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Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have pointed out that Russia has run huge trade surpluses every year since the early 1990s, which should have led to a large accumulation of overseas assets. Yet official statistics show Russia with only moderately more assets than liabilities abroad. How is that possible? The obvious explanation is that wealthy Russians have been skimming off large sums and parking them abroad.

The sums involved are mind-boggling. Novokmet et al. estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P. To give you some perspective, this is as if a U.S. president’s cronies had managed to hide $20 trillion in overseas accounts.

, “the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.” As far as I can tell, the overseas exposure of Russia’s elite has no precedent in history — and it creates a huge vulnerability that the West can exploit.

Former Attorney General William P. Barr writes in a new memoir that former President Donald J. Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self-control” cost him the 2020 election and says “the absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”

In the book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Mr. Barr also urges his fellow Republicans to pick someone else as the party’s nominee for the 2024 election, calling the prospect of another presidential run by Mr. Trump “dismaying.”

“Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,”

President Biden will call in his Tuesday night address for limits on potentially harmful interactions between children and social media platforms.

He will ask Congress to ban targeted ads aimed at children on social media sites,

In turn, the critics say that young people can be fed increasingly extreme content or posts that diminish their self-worth.

uilt 4,500 years ago during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the pyramids of Giza are more than elaborate tombs — they’re also one of historians’ best sources of insight into how the ancient Egyptians lived, since their walls are covered with illustrations of agricultural practices, city life, and religious ceremonies. But on one subject, they remain curiously silent. They offer no insight into how the pyramids were built.

It’s a mystery that has plagued historians for thousands of years, leading the wildest speculators into the murky territory of alien intervention and perplexing the rest. But the work of several archaeologists in the last few years has dramatically changed the landscape of Egyptian studies. After millennia of debate, the mystery might finally be over.

For example, the Egyptians hadn’t yet discovered the wheel, so it would have been difficult to transport massive stones — some weighing as much as 90 tons — from place to place. They hadn’t invented the pulley, a device that would have made it much easier to lift large stones into place. They didn’t have iron tools to chisel and shape their stonework.

(CNN)A US Secret Service inspector who helped coordinate then-Vice President Mike Pence's trip to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, testified on Monday that Pence spent several hours in a loading dock underneath the building during the riot.The revelation -- during the second trial for a defendant charged in the Capitol attack -- is the first time that federal law enforcement has confirmed where Pence went after he was evacuated from the Senate chamber on January 6.

"We took him to a secure location ... underground," Secret Service inspector Lanelle Hawa testified. "It was in the loading dock," which is located underneath the plaza on the Senate side of the building, she said.Read MoreHawa said the loading dock counted as a restricted area, established for the Electoral College certification, as did the Capitol grounds. When asked by prosecutors whether Pence ever left that restricted area, Hawa said, "No."

Griffin's legal defense team made it clear before the trial that they wanted to ask about Pence's location during the riot and about the restricted area established for his visit -- appearing to set up the argument that the area was no longer restricted because Pence left. Days before the trial, McFadden allowed Griffin's attorneys to cross examine the Secret Service inspector on Pence's location during the riot, writing that "Griffin must be allowed to test the veracity of the Government's contention that Vice President Pence was on the Capitol grounds during the relevant period."After a half an hour of Griffin's attorney, Nicholas Smith, questioning the inspector, McFadden told Smith that he had not established that Pence had left the restricted area.

The attack began Feb. 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation."Russian forces moving from neighboring Belarus toward Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, have advanced closer to the city center in recent days despite the resistance. Heavy shelling and missile attacks, many on civilian buildings, continue in Kyiv, as well as major cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol. Russia also bombed western cities for the first time last week, targeting Lviv and a military base near the Poland border.

The U.S. will be providing Ukraine with $100 million in "civilian security" assistance, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Saturday, hours after he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with their Ukrainian counterparts.The aid will provide equipment including armored vehicles, medical supplies, personal protective equipment and communications equipment, according to the Department of State.

"We’ll not cease the efforts to get humanitarian relief wherever it is needed in Ukraine and for the people who’ve made it out of Ukraine. Notwithstanding the brutality of Vladimir Putin, let there be no doubt that this war [has] already been a strategic failure for Russia," Biden said.

Warsaw, Poland (CNN)President Joe Biden declared forcefully Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin should no longer remain in power, an unabashed challenge that came at the very end of a swing through Europe meant to reinforce Western unity.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Biden, saying, "This is not to be decided by Mr. Biden. It should only be a choice of the people of the Russian Federation."In his speech, which drew a sharp line between liberal democracies and the type of autocracy Putin oversees, Biden warned of a long fight ahead."In this battle we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days, or months, either," he said.

Biden, standing along NATO's eastern edge, in Poland, issued a stern warning during his speech, telling Putin: "Don't even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory." He said the US was committed to the collective protection obligations laid out in NATO's charter "with the full force of our collective power."

If I could distill the anger about that essay down to a single sentence (besides simply, “Shut up!”) it would be this: “You talk about the problems in Christian conservatism too much. Talk about the Left more.” 

And I get it. I really do. In a deeply divided nation where millions of people have convinced themselves that the church is under unprecedented siege, you want Christians who possess a public platform to “defend the church.” There is a deep and profound human desire for advocacy.

Yet that’s not remotely the model of biblical discourse, especially of how believers talk to each other.

what parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story.

A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984

a significant number of Russian men are still keen to fight — more, in fact, than at the war’s outset. What explains the disconnect?

One obvious reason is fear. Men called up to the army have no choice but to obey, because opposition to the war has effectively been outlawed.

while fear and repression shape responses to the war, that doesn’t explain the readiness — willingness, even — of some Russian men to serve at the front. About 36 percent of Russian men are content to be conscripted, with the most supportive group being men aged 45 and older.

In 1989, a policy analyst at a leading conservative Washington, D.C. think tank described a workable planopens in a new tab or window in which private insurers, just as in Germany, provide universal coverage. This plan would:Change the current tax treatment of health insurance (which largely benefits people with employer-based coverage at the expense of lower income Americans)Declare that families face the responsibility of having adequate insuranceOffer government assistance to families unable to afford health coverage on their ownReform the Medicare program

The middle planks of this conservative plan ultimately became the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Marketplacesopens in a new tab or window, where families could purchase health insurance in a new, nationally regulated market with financial subsidies to cover costs for those with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty level (about $92,120opens in a new tab or window for a family of three).

President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law 13 years ago today, transforming a patchwork system of individual health insurance markets into one that today could form a national framework for universal healthcare

Preface

“No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20

A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21

At Cambridge, professors and students alike are afraid to speak critically, or at all, on the subject of gender.

Believing that biological sex is binary and unchangeable – and that gender is culturally constructed – may not seem controversial. Yet gender-critical feminists who hold such mainstream views are often slapped with a derogatory label: Terf, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

heir beliefs, let’s remember, are far from radical: they think that conflating gender with sex leads to violations of the rights of women, children and gay and lesbian people.

I believe that most of us are willing to broaden our understanding of our country’s history to look at both the best and the worst. But we often can’t—not for intellectual reasons but because of unrecognized psychological ones. Understanding those psychological roadblocks is a formidable challenge. But it’s crucial to do so if we want to get past them.

Let’s begin with the four reasons our minds sometimes make it hard to have a more honest, nuanced view of our history.

First, our minds tend to play down our wrongdoing from the past.

he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”

He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood

Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.

a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.

as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.

First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.

D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.

the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.

Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.

Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?A. An American.

in general, Americans’ lack of language skills is less important than their insularity, their relative unfamiliarity with what happens and how things work in other nations.

Other countries, especially wealthy ones that more or less match the United States in technological development and general ability to get things done, are a sort of mirror that helps us see ourselves more clearly. Yet many Americans, even supposedly knowledgeable commentators, often seem unaware of both the ways other nations are similar to us and the ways they are different.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in April of 2021 with a deep background in Wall Street, regulatory policy, and crypto, which he had taught at MIT years before joining the SEC. Gensler came in with the goal of implementing the rule of law in the crypto space, which he knew was full of scams and based on unproven technology. Yesterday, on CNBC, he was again confronted with Andrew Ross Sorkin essentially asking, “Why were you going after minor players when this Ponzi scheme was so flagrant?”

Cryptocurrencies are securities, and should fit under securities law, which would have imposed rules that would foster a de facto ban of the entire space. But since regulators had not actually treated them as securities for the last ten years, a whole new gray area of fake law had emerged

Almost as soon as he took office, Gensler sought to fix this situation, and treat them as securities. He began investigating important players

“Anyone who is critical of the tech industry always has someone yell at them ‘Luddite! Luddite!’ and I was no exception,” she told me. It was meant as an insult, but Crabapple embraced the term. Like many others, she came to self-identify as part of a new generation of Luddites. “Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”

on some key fronts, the Luddites are winning.

The government mobilized what was then the largest-ever domestic military occupation of England to crush the uprising—the Luddites had won the approval of the working class, and were celebrated in popular songs and poems—and then passed a law that made machine-breaking a capital offense. They painted Luddites as “deluded” and backward.