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It took a series of developments to turn the public decisively against Nixon. It was the White House recordings that sealed the president’s fate — including the tape on which he said he could raise $1 million in hush money. It took the firing of the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox (whom Nixon later referred to as the “partisan viper we had planted in our bosom”). And the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew. And the allegations of tax evasion. And the missing 18½ minutes on the tapes. And “expletives deleted.” And “I am not a crook.” It was only in June 1974 that a majority of Americans thought Nixon should resign or be impeached.

Removing a president requires not a nasty legal storm, but a hurricane. And the president has a political base — fed on a Fox News diet — that may be impossible to uproot.

Until 2001, deals worth more than $15 million had to be reported to the antitrust authorities. That year, the threshold was raised and indexed to economic growth, and is now $90 million.

For transactions involving few tangible assets such as in technology and pharmaceutical startups, the threshold is $360 million.

after the 2001 changes, the number of merger notifications dropped 70% and the number of mergers that didn’t require notification jumped nearly 50%

Before the change, around a third of merger investigations involved deals worth less than $50 million. After the change, the number of such deals investigated fell to close to zero.

between 1997 and 2017 more than 4,000 acquisitions of kidney dialysis centers were proposed. About half were above the reporting threshold, and in 265 cases, the FTC required divestitures to resolve competition concerns

Among the half below the threshold, the FTC required just three divestitures. Two companies controlled about 31% of facilities in 1997. By 2016, two companies, DaVita Inc. and Fresenius Medical Care , controlled 77% of facilities

his preliminary results suggest the numbers of nurses per technician decline and patients per hemodialysis machine rise at facilities acquired in mergers below the reporting threshold. That, he said, could be evidence of reduced quality of care, though he acknowledged it could also reflect increased efficiency.

22% of markets for physicians are highly concentrated (according to federal guidelines), and they got that way mostly via acquisitions too small to be reported.

pharmaceutical companies often halt development of competing drugs at startups they acquire, especially when the acquisition is just small enough to escape antitrust reporting requirements.

That’s the latest among several recent studies by economists working independently, all arriving at similar findings: A few “superstar firms” have grown to dominate their industries, crowding out competitors and controlling markets to a degree not seen in many decades.

The U.S. had more than 7,000 public companies 20 years ago, the professors say; nowadays, it’s fewer than 4,000.

Consider real-estate services. In 1997, according to Profs. Grullon, Larkin and Michaely, that sector had 42 publicly traded companies; the four largest generated 49% of the group’s total revenue. By 2014, only 20 public firms were left, and the top four— CBRE Group, Jones Lang LaSalle, Realogy Holdings and Wyndham Worldwide—commanded 78% of the group’s combined revenue.

Or look at supermarkets. In 1997, there were 36 publicly traded companies in that industry, with the top four accounting for more than half of total sales. By 2014, only 11 were left. The top four—Kroger, Supervalu, Whole Foods Market and Roundy’s (since acquired by Kroger)—held 89% of the pie.

Let’s look beyond such obvious winner-take-all examples as Apple or Alphabet, the parent of Google.

The winners are also grabbing most of the profits

At the end of 1996, the 25 companies in the S&P 500 with the highest net profit margins—income as a percentage of revenue—earned a median of just under 21 cents on every dollar of sales. Last year, the top 25 such companies earned a median of 39 cents on the dollar.

Two decades ago, the median net margin among all S&P 500 members was 6.7%. By the end of 2016, that had increased to 9.7%.

So while companies as a whole became more profitable over the past 20 years, the winners have become vastly more profitable, nearly doubling the gains they got on each dollar of sales.

Why might it be easier now for winners to take all? Prof. Michaely suggests two theories. Declining enforcement of antitrust rules has led to bigger mergers, less competition and higher profits.

The other is technology. “If you want to compete with Google or Amazon,” he says, “you’ll have to invest not just billions, but tens of billions of dollars.”

Still, history offers a warning. Many times in the past, winners have taken all but seldom for long.

But Mr. McConnell, who said last year that he would support Judge Garland to serve as attorney general, was among the Republicans who voted for his confirmation and a day earlier to end debate over his nomination, paving the way for the full Senate to vote.

He was chosen by President Barack Obama in 2016 to join the Supreme Court only to see his nomination held up for eight months in an audacious political maneuver by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time. The move ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to choose his own nominee to fill the seat.

The Capitol riot investigation has grown closer to Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s allies, and the F.B.I. has found evidence of communications between right-wing extremists and White House associates, underscoring how closely Mr. Trump had aligned himself with such groups during his presidency.

“I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” he said. “I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

But Mr. McConnell refused to consider his nomination, and Mr. Trump selected Neil M. Gorsuch to fill the vacant seat in 2017. Judge Garland stayed on at the appeals court.

His arrest — considered the most important apprehension by an international tribunal in the past decade — could help bring long-awaited justice for his actions more than a generation after the killing of at least 800,000 and perhaps as many as one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the small central African nation.

Mr. Kabuga’s capture could be the most important arrest of a figure wanted by an international tribunal since the 2011 apprehension of Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Serbian military leader who was later convicted of having committed genocide during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, Mr. Brammertz said.

In 2002, the United States government began circulating wanted posters in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, one of his known hide-outs. In an attempt to use its own resources and official connections to catch him, the United States had offered a reward of up to $5 million for his capture.But with his huge bank account and high-level connections, Mr. Kabuga had managed until Saturday to escape an arrest warrant issued by the tribunal in 1997.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Kabuga was traced to a house owned by Hosea Kiplagat,

International Criminal Tribunal uncovered evidence that a Kenyan police officer might have tipped off Mr. Kabuga in 1997 that an arrest was imminent.

Doctors in the top 10 percent averaged $1.3 million

And those in the top 1 percent averaged an astounding $4 million, though most of that (85 percent) came from business income or capital gains.

In certain specialties, doctors see substantially more in their peak earning years: Neurosurgeons (about $920,000), orthopedic surgeons ($789,000) and radiation oncologists ($709,000) all did especially well for themselves. Specialty incomes cover 2005 to 2017 and are expressed in 2017 dollars.

family-practice physicians made around $230,000 a year. General practice ($225,000) and preventive-medicine ($224,000) doctors earned even less — though that’s still enough to put them at the top of the heap among all U.S. earners.

“There is this sense of, well, if you show that physician incomes put them at the top of the income distribution, then you’re somehow implying that they’re instead going into medicine because they want to make money. And that narrative is uncomfortable to people.”

why did those figures ruffle so many physician feathers?

“You can want to help people and you can simultaneously want to earn money and have a nicer lifestyle and demand compensation for long hours and long training. That’s totally normal behavior in the labor market.”

Yale University economist Jason Abaluck notes that when he asks the doctors and future doctors in his health economics classes why they earn so much, answers revolve around the brutal training required to enter the profession. “Until they finish their residency, they’re working an enormous number of hours and their lifestyle is not the lifestyle of a rich person,” Abaluck told us.

why do physicians make that much?

On average, doctors — much like anyone else — behave in ways that just happen to drive up their income. For example, the economists found that graduates from the top medical schools, who can presumably write their own ticket to any field they want, tend to choose those that pay the most.

“Our analysis shows that certainly physicians respond to earnings when choosing specialties,” Polyakova told us. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

“In general, U.S. physicians are making about 50 percent more than German physicians and about more than twice as much as U.K. physicians,

Grover said the widest gaps were “really driven by surgeons and a handful of procedural specialties,” doctors who perform procedures with clear outcomes, rather than preventing disease or treating chronic condition

“we’re not about prevention, you know?” he said, noting that his own PhD is in public health. “I wish it was different, but it ain’t!”

The United States has fewer doctors per person than 27 out of 31 member countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

In 1970, based on a slightly different measure that’s been tracked for longer, America had more licensed physicians per person than all but two of the 10 countries for which we have data. What caused the collapse?

the United States has far fewer residency slots than qualified med school graduates, which means thousands of qualified future physicians are annually shut out of the residency pipeline, denied their chosen career and stuck with no way to pay back those quarter-million-dollar loans.

“I’d like to see an in-depth analysis of the effect of the government capping the number of residency spots and how it’s created an artificial ‘physician shortage’ even though we have thousands of talented and graduated doctors that can’t practice due to not enough residency spots,”

Such an analysis would begin with a deeply influential 1980 report,

That report, by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. It came out just before President Ronald Reagan took office, and the new administration seemed only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems.

ssociation of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent.

Federal support for residencies was also ratcheted down, making it expensive or impossible for hospitals to provide enough slots for all the medical school graduates hitting the market each year. That effort peaked with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act which, among other things, froze funding for residencies — partially under the flawed assumption that HMOs would forever reduce the need for medical care in America, Orr writes. That freeze has yet to fully unwind.

or decades, many policymakers believed more doctors caused higher medical spending. Orr says that’s partly true, but “the early studies failed to differentiate between increased availability of valuable medical services and unnecessary treatment and services.”

“In reality, the greater utilization in places with more doctors represented greater availability, both in terms of expanded access to primary care and an ever-growing array of new and more advanced medical services,” he writes. “The impact of physician supply on levels of excessive treatment appears to be either small or nonexistent.”

“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”

Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.

Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005.

it’s because states have responded to the shortage by empowering nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform tasks that once were the sole province of physicians. Over the past 20 years, the number of registered nurses grew almost twice as quickly as the number of doctors, and the number of physician assistants grew almost three times as rapidly, our analysis showed.

While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years.

1990 offers a deeper origin story. That was the year Margaret Thatcher was pulled from office and replaced by John Major, a man no one thinks of as a giant. Major inherited a country in a stronger position than at any time since the 1960s, yet handed over power to Tony Blair having frittered away the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management.

The stars of the show were the three prime ministers before her—Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron—with supporting roles for the former chancellor George Osborne and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

When Blair left office in 2007, the country was still relatively unified and prosperous. It fell to Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, to watch everything explode in the great financial crisis. All of these milestones—1990, 1997, and 2007—have legitimate claims to be the genesis of the current crisis. Yet none quite fits. The regime of little men had not begun. That came in 2010

For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over

Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.

In this absurd hospital drama, there were also walk-on parts for two former Labour leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. And Boris Johnson is now attempting a comeback!

May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.

Both Cameron and Clegg had been elected leader of their respective parties through American-style primaries. Back then, such votes were lauded as “democratization,” much-needed medicine to treat an ailing old constitution. They were no such thing. Rather than injecting more democracy into the process, they did the opposite—empowering tiny caucuses to send their minority tribunes to challenge parliamentary rule.

Miliband would further “modernize” the process with rule changes that would send the party careering toward populist extremism and electoral annihilation under Jeremy Corbyn. In time, such institutional vandalism would have dire consequences for both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and therefore the country.

Cameron and Clegg went to work hacking back public spending with extraordinary severity. The result was that Britain experienced the slowest economic recovery in its history, which meant that the coalition government failed to balance the books as it had hoped—exactly, in fact, as Labour had warned would happen

Britain had bailed out the bankers and then watched them get rich while the rest of the country got poorer. No wonder people were angry.

Cameron began to panic about the threat to British interests from a more cohesive euro-zone bloc—which was an inevitable consequence of Major’s compromise. After Cameron’s demands for new safeguards to those interests were ignored, he vetoed the euro zone’s reforms. The euro zone went ahead with them anyway. One year into Cameron’s premiership, in 2011, the nightmare of British isolation within the EU had come true.

For the next five years, the British prime minister took a series of gambles that ended in disaster. Alarmed by his veto failure, Cameron concluded that Britain needed to renegotiate its membership entirely—and put it to voters in a referendum, which he promised in 2013. By then he had also agreed to a referendum on Scottish independence. Britain’s future was on the line not once but twice.

A year after his election victory, Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.

A second origin date, then, might be 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.

May was hampered throughout her troubled final years as prime minister with a leader of the opposition in Jeremy Corbyn, who was ideologically hostile to any conciliation or compromise with the Tories, empowered by both his own sense of righteous purity and the mandate he had twice received from Labour Party members. He, after all, had a mandate outside Parliament.

Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in postwar British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.

In their first act in power, Truss and Kwarteng blew up the British government’s reputation for economic competence—and with it went the household budgets of Middle England.

Guilty Men was indeed something of a character assassination of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald, among others. Many historians now say these appeasers of the 1930s bought their country much-needed time.

each, unquestionably, left their country poorer, weaker, angrier, and more divided. Over the past 12 years, Britain has degraded. A sense of decay fills the air, and so, too, a feeling of genuine public fury.

Others point to driving’s high cost. Car insurance has skyrocketed in price in recent years, increasing nearly 14 percent between 2022 and 2023. (The average American now spends around 3 percent of their yearly income on car insurance.) Used and new car prices have also soared in the last few years, thanks to a combination of supply chain disruptions and high inflation.

E-scooters, e-bikes and ride-sharing also provide Gen Zers options that weren’t available to earlier generations. (Half of ride-sharing users are between the ages of 18 and 29, according to a poll from 2019.) And Gen Zers have the ability to do things online — hang out with friends, take classes, play games — which used to be available only in person.

Whether this shift will last depends on whether Gen Z is acting out of inherent preferences, or simply postponing key life milestones that often spur car purchases. Getting married, having children, or moving out of urban centers are all changes that encourage (or, depending on your view of the U.S. public transit system, force) people to drive more.

In 1997, 43 percent of 16-year-olds and 62 percent of 17-year-olds had driver’s licenses. In 2020, those numbers had fallen to 25 percent and 45 percent.

Millennials went through a similar phase. Around a decade ago, many newspaper articles and research papers noted that the millennial generation — often defined as those born between 1981 and 1996 — were shunning cars. The trend was so pronounced that some researchers dubbed millennials the “go-nowhere” generation.

The average number of vehicle miles driven by young people dropped 24 percent between 2001 and 2009, according to a report from the Frontier Group and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. And at the same time, vehicle miles traveled per person in the United States — which had been climbing for more than 50 years — began to plateau.

adult millennials continue to drive around 8 percent less every day than members of Generation X and baby boomers. As millennials have grown up, got married and had kids, the distance they travel in cars has increased — but they haven’t fully closed the gap with previous generations.

data has shown that U.S. car culture isn’t as strong as it once was. “Up through the baby boom generation, every generation drove more than the last,” Dutzik said. Forecasters expected that trend to continue, with driving continuing to skyrocket well into the 2030s. “But what we saw with millennials, I think very clearly, is that trend stopped,”

If Gen Zers continue to eschew driving, it could have significant effects on the country’s carbon emissions. Transportation is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States. There are roughly 66 million members of Gen Z living in the United States. If each one drove just 10 percent less than the national average — that is, driving 972 miles less every year — that would save 25.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from spewing into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent to the annual emissions of more than six coal-fired power plants.

We’re paying this lofty price in large part because Myriad owns broad patents on these two BRCA genes, which it acquired in 1997 and 1998, respectively — and refuses to license the test to any other American company.

we need legislative action for rational and appropriate pricing. We don’t make vaccines prohibitively expensive so only the rich can protect themselves. Nor should we let other preventive measures that can save thousands of lives be priced at levels far above what normal “market conditions” would suggest.

In the case of a diagnostic test like that for the BRCA genes, for example, insurance companies could pay for the intellectual property, buy a license on behalf of their insured customers (you and me), and then make sure as many at-risk individuals as possible were tested.

the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.

He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.

as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”

When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.

One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.

This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.

The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”

at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category

he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”

men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)

I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt

the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.

Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year

Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.

“We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”

The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.

He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.

There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools

The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.

Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”

the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.

If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.

Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”

Clinton Foundation gathering in Morocco at the behest of its king, who had pledged $12 million to the charity.

“She created this mess and she knows it,” a close aide, Huma Abedin, wrote of Mrs. Clinton in a January 2015 email.

Founded in 1997, when Mr. Clinton was still president, the foundation has raised roughly $2 billion to fund projects around the world, helping African farmers improve their yields, Haitians recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake and millions of people gain access to cheaper H.I.V./AIDS medication, among other accomplishments.

At the time, she was beginning to exert influence at the foundation, expressing concerns that Mr. Band and others were trying to use the charity to make money for themselves, and accusing another aide in her father’s personal office of installing spyware.

One such donor, Laureate International Universities, a for-profit education company based in Baltimore, was paying Mr. Clinton $3.5 million annually “to provide advice” and serve as its honorary chairman

Chelsea Clinton helped enlist an outside law firm to audit the Clinton Foundation’s practices.

the foundation “ensure that all donors are properly vetted and that no inappropriate quid pro quos are offered to donors in return for contributions.”

In August, the foundation said it would no longer accept foreign donations should Mrs. Clinton win the White House.

Russian government’s efforts to use cyberattacks to influence the election in favor of the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

asked whether Mrs. Clinton’s name would be used in connection with the foundation, which is formally known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. “It will invite press scrutiny and she’ll be held accountable for what happens there,”

a lawyer and top aide, said she discussed with Mrs. Clinton various “steps” to take to adjust her relationship with the foundation, including her resignation from the foundation’s board.

Mr. Band, who helped Mr. Clinton build the foundation, clearly felt irritated by Chelsea Clinton’s stream of implications that he had padded his own pockets from his work for her father.

“As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far,” he wrote. “A kiss on the cheek while she is sticking the knife in the back, and front.”

Sessions had once told him that “he believed the NAACP, the SCLC, Operation PUSH, and the National Council of Churches were all un-American organizations teaching anti-American values.”

He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed in Alabama’s infamous Yellow Mama electric chair in 1997, the first white man executed for killing a black man in Alabama since 1913, which Sessions noted in his attorney general questionnaire.

Judge Braxton Kittrell presided but did not comment on Sessions’s role in the prosecution when he testified before the Senate in 1986.

The FBI investigated at the request of the district attorney but turned up no suspects. Encouraged by his brother, the attorney for Donald’s mother, Figures pushed for a second FBI investigation, and eventually a grand jury which returned indictments against Knowles and Hays, who were arrested in June 1983.

During the Donald case, Sessions allegedly told Figures and others he liked the Klan until he found out they smoked marijuana.

Session replied “something to the effect of, ‘I didn’t know that Klansmen used marijuana now,” Kowalski said, and that “he used to have respect for that organization but now he no longer does, knowing they use drugs.”

Sessions was denied confirmation thanks to the allegations of racism and abuse of power, making him the first Reagan appointee not approved by the Senate, and only the second nominee to the district court bench rejected in 49 years.

In 1992 a federal grand jury charged Figures for allegedly bribing a drug dealer not to testify against his client, a prosecution many viewed as retaliatory.

Senators on the Judiciary Committee will have only Figures’s 1986 testimony to go on when hearings begin next week. He died in January 2015, then serving as a municipal judge in Mobile.

For much of his career, he maintained roles in Parliament and on influential clerical panels, under the tutelage of Ayatollah Khomeini and then, less durably, of his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Instead, Ayatollah Khamenei built his own power base. But Mr. Rafsanjani’s back-room dealings — often trading on his close relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini — earned him the nickname “kingmaker.”

In March, Mr. Rafsanjani wrote on Twitter that the “world of tomorrow is one of negotiations, not the world of missiles.

In 2013, Mr. Rafsanjani was disqualified from standing in presidential elections and swung his political weight behind a moderate, longtime associate, Hassan Rouhani, who won the vote and went on to bring many of Mr. Rafsanjani’s supporters into his cabinet and to negotiate the nuclear agreement with the United States in 2015

From 1963 to 1978, Mr. Rafsanjani was jailed five times for his opposition to the shah, but he remained in close contact with exiled clerics, including Ayatollah Khomeini, who was living in Najaf, Iraq.

By 2013, Mr. Rafsanjani was said to have built a family business empire that owned Iran’s second biggest airline, exercised a near monopoly on the lucrative pistachio trade and controlled the largest private university, Azad. The family’s business interests also included real estate, construction and oil deals

In presidential elections in June 2009, Mr. Rafsanjani supported the moderate Mir Hussein Moussavi, who lost to Mr. Ahmadinejad. The outcome was widely disputed, and many Iranian protesters died or were detained challenging the authorities in the streets. The protesters included Mr. Rafsanjani’s youngest daughter, Faezeh, who had campaigned for women’s rights and was arrested in large demonstrations against Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory

In September 2009, Mr. Rafsanjani seemed to be sidelined when the authorities barred him from addressing Friday prayers in Tehran on Quds Day, an annual display of solidarity with Palestinians.

In 2011, Iran sided with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria during the Arab Spring, along with the Hezbollah Shiite militia in Lebanon, setting Tehran against Mr. Assad’s Western adversaries, including the United States.

House and Senate Republicans remain unwilling to budge from their opposition to a special bipartisan inquiry into the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and into any connections to President Trump or those close to him. Changing their mind would probably require significant revelations of the sort that would make their current stance politically untenable. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Speaking to the TV2 channel, Bondevik expressed further concern about the Trump administration’s tactics. “I understand the fear of terror, but one should not treat entire ethnic groups in such a way,”

“I must admit that I fear the future. There has been a lot of progress over the last 10 years, but this gives great cause for concern, in line with the authoritarian leaders we see controlling other major countries.”

As a religious organization, the LDS Church enjoys several tax advantages. Like other churches, it is often exempt from paying taxes on the real estate properties it leases out, even to commercial entities, says tax lawyer David Miller, who is not Mormon. The church also doesn’t pay taxes on donated funds and holdings.

Under U.S. law, churches can legally turn around and sell donated stock without paying capital-gains taxes, a clear advantage for both donor and receiver.

According to U.S. law, religions have no obligation to open their books to the public, and the LDS Church officially stopped reporting any finances in the early 1960s. In 1997 an investigation by Time used cross-religious comparisons and internal information to estimate the church’s total value at $30 billion. The magazine also produced an estimate that $5 billion worth of tithing flows into the church annually, and that it owned at least $6 billion in stocks and bonds.

a recent investigation by Reuters in collaboration with sociology professor Cragun estimates that the LDS Church is likely worth $40 billion today and collects up to $8 billion in tithing each year.

Several high-ranking church insiders told him that the church’s finances are so compartmentalized that no single person, not even the president, knows the entirety of its holdings

it’s important to start at the very top: The Mormon Church is owned and run by what is called the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This entity is a “corporation sole,” which is an obscure legal body owned entirely by one person. In the case of the Mormon Church, that person is Monson, the prophet.

McMullin says the Mormon Church has “two or three or four for-profit entities under the Presiding Bishopric,” and names DMC, AgReserves, and Suburban Land Reserve. He says DMC has about “2,000 to 3,000 employees.” He also confirms Hoover’s estimate that DMC has annual revenue of roughly $1.2 billion

The Mormon belief in the spiritual value of financial success goes back to 1830, when the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, announced to his followers that God had told him the following: “Verily I say unto you, that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.” In other words, historian Quinn translates, “whether it’s investing in a merchandising store, or tannery, or a lumber mill, or a hotel, or a bank—all of which occurred under Joseph Smith’s leadership—according to that 1830 revelation, it’s all spiritual.”

In its early days, the church’s entrepreneurial rigor was fueled by necessity. Mormons, who clashed with neighbors and government authorities over practices such as polygamy, often had to fend for themselves. The group also espoused separatist financial goals of “erecting and maintaining an improved economic system for its members,” according to historian Leonard J. Arrington, who points out that 88 of Smith’s 112 revelations deal directly or indirectly with economic matters.

When Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847 it was a barren territory, still under Mexican jurisdiction. To settle the land, Arrington writes, over a 15-year period in the late 1800s, “Mormons constructed 200 miles of territorial railroad, a $300,000 woolen mill, a large cotton factory, a wholesale-retail concern with sales of $6,000,000 a year, more than 150 local general stores, and at least 500 local cooperative manufacturing and service enterprises.”

oday, Temple Square is filled with statues glorifying the industry of those pioneers. The state emblem is a beehive, in honor of diligent work, and the term “deseret,” used in the titles of many Latter-day enterprises, derived from the Book of Mormon, means “honeybee.”

Until the 1990s, wards—the Mormon equivalent of parishes—kept some donated member money locally to distribute for aid and activities as they saw fit. Today all money is wired directly to Salt Lake City. McMullin insists that not one penny of tithing goes to the church’s for-profit endeavors, but it’s impossible for church members to know for sure. Although the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants says “all things shall be done by common consent in the church,” members are not provided with any financial accounting.

the Mormon Church donates only about 0.7 percent of its annual income to charity; the United Methodist Church gives about 29 percent.

“Though the church’s monetary donations are significant, much of the ‘value’ of our service is not monetary, but in the hundreds of thousands of hours of service and the talent and expertise given by church members to help others around the world.”

The LDS Church’s legions of missionaries and volunteers don’t merely spread the Mormon message around the world; they’re also vital to the church’s businesses. According to McMullin, DMC alone employs 1,400 “people who are volunteering their time and their services—some are part-time and some are volunteer.” Many of these members being asked to serve full- or part-time are retirees.

when Romney divides the world into makers and takers and presumes that our ability to pay federal income tax is a measure of which group we belong to, he sends a different message. He implicitly tells average Americans that their quiet work doesn’t “make” America unless they are entrepreneurs who make enough money. Worse, he tells them that their lives aren’t even dignified, that they are “takers” who are unable to exercise personal responsibility over their lives.

I choose to rededicate myself to building that shining city on a hill that Reagan evoked when he brought conservatism out of the wilderness.That city is one we all can help build and in which we all can live. It’s a city with citizens, not clients; a place where the government doesn’t keep its hands off or provide handouts but, instead, offers everyone a hand up. It’s one that exists not to enrich the few but to ennoble the many.

After Nov. 6, whether Romney wins or loses, the conservative movement will still face a time for choosing. Do we still value the Lenny Skutniks and Joe the Plumbers? Or are we a movement that not so subtly tells the average Jane and Joe that their sacrifices don’t count, that the place of honor is set only for the highest and most successful among us?

days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to hold a crisis meeting.