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Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,

Gamergate

The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect

ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.

The southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro, one of the busiest in Europe, will be the transfer point for hundreds of tons of the most deadly Syrian chemical weapon compounds en route to their neutralization at sea, the organization responsible for helping oversee the destruction of the arsenal announced on Thursday.

The first load of the most dangerous weapons was placed aboard a Danish vessel in the Syrian port of Latakia last week. Related Coverage U.N. Says Executions in Syria By Rebels May Be War Crimes JAN. 16, 2014 Donors Offer $2.4 Billion to Aid Syrian Civilians, but U.N. Says More Is NeededJAN. 15, 2014 video Video Feature: Watching Syria's War: Bombardment on a Damascus Suburb

Syria agreed to renounce their use and sign the global treaty that bans them last September after an international uproar over an Aug. 21 sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of people in a Damascus suburb. The Syrian government and the insurgents seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad accused each other of responsibility.

Tweet // Re-execute when the element gets attached. if (window['gapi'] !== undefined) { window.gapi.plusone.go(); }; More Email Print Lara/Flickr In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students

The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college.

the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.

After years of watching his influence in Latin America slip away, Mr. Obama suddenly turned the tables this week by declaring a sweeping détente with Cuba, opening the way for a major repositioning of the United States in the region.

Washington’s isolation of Cuba has long been a defining fixture of Latin American politics, something that has united governments across the region, regardless of their ideologies. Even some of Washington’s close allies in the Americas have rallied to Cuba’s side.

“We never thought we would see this moment,” said Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who chided the Obama administration last year over the National Security Agency’s surveillance of her and her top aides. She called the deal with Cuba “a moment which marks a change in civilization.”

About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. Google’s once underappreciated side bet has become Earth’s dominant computing platform

Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android.

Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014

Two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain.“The divide is generally down political party lines,” says professor Peter Hicks, a British historian with the Napoléon Foundation in Paris. “On the left, there’s the ’black legend’ of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the ’golden legend’ of a strong leader who created durable institutions.”

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, a decade ago, the president and prime minister—at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin—boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest military victory. More from the May 16 Issue Political First Responders Flights of Fancy Flower Power “It’s almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story,” Hicks tells Newsweek

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle,

said her relatives seemed more outraged by the demonstrations than the killing, which she saw as an injustice.

Race has never been an easy topic of conversation in America. But the recent high-profile deaths of black people at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, New York, Cleveland and elsewhere — and the nationwide protests those deaths spurred — have exposed sharp differences about race relations among friends, co-workers, neighbors and even relatives in unexpected and often uncomfortable ways.

Put bluntly, many people say, they feel they are being forced to pick a team.

A Kuhnian paradigm is a set of assumptions that allows scientists in a particular field to avoid time-wasting arguments over the basics and spend their days solving small but useful puzzles

Scientific assumptions are never perfect mirrors of reality, though (“all models are wrong; but some are useful“). When evidence piles up that contradicts the paradigm, a science sometimes needs to go through the painful process of a paradigm shift.

Financial economics adopted its own, narrower paradigm, in which the starting point was that the prices prevailing on financial markets were more or less correct (a belief that in those days went under the name Efficient Market Hypothesis

At the trial of Peter Liang, the jurors kept returning to the 11.5-pound trigger of his New York Police Department standard-issue 9mm Glock.

Liang was the officer who killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, for no reason but that Gurley had walked into a dark stairwell.

iang’s defense had been that he kept his finger off the trigger, but that in the dark stairwell a loud sound surprised him. His finger twitched, leading to what Liang’s lawyers called “a tragic accident.”

Over the months that Russia amassed more than 100,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine

Ukraine is vulnerable to a major cyber attack

Ukraine has repeatedly been a target of cyberattacks, especially since the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. In the years since Crimea's annexation — which is unrecognized by the international community — near-constant cyber warfare, much of it from Russia, has targeted almost every sector in Ukraine, from its power grid to its treasury to its media companies.

The importance of women to the Democratic Party in 2014 cannot be overstated

Democrats are pushing to carry over that 2012 "gender gap" to 2014, hoping the support of female voters will shore up the party amid a traditionally tough political atmosphere of a presidential midterm and the rocky debut of Obama's healthcare law.

Davis in Texas, who captured the hearts of liberals nationwide with her standing filibuster to block an anti-abortion law and is now running for governor.

n his first interview since fleeing to Russia, Ukraine's ousted president said Wednesday that he was "wrong" to have invited Russian troops into Crimea and vowed to try to persuade Russia to return the coveted Black Sea peninsula.

Yanukovych denied the allegations of corruption, saying he built his palatial residence outside of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, with his own money. He also denied responsibility for the sniper deaths of about 80 protesters in Kiev in February, for which he has been charged by Ukraine's interim government.

While Russia can hardly be expected to roll back its annexation, Yanukovych's statement could widen Putin's options in the talks on settling the Ukrainian crisis by creating an impression that Moscow could be open for discussions on Crimea's status in the future.

the latest poll from Pew on American attitudes toward other faiths. The researchers asked a panel of more than 3,200 nationally representative adults to take a "feeling thermometer" about religious groups in America, rating their level of "warmth" or "coolness" toward Jews, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, evangelicals, atheists, and more

respondents were much more likely to report feeling "warmly" toward the religious group they were part of; Catholics were all about other Catholics, evangelicals were enthusiastic about evangelicals, etc.

despite the home-team advantage of the Christians in the survey, who made up more than two-thirds of the sample, Jews got the highest overall ratings. A good chunk of the respondents said they don't even know any Jewish people; only 60 percent said they'd ever met a Jew.

lower-income Americans have more money, experience less poverty, and receive far more safety-net support than their grandparents ever did. Over all, material conditions have improved, not worsened, across the period when their communities have come apart.

Between 1979 and 2010, for instance, the average after-tax income for the poorest quintile of American households rose from $14,800 to $19,200; for the second-poorest quintile, it rose from $29,900 to $39,100.

Meanwhile, per-person antipoverty spending at the state and federal level increased sixfold between 1968 and 2008

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, the day selected each year by the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of women’s, civil rights and labor groups, to draw attention to how much longer women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year

Another measure of the wage gap, computed by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, shows that, in 2014, the ratio of female-to-male weekly earnings was 82.5 percent.

The longer the gap persists, the less it can be explained away by factors other than discrimination.

The sustained determination on the part of the conservative movement has paid off in an unprecedented realignment of power in state governments.Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape

By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.

“How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.

While the process of secularization has been slower-moving in the U.S. compared to Europe, it is now proceeding rapidly. A 2014 study by Pew Research found that 23 percent of Americans say they’re “unaffiliated” with any religious tradition, up from 20 percent just three years earlier. The Public Religion Research Institute confirmed the statistic as well with a 2014 poll based on 50,000 interviews indicating that 23 percent of respondents were unaffiliated.

Between 2007 and 2012, the number of people claiming “nothing in particular” increased by 2.3 percent, those saying they were agnostics increased by 1.2 percent and those claiming to be atheists increased by 0.8 percent. No actual religious group has experienced anywhere near such growth during this time period.

Looked at over the longer term, the trend is even more discernible. In 1972, just 5.1 percent of Americans said they had no religious affiliation, according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey. In 2014, that number was 20.7 percent, an increase of more than 400 percent.

American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.

The better course for all of us — Republican, Democrat and independent — is to step back and take the long view, and to begin building for that.

This election — not only the Trump phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also — has reminded us how much pain there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century.

This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.