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The argument is that even if you don’t particularly like or trust Mr. Trump, he will not redefine the Republican Party.

But he already has. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, is waging an open attack on what have long been the party’s core views.

For at least three decades Republican politics have been defined by the centrality of conservatism in the party’s governing philosophy. Modern conservatism has three elements: a commitment to limited government and economic liberty that enables prosperity; moral traditionalism that conserves our capacity for liberty by producing responsible citizens; and a belief that America, confidently and carefully engaged in international affairs, can be a force for good in the world.

why the weekend frenzy, the screaming headlines, the surge of protest? Because of several features inherent to populism, which tend to undermine its attempts to govern no matter the on-paper popularity of its ideas.

First, populism finds its voice by pushing against the boundaries of acceptable opinion. But in the process it often embraces bigotries and extremisms that in turn color the reception of its policies.

Second, having campaigned against elites and experts and all their pomps and works, populists imagine that their zeal can carry all before it, that proceduralism and institutional knowledge are for losers and toadies

Announcing the human rights report, Secretary General of Amnesty International Salil Shetty listed US President Donald Trump alongside world leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and claimed that their "divisive fear-mongering has become a dangerous force in world affairs."

also criticizes former President Barack Obama's record on human rights, saying he "leaves a legacy that includes many grievous failures to uphold human rights" during his eight years in office. It says early indicators suggest that Trump's foreign policy will "usher in a new era of greater instability and mutual suspicion."

Amnesty. As powerful states backtrack on their human rights commitments, other leaders may feel emboldened to do the same, the nongovernmental organization warns

The Limits of American Realism

Realists had a field day with that carnage, beginning with former Secretary of State James Baker’s early assessment that, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” This view was echoed by various self-serving assessments from the Clinton White House that justified inaction through the portrayal of the Balkans as the locus of millennial feuds neither comprehensible nor resolvable.

The moral case was, however, overwhelming, beginning with the Serbian use in 1992 of concentration camps to kill Bosnian Muslim men deemed threatening, and expel Muslim women and children.

“That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans.

If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.

This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.

Things came to a head in December 1970, when Sheik Mujib-ur-­Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali leader, and his party, the Awami League, won the elections on the promise of autonomy for East Pakistan.

Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, egged on by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second-place finisher, arrested Rahman and ordered the army to crush the Bengalis. Dominated by Punjabis, the army moved brutally, shooting and detaining Bengali leaders, intellectuals and anyone who opposed them.

Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. It’s hard to overstate just how earth-changing Nixon and Kissinger regarded their trips to China — and how important they thought they were for bringing them about.

Though Mr. Obama this spring threatened in international forums to revisit the United States’ longstanding defense of Israel against Palestinian moves, many experts now see that as unlikely. With the president having secured a legacy-defining foreign policy achievement with Iran, the world focused on the refugee crisis and the rise of the Islamic State, and Palestinian internal politics in turmoil, the long-shot prospects for progress on peace do not seem worth the political risk as the 2016 presidential campaign intensifies.

Mr. Netanyahu has already started saying things his allies like to hear. After his session on Thursday with David Cameron, the British prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu said he was ready to meet with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank even though it is “a nightmare for my security people.”“I’m willing right now, without any preconditions, any preconditions whatsoever, to sit down with President Abbas and negotiate this peace,”

The Greeks allowed slaves who ran away from abusive masters and even some criminals to seek sanctuary in certain temples; ‘‘asylum’’ comes from their word for inviolable.

The right of asylum might seem as culturally embedded as the ruins of one of the old temples.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain invoked insects when he warned of a ‘‘swarm’’ of ‘‘illegal migrants.’

to some of Suu Kyi’s admirers in the West, and ethnic and religious minorities here in Burma, the last few months have been disconcerting.

Suu Kyi, however, is making no apologies for sounding less like a human rights icon and more like a politician playing to the country’s Buddhist majority.

“Please don’t forget that I started out as the leader of a political party. I cannot think of anything more political than that,” Suu Kyi said at a Dec. 6 news conference in Rangoon. “Icon was a depiction that was imposed on me by other people.”

In Waves of Migrants, Children Arrive Alone and Settle In Uneasily

Many of Europe’s new mystery children are boys ages 14 to 17, sent by families too poor to pay smugglers for more than a single journey.

Only about 2 percent of the teenagers who arrive alone are girls, but they often have the most harrowing tales of abuse.

“ISIS is the face of evil,” Obama said at the conclusion of the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey. “Our goal is to … destroy this barbaric organization.”

“Paris is not alone,” Obama said, highlighting attacks in Beirut, Turkey and Iraq.

“That’s not what is going on here. These are killers with fantasies of glory.”

How the ISIS fight went global

Just one day before multiple machine gun and bomb attacks in the French capital left almost 500 people from all walks of life dead or wounded, U.S. President Barack Obama said that the U.S. strategy against the jihadist group has "contained" it but not yet succeeded in its effort to "decapitate" the group's leadership.

Two suicide bombers detonated devices in the port city on Thursday, claiming the lives of at least 43 and wounding another 239.

Disappointed With Europe, Thousands of Iraqi Migrants Return Home

Last year, beckoned by news reports of easy passage to Europe through Turkey, tens of thousands of Iraqis joined Syrians, Africans and Afghans in the great migrant wave to the Continent. Now, thousands of Iraqis are coming home.

Many Iraqis have stayed in Europe, of course, especially those who were displaced from lands controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor kid, according to Robert Putnam of Harvard University.

Forbes’s wealthiest 100 are worth as much as all 42 million African-Americans, the report says.

So it’s healthy for American voters to be demanding change. But when societies face economic pain, they sometimes turn to reforms, and other times to scapegoats (like refugees this year

Winter Poses New Danger for Migrants

If the numbers increase drastically or, worse, if there are more border closings, there would be an almost immediate backup that would quickly repopulate border camps within a week — some of them open-air, others consisting mostly of unheated tents.

Hungary completed a 108-mile razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia last month, following a free-for-all this summer that saw squalid encampments

Another 100,000 spaces in refugee welcome centres will be created under a deal agreed by European leaders at an emergency summit in Brussels.

The heads of 11 EU states and three non-EU countries met to discuss how to handle growing number of migrants.

More than 9,000 migrants arrived in Greece every day last week, the highest rate so far this year.

The Obama administration is locked in a sharp new debate over whether to deploy American military forces to establish no-fly zones and safe havens in Syria to protect civilians caught in its grinding civil war.

White House remains deeply skeptical about the idea, but the growing refugee crisis in Europe and Russia’s military intervention in Syria have increased pressure on President Obama

the fact that the administration is even revisiting an idea it has previously rejected — just weeks after Mr. Obama publicly dismissed it again

To bomb or not to bomb? This should not be the question but sadly it is. The Government will push for parliamentary approval to bomb Isis in Syria.

How can Britain help end the conflict in Syria, effecting a meaningful political and economic transition? Only this will accelerate the defeat of Isis, unseat the Assad regime and solve the refugee crisis.

Military solutions are non-existent. No side can realistically knock all the others out. International backers put their proxies’ survival above that of Syria’s. Vladimir Putin has terminated any realistic talk of imposing No Fly Zones, No Bomb Zones or Safe Zones.

Katidis is a reflection of a troubling global trend: the rise of neo-fascist politics amid the economic tumult in Europe.

The austerity measures enacted in response to the Greek economic crisis have propelled the rise of right-wing politics; nationalist groups are gaining footholds throughout the country.

While political distress causes people to leave their homelands, economic distress causes them to turn their frustration on their newest neighbors.

“Trump is a fascist,”

“We are here faced by fascists,” Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman, declares to the House of Commons,

That was George Orwell, in 1944. He had heard the epithet “fascist” applied, he said, to fox-hunting, Kipling, Gandhi, homosexuality, “astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”