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Awash in grief and anger, we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt down Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for letting him turn a maze of caves into a launching pad to attack America.

Even then, it was clear that our attempt to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into model democracies was not going well. Touring those countries, Gates could barely leave the small secured zones.

Gates told reporters he had only just learned the “eye-opener” that the Taliban were attracting so many fighters because they paid more. Generals in Afghanistan said the Taliban were giving fighters $250 to $300 a month, while the Afghan Army was paying about $120. So Gates, employing the American way of throwing more money at a problem, got the recruits a raise to $240.

It’s impossible not to notice how many members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election were white Southerners — more than half the legislators who professed to believe Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen are people who represent the American South.

But Republicans still hold the power in almost all Southern state legislatures (Virginia’s is the exception, and only since 2019), and they will continue to do everything possible to make it harder for Democrats to vote.

With such elected “leaders” representing this region — and with the insurrectionists parading through our nation’s Capitol carrying Confederate battle flags and other symbols of white supremacy — it’s not surprising that so many people outside the South seem to believe that the voters who support Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Loeffler, not even to mention Donald Trump, are the only people who live here.

It’s impossible not to notice how many members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election were white Southerners — more than half the legislators who professed to believe Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen are people who represent the American South.

“Violence is abhorrent and I strongly condemn today’s attacks on our Capitol,” tweeted Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, who had just spent two months running for re-election while simultaneously joining the president in insisting that the election was rigged.

With such elected “leaders” representing this region — and with the insurrectionists parading through our nation’s Capitol carrying Confederate battle flags and other symbols of white supremacy — it’s not surprising that so many people outside the South seem to believe that the voters who support Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Loeffler, not even to mention Donald Trump, are the only people who live here.

In nearly 28 years in Congress -- including six spent as chair of the US House Committee on Homeland Security -- I have never experienced a day quite like that which my colleagues and I endured last Wednesday. Having lived through 9/11 and other attacks, most Americans have little difficulty appreciating the threat of foreign terrorism and the need to vigilantly guard against it.

Given this unprecedented domestic assault, the lingering atmosphere of lawlessness and intimidation in our capital and the credible threat of additional violence directed at our national government and statehouses across the country in the days ahead, it would be an abdication of our most vital responsibility to the American people to further compromise their security and that of our republic in this moment.

The Cuban-born Mayorkas, 61, was among President-elect Joe Biden's first picks for his Cabinet in late November. He is not an unknown commodity, and he is one of the most knowledgeable homeland security experts in the country.

Airbnb says it is canceling reservations made in the Washington, D.C., metro area during inauguration week, citing various officials' requests that people not travel to the area during this time

The service will also block new bookings in the area during that period. Airbnb says it will refund guests whose reservations were canceled and reimburse hosts for the money they would have earned from the canceled reservations.

Additionally, we are aware of reports emerging yesterday afternoon regarding armed militias and known hate groups that are attempting to travel and disrupt the Inauguration."

NASHVILLE — In this family, we are not new-car people. My husband and I buy used vehicles, and we keep them until the cost of patching them up far exceeds their value, a time-honored practice known as driving a car into the ground. We don’t drive a lot, either: My husband works a mile and a half from our house, and I work from a home office. I kept thinking about electric cars anyway.

Meanwhile, evidence of the growing climate calamity was becoming clearer and grimmer with every new study — and with every wildfire, every drought, every hurricane — even as the Trump administration kept rolling back environmental protections at a breathtaking rate. I felt a rising desperation to do everything possible to reduce my own carbon footprint, to foster as much biodiversity as I could on my own little half-acre plot of ground.

But the single greatest change we can make is to change the way we get around. “Transportation is the largest source of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the United States today, and the bulk of those emissions come from driving in our cities and suburbs,”

Billy Martin does not care much for politicians. But the retired teacher and coach liked what he heard from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who promised to arrive in Washington as a defiant force, intent on rattling the establishment.

But in recent weeks, it has also been impossible to ignore the torrent of troubling social media posts and videos in which Ms. Greene had endorsed violent behavior, including executing Democratic leaders, and spread an array of conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., were hoaxes.

“Sometimes people say things they regret, speak before they think,” Mr. Martin said as he got in his pickup in downtown Summerville, a town of 4,300 people represented by Ms. Greene,

Mr. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in politics and didn’t keep up with the news. The year before, while Mr. Zuckerberg was visiting Donald Graham, then the chairman of The Washington Post, a reporter handed the young C.E.O. a book on politics that the reporter had written. Mr. Zuckerberg said to Mr. Graham, “I’m never going to have time to read this.”

“I teased him because there were very few things where you’ll find unanimity about, and one of those things is that reading books is a good way to learn. There is no dissent on that point,” Mr. Graham said. “Mark eventually came to agree with me on that, and like everything he did, he picked it up very quickly and became a tremendous reader.”

the Times is nixing “tip of the spear” single-panel cartoons — a form of pointed critique that in American newspapers dates back to the 19th-century work of the legendary Thomas Nast

In the insane world we live in, the art of visual commentary is needed more than ever. And so is humor.”

Chappatte speculated Monday that his decades of work have been “undone” by the Trump/Netanyahu cartoon. “I’m afraid this is not just about cartoons, but about journalism and opinion in general,” wrote Chappatte, who is in his early 50s. “We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow.”

There has never existed a political system similar to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In the fervor of a 1978 social revolution against the Shah and his neocolonial relationship with the United States and Europe, a group of Shi’i clerics won the upper hand and created the world’s only current theocracy.

Most American political reporting on the Islamic Republic, therefore, simplifies Iranian politics to a struggle between “moderates” or “reformists” and “hardliners.”

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.

“What you need to realize with Sioux county is there’s a very strong religious flavor there, from their courts to their public squares,” said Ned Bjornstad, a former elected prosecutor in north-west Iowa turned veteran defense attorney who practices regularly in Orange City. “For a candidate like Buttigieg, I’d expect protesters.”

“Iowans long for someone who understands them,” Harms said. “The second you meet him, you get that impression that he almost knows you. Of course he can come into Orange City, and people will like him. There’s that common bond among midwesterners.”

“In the last 50 years, every Democratic president has a perspective outside Washington, is new on the national scene, and is of a new generation,” he said. “I check all those boxes.”

More than half of the five top-polling candidates competing in the Iowa Democratic caucuses are preparing to close out the campaign exactly where they never hoped to be — 1,000 miles away on the floor of the U.S. Senate, acting as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Trump.

Buttigieg’s campaign has argued that staying out of the polarized impeachment conversation will bolster his pitch as the candidate who can mollify partisan tensions and disrupt the traditional Washington ways of doing things.

Biden’s campaign has recently pivoted to embrace its complicated presence, arguing that the president’s alleged efforts to find disparaging information on the Biden family in Ukraine is a reflection of the candidate’s strength, not evidence of a potential weakness.

A massive computer breach allowed hackers to spend months exploring numerous U.S. government networks and private companies' systems around the world. Industry experts say a country mounted the complex hack — and government officials say Russia is responsible.

Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, is believed to have carried out the hack, according to cybersecurity experts who cite the extremely sophisticated nature of the attack. Russia has denied involvement.

President Trump has been silent about the hack and his administration has not attributed blame.

The former chief of U.S. Capitol Police says security officials at the House and Senate rebuffed his early requests to call in the National Guard ahead of a demonstration in support of President Trump that turned into a deadly attack on Congress.

Former chief Steven Sund -- who resigned his post last week after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for him to step down

Sund's superiors said previously that the National Guard and other additional security support could have been provided, but no one at the Capitol requested it.

But government officials say they are emphasizing accuracy over speed in a year when processing an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots under extended deadlines is taking more time.

"The volume is definitely something that we've never seen before in the state as far as receiving and processing mail-in ballots."

More than 1.2 million ballots had been counted by Friday afternoon, with Joe Biden holding a 20,137-vote lead over President Donald Trump - an edge of about 1.6 points. About 87% of the estimated vote has been tallied, but tens of thousands of votes remain uncounted statewide.

We hear often that the November election is the most consequential in our lifetime. But the importance of the election is not just which candidate or which party wins. Voters also face the question of whether the American democratic experiment, one of the boldest political innovations in human history, will survive.

If those are the results of this tumultuous election year, we are lost, no matter which candidate wins. No American, and certainly no American leader, should want such an outcome.

We should see the challenge clearly in advance and take immediate action to respond.

Separately, Barr has told federal prosecutors to aggressively pursue cases against those committing violence amid the protests, and in a Justice Department conference call last week he suggested they might apply a rarely used law against sedition, according to people familiar with the conversation.

“We have a long and checkered history dealing with free speech, and specifically using sedition charges to quell dissent,”

We’re somewhat desensitized, but this was beyond the pale,” the attorney said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Again, you never expect the head of your agency to dismiss you and to denigrate the work that you do, and to call into question your motives. You don’t go to work every day for that.”

This virus was always going to beat the attention span of the US public at large, and why wouldn’t it? We’ve grown completely accustomed to the tweet, the viral, the disposable, so much so that trying to stop this virus is like trying to undo the last 30 years of the development of US culture in every area.

L.A. county’s problem isn’t Trump or the current GOP. We did this on our own, with a culture here that’s often like a squirrel on meth. Maybe politicians yelling at the top of their lungs about masking would have made things different, but that was never going to happen here, and I don’t think L.A. denizens honestly care that much about what DC pols say.

It’s been a hundred years since a pandemic here, over hundred fifty years since a major conflict on the continent. There’s just no contextualizing this risk for a broad American populace who are barely grounded in history, much less humility about global affairs. Maybe that says more about Europe than the US and the real difference in the two on Covid-19.