlike the coronavirus crisis that has killed more than half-a-million Americans, the issues that are now at the top of the nightly newscasts have defied bipartisan consensus for decades -- and will provide a severe test of the President's calls for national unity and cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.

Two years ago, Democrats excoriated Trump administration officials for its handling of the crisis at the border. Now the problem is squarely within Biden's domain and government resources are once again strained to the brink as more than 600 unaccompanied children cross the Mexico border each day.

"We're not seeing any action. Our experience has taught us that now is the time to act. We need Congress to get on board. We need a recognition of the fact that there's a crisis on the Southwest border," Roy Villareal, who served as chief patrol agent in the Tucson sector from 2018 to 2020, told CNN's Priscilla Alvarez.

"This is just the first step in a process of providing greater access to the media," Psaki said during a news briefing.

"It's a huge problem. I'm not going to pretend that it's not. It's a huge problem," Harris said in remarks that appeared to be somewhat of a do-over of the administration's initial downplaying of the situation.

"I asked her, the VP today, because she's the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border," Biden said on Wednesday.

It marked the first time in the 231-year history of the United States that a president has been impeached twice in his term.

Another presidential run in 2024 would be a very real possibility.Instead, Trump is on the ropes. He's been silenced from social media, including his beloved Twitter account. Even if he is not prohibited from running for office by a Senate conviction, his power and influence within the Republican Party has been dented.

For five years, Trump has been proving critics and prognosticators who penned his political epitaph wrong. He's survived scandals and controversies that would take down most other politicians.This time, at long last, could be different.

, I don't think the arsonists and vandals who caused damage in Portland, Oregon and other cities last summer need to be listened to either

They broke windows, scaled walls, carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol Rotunda, defecated in the halls of the Capitol, killed a police officer, savagely beat another one with a pole holding an American flag and crushed yet another officer in a door while he screamed for help.

73% of Republican voters believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election

A Pew poll finds that roughly 41% of Republicans who have heard of QAnon, a group that peddles the conspiracy theory that a ring of satanic pedophiles have taken over the US government, say QAnon is a good thing for the country.

I think the time for listening to present-day Trump supporters is over.

I think at this point the smartest thing the rest of us could do is no longer give warped Trump supporters a platform and no longer lend them our ears. It's time to turn off their microphones.

On both sides of the Capitol, lawmakers, aides, police officers and reporters who had fled to secure locations have been warned that they might have been exposed to the coronavirus while hiding from the mob

“It angers me when they refuse to adhere to the directions about keeping their masks on,” Ms. Watson Coleman, a lung cancer survivor who will turn 76 next month, said in an interview. “It comes off to me as arrogance and defiance. And you can be both, but not at the expense of someone else.”

The scene that unfolded on Wednesday in that one secure room — where an offer of masks from Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, Democrat of Delaware, was rejected by a group of Republicans — is emblematic of the challenge that has dogged Capitol Hill’s disorderly response to the pandemic.

Republicans accused Democrats, who needed their narrow majority fully present in person to confirm Ms. Pelosi as speaker, of subverting their own rules on the first day of the Congress

permitting the construction of a small plexiglass enclosure with its own ventilation system in one of the galleries so that lawmakers in a protective quarantine could vote in person

Complicating matters further, lawmakers in both parties have delayed receiving a vaccination, despite being granted primary access, arguing that essential workers needed to receive it first.

Right now, even now, we've gone from half a million a day to 750,000 a day.

"If we get about 70% to 85% of the people in the country vaccinated, we likely will get to that umbrella of herd immunity,

His remarks come a day after he outlined a $1.9 trillion emergency legislative package to fund a nationwide vaccination effort and provide direct economic relief to Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic, telling Americans that "the health of our nation is at stake."

100 million vaccine shots in his initial 100 days in office.

"People will not be subject to age or disability discrimination when the going gets tough."

The new OCR action makes clear that doctors cannot issue a blanket DNR and cannot substitute their subjective beliefs about the quality of a disabled person's life over the person's own wishes.

"that discrimination against persons with disabilities will be absolutely forbidden and stereotypes about their usefulness should never be part of a discussion when we allocate care."

it would become a significant expansion of disability civil rights law.

But a final rule exists in draft form, according to a source at HHS, with hopes that new Biden Administration officials will pick it up.

include language to guarantee doctors will not pressure patients to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders and not exclude people from treatment based on their disability alone.

The steps taken by OCR to stop medical discrimination reflect the findings of a series of papers on bioethics and disability, issued by the National Council on Disability,

"Disability discrimination in health care is among the most insidious — with life and death consequences — and it's hard to root out,"

"sends an unequivocally clear message that we will not accept health care that relegates people with disabilities to last in line or 'lost cause.'"

A video last May apparently showed police SUVs surging into a crowd that had surrounded them during a protest in Brooklyn.

"this longstanding pattern of brutal and illegal force ends. No one is above the law — not even the individuals charged with enforcing it."

inflicting significant physical and psychological harm and leading to great distrust in law enforcement."

n July, plainclothes officers were seen on video as they "aggressively detained a woman at a protest and hauled her away in an unmarked vehicle,"

"failed to prevent and address the pattern or practice of excessive force and false arrests by officers against peaceful protesters in violation of the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution"

says the NYPD made a practice out of "kettling" — corralling people by using physical force and obstructions — to arrest protesters rather than allowing crowds to disperse.

"In office and into the fight, I carry Mrs. Shelton with me always,"

"As a daughter of parents who were active in the civil rights movement, I knew that the fight for civil rights, the fight for equality, the fight for justice is going to take place in many ways, but one of the most significant ways (is) by lawyers understanding the power of their advocacy to make change and to make reform happen,"

"I think we cannot yield to those who would try and make us afraid of who we are."

Ten Republicans, including the House's No. 3 Republican, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, joined all Democrats to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection."

"We know that the President of the United States incited this insurrection, this armed rebellion against our common country,"

"There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution," Cheney said.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday that Trump "bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters,"

In the Senate, McConnell is not planning to bring the Senate back for a trial before January 19, meaning the trial won't begin until Trump is out of office and Biden has been sworn in.

Pence sent a letter Tuesday saying he would not seek to invoke the 25th Amendment as Democrats had urged, and Trump is not considering resigning.

After the House vote, Trump released a video statement calling for calm as the threat of new riots -- which Trump said he'd been briefed on by the Secret Servic

The poll found 75% of Americans believe Trump bears at least some of the responsibility for the attack, with only 24% saying he has no responsibility.

A narrow majority of Americans, 54%, said it would be best for Trump to be removed from office prior to Biden's Jan. 20 inauguration, while 45% said Trump should finish his term.

In fact, studies demonstrate bias across nearly every field and for nearly every group of people. If you’re Latino, you’ll get less pain medication than a white patient. If you’re an elderly woman, you’ll receive fewer life-saving interventions than an elderly man. If you are a man being evaluated for a job as a lab manager, you will be given more mentorship, judged as more capable, and offered a higher starting salary than if you were a woman. If you are an obese child, your teacher is more likely to assume you’re less intelligent than if you were slim. If you are a black student, you are more likely to be punished than a white student behaving the same way.

Mike Pence, for instance, bristled during the 2016 vice-presidential debate: “Enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias whenever tragedy occurs.” And two days after the first presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton proclaimed the need to address implicit bias, Donald Trump asserted that she was “essentially suggesting that everyone, including our police, are basically racist and prejudiced.”

Still other people, particularly those who have been the victims of police violence, also reject implicit bias—on the grounds that there’s nothing implicit about it at all.

Bias is woven through culture like a silver cord woven through cloth. In some lights, it’s brightly visible. In others, it’s hard to distinguish. And your position relative to that glinting thread determines whether you see it at all.

All of which is to say that while bias in the world is plainly evident, the exact sequence of mental events that cause it is still a roiling question.  Devine, for her part, told me that she is no longer comfortable even calling this phenomenon “implicit bias.” Instead, she prefers “unintentional bias.” The term implicit bias, she said, “has become so broad that it almost has no meaning.”

Weeks afterwards, students who had participated noticed bias more in others than did students who hadn’t participated, and they were more likely to label the bias they perceived as wrong. Notably, the impact seemed to last: Two years later, students who took part in a public forum on race were more likely to speak out against bias if they had participated in the training.

This hierarchy matters, because the more central a layer is to self-concept, the more resistant it is to change. It’s hard, for instance, to alter whether or not a person values the environment. But if you do manage to shift one of these central layers, Forscher explained, the effect is far-reaching.

And if there’s one thing the Madison workshops do truly shift, it is people’s concern that discrimination is a widespread and serious problem. As people become more concerned, the data show, their awareness of bias in the world grows, too.

By 1989, when he spoke out about the infamous assault on a jogger in Central Park he would decry "the complete breakdown" of society and yearn for the days "when I was young" and he saw cops rough-up two loudmouths who had harassed a waitress. He wanted a return of that sort of policing and called on New York State to adopt the death penalty after the arrests of the five young black and Latino men in the jogger case. Years later, those men were found to be innocent.

Trump didn't seem to consider the suffering that caused the crises of his youth.

the trauma of the violent response to the civil rights struggle and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy led to a lifelong struggle to understand and address the pain of our fellow citizens who sought dignity and equality

When asked about when America was great he recalled the time of his childhood, the 1940s and 1950s, when "we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do." He also remains nostalgic for the stereotypical 1950s housewife, speaking wistfully of women like actress Donna Reed, who always seemed to play the role of a gentle and accommodating woman.

His drive for the presidency ended with him in the Oval Office thanks to an Electoral College system that lets the loser of the national vote gain the presidency.

With no experience in government, the military, or genuine civic engagement, Trump brought his true self to the White House, where his team included many who seemed to share his back-to-the-50s mentality. At the Justice Department federal efforts to safeguard civil rights were curbed. The Department of Education rolled back protections for the rights of women and minorities. The Pentagon barred transgender recruits.

There was an inevitability in the way that he first denied the problem and then banked on solutions that reeked of his pre-'60s childhood, when polio was defeated by a vaccine and new drugs arrived to vanquish infectious diseases.

he had never noticed that the world and its problems are complex and require respectful study and difficult, collaborative work.

That the US is a country in crisis, without a leader, is now so obvious that as Time magazine reported last week, cracks are forming in his once-unbreakable base. The doubts the magazine documented before the country was convulsed by recent protests against police brutality reflected his failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which contributed to a death toll now exceeding 100,000

he economic toll that includes 40 million unemployed, hit the poor and working class harder than others. Then George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street as a police officer pressed his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes.

That the President has been deaf to the suffering, and incapable of responding like any previous president would, reminds us that his character, his view of humanity, and his life experience, made him wholly unqualified for the role he now occupies.

I heard Floyd scream "Mama," and through my tears, even though I knew the events in the video had already unfolded to a tragic conclusion, I was still ready to fight. He wasn't my baby, but he was someone's child. And he needed someone with a mother's love to help him

I'm tired of being scared for him. I'm tired of reading about Ahmaud, Travis, George and so many others. The list never stops. I need the white mamas to share this burden. I need my white friends to love me and mine enough to come running, too.

I need them to hear that cry and to tell their sons and daughters that my child is a human. I need them to declare and believe that he's in danger, that I can't protect him by myself and that his life matters to me and to them. I need them to tell their white friends' children, too. My child's life is sacred. My child is not dangerous.

My baby calls me every time he's caught being black -- the security officer trailing him in the Harvard museum while he waited for his friend's commencement to start last May.

And the white woman who scurried away from the ladies' room on his college campus, presumably because he was walking toward her? Wasn't he just going in the same direction to use the adjacent men's room?

While I'm waiting for white mothers to come running, to let me rest for just a moment while they carry the baton for a bit, I have a special thank you for my friend Stacie. I'm blessed with a multi-cultural array of friends. Stacie personifies compassion, sensitivity, godliness and intellect. She knows the world sees and treats her differently because she's white, financially comfortable and socially connected. In her heart, she's just a mama like me.

She sees my blackness and the pain it brings. She'd never declare, as too many do, that she "doesn't see color." She sees it because she truly sees me. She knows it shapes how I see the world and how the world sees me. She knows my son, and she authentically cares about him. She knows I'm hurting without my having to tell her. And one mama to another, she cared.

The Russian connection echoes a long-running theme of the Trump presidency, which has cast doubt on his ability to lead the nation -- from Trump's criticism of the NATO alliance to his request for Russia to be admitted to the G7 economic summit countries, to his withdrawal of American troops from Syria. Indeed, last week Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted that "all roads lead" to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

When we hear the gears of the Trump machine grind and see the decorative pieces of chrome loosen and fall, we are witnessing the results of a confrontation between reality and fantasy. This observation doesn't diminish the power of Trump's marketing method. It does, however, suggest its limits.

There aren’t many explicit references to baseball in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” yet many executives swear by it

“From coaches to front office people, some get back to me and say this has changed their life. They never look at decisions the same way.

A few, though, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently cited the book as having “a real profound impact,” and said he reflects back on it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former executive for the Toronto Blue Jays, wrote the book “Inside Game” — an examination of bias and decision-making in baseball — that was inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

“As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, this helps all of us better understand why it needed to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said that was especially true when “working in a business that many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember, and what is intuitive to our thinking.”

The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interplay between each mind’s System 1 and System 2, which he described as a “psychodrama with two characters.”

System 1 is a person’s instinctual response — one that can be enhanced by expertise but is automatic and rapid. It seeks coherence and will apply relevant memories to explain events.

System 2, meanwhile, is invoked for more complex, thoughtful reasoning — it is characterized by slower, more rational analysis but is prone to laziness and fatigue.

Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 could make an impulse decision, often at the expense of self-control

No area of baseball is more susceptible to bias than scouting, in which organizations aggregate information from disparate sources:

“The independent opinion aspect is critical to avoid the groupthink and be aware of momentum,”

Matt Blood, the director of player development for the Orioles, first read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” as a Cardinals area scout nine years ago and said that he still consults it regularly. He collaborated with a Cardinals analyst to develop his own scouting algorithm as a tripwire to mitigate bias

Mejdal himself fell victim to the trap of the representativeness heuristic when he started with the Cardinals in 2005

Adobe ADBE 7.19%increase; green up pointing triangle, maker of the Photoshop, released a new tool in Firefly, its generative-AI image suite, that lets you change and add in parts of a photo with AI imagery. Earlier this month, Google showed off a new Magic Editor, initially for Pixel phones, that allows you to easily manipulate a scene. And people are all over TikTok posting the results of AI headshot services like Try It On.

After testing a mix of AI editing and generating tools, I just have one question for all of you armchair philosophers: What even is a photo anymore?

I have always wondered what I’d look like as a naval officer. Now I don’t have to. I snapped a selfie and uploaded it to Adobe Firefly’s generative-fill tool. One click of the Background button and my cluttered office was wiped out. I typed “American flag” and in it went. Then I selected the Add tool, erased my torso and typed in “naval uniform.” Boom! Adobe even found me worthy of numerous awards and decorations.

Astronaut, fighter pilot, pediatrician. I turned myself into all of them in under a minute each. The AI-generated images did have noticeable issues: The uniforms were strange and had odd lettering, the stethoscope seemed to be cut in half and the backgrounds were warped and blurry. Yet the final images are fun, and the quality will only get better. 

In FaceApp, for iOS and Android, I was able to change my frown to a smile—with the right amount of teeth! I was also able to add glasses and change my hair color. Some said it looked completely real, others who know me well figured something was up. “Your teeth look too perfect.”

The real reality-bending happens in Midjourney, which can turn text prompts into hyper-realistic images and blend existing images in new ways. The image quality of generated images exceeds OpenAI’s Dall-E and Adobe’s Firefly.

it’s more complicated to use, since it runs through the chat app Discord. Sign up for service, access the Midjourney bot through your Discord account (via web or app), then start typing in prompts. My video producer Kenny Wassus started working with a more advanced Midjourney plugin called Insight Face Swap-Bot, which allows you to sub in a face to a scene you’ve already made. He’s become a master—making me a Game of Thrones warrior and a Star Wars rebel, among other things.

We’re headed for a time when we won’t be able to tell how manipulated a photo is, what parts are real or fake.

when influential messages are conveyed through images—be they news or misinformation—people have reason to know a photo’s origin and what’s been done to it.

Firefly adds a “content credential,” digital information baked into the file, that says the image was manipulated with AI. Adobe is pushing to get news, tech and social-media platforms to use this open-source standard so we can all understand where the images we see came from.

So, yeah, our ability to spot true photos might depend on the cooperation of the entire internet. And by “true photo,” I mean one that captures a real moment—where you’re wearing your own boring clothes and your hair is just so-so, but you have the exact right number of teeth in your head.

“The struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it has become a fight to defend our society, and democracy itself.”

Jonathan Swift, it’s worth noting that he was not an optimist about “truth.”

By the time a lie is refuted, he wrote, “it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man, who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.'“

“Considering that natural disposition in many men to lie, and in multitudes to believe,” he wrote in 1710, “I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim so frequent in every body's mouth; that truth will at last prevail.

A recent Washington Post tally found that nearly 300 Republicans running for congressional and state offices are election deniers. That means, as a FiveThirtyEight analysis found, 60 percent of Americans will have at least one election denier on their ballot next week.

In a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 63 percent of Republicans say they worry “the election results could be manipulated.”

From the New York Times: When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.

The big mistake people have made is in assuming this could blow up only in an extensive struggle in 2024 and perhaps involving Donald Trump. What seems entirely unanticipated, yet is extremely predictable, is that smaller skirmishes could break out all over the country this year.

Democrats have got themselves in a situation where the head of their party holds the most popular position on guns and crime—and yet they’re getting crushed on the issue because they’ve let GOP campaign ads, the right wing media ecosystem, and assorted progressive big city prosecutors shape the narrative on the issue rather than doing so themselves.

It was followed by TikTok, the Chinese-owned video site, which uses machine-learning models to predict engagement and make recommendations to users.

“We see a difference for each platform because each platform has different mechanisms for virality on it,” said Jeff Allen, a former integrity officer at Facebook and a founder and the chief research officer at the Integrity Institute. “The more mechanisms there are for virality on the platform, the more we see misinformation getting additional distribution.”

The institute calculated its findings by comparing posts that members of the International Fact-Checking Network have identified as false with the engagement of previous posts that were not flagged from the same accounts

Facebook, according to the sample that the institute has studied so far, had the most instances of misinformation but amplified such claims to a lesser degree, in part because sharing posts requires more steps. But some of its newer features are more prone to amplify misinformation, the institute found

Facebook’s amplification factor of video content alone is closer to TikTok’s, the institute found. That’s because the platform’s Reels and Facebook Watch, which are video features, “both rely heavily on algorithmic content recommendations” based on engagements, according to the institute’s calculations.

Instagram, which like Facebook is owned by Meta, had the lowest amplification rate. There was not yet sufficient data to make a statistically significant estimate for YouTube, according to the institute.