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The disclosure that President Trump paid little or no federal income taxes for years, including while in the White House

While Mr. Trump tried to deflect the news about his taxes, and his Republican allies generally kept their silence, Democrats pounced and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the party’s presidential candidate, posted a video noting that the president paid less in income taxes than everyday Americans like teachers, firefighters and nurses.

so the tax revelations are not likely to shift the election in any fundamental way,”

Thursday that hackers who American intelligence agencies believed were working for the Kremlin used a far wider variety of tools than previously known to penetrate government systems, and said that the cyberoffensive was “a grave risk to the federal government.”

complicates the challenge for federal investigators as they try to assess the damage and understand what had been stolen.

Echoing the government’s warning, Microsoft said Thursday that it had identified 40 companies, government agencies and think tanks that the suspected Russian hackers, at a minimum, stole data from. Nearly half are private technology firms, Microsoft said, many of them cybersecurity firms, like FireEye, that are charged with securing vast sections of the public and private sector.

Douthat believes — evidently quite deeply — that the biggest danger to the United States is the cultural left, which means he’s stuck. He cannot or will not face the full extent of the Republican party’s turn against democracy, and focuses his energy on downplaying it, perhaps in part to convince himself.

This encapsulates Douthat’s assessment of our historical moment: Yes, Trump is bad, but vigilance against anti-democracy forces on the American right is misguided because they’re so incredibly weak. The real threat is the left

Douthat continued (and continues) to underestimate the threat from the Trumpist-authoritarian right. He criticizes the Big Lie and January 6 less as threats to American democracy and more as hindrances to his vision of a “Trumpism without Trump.” In the December 5 column, he worried that “stop the steal” was crowding out “the more compelling narrative” that “Trump’s presidency demonstrated that populism can provide a foundation for conservatism.” After the Capitol attack, he lamented that, “By allowing his presidency to be possessed by the occult online, [Trump] sealed his legacy to the populist causes he sometimes pretended to serve.”

WASHINGTON — Senior House Democrats are coalescing around a draft proposal that could raise as much as $2.9 trillion to pay for most of President Biden’s sweeping expansion of the social safety net by increasing taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals.

The preliminary proposal, which circulated on and off Capitol Hill on Sunday, would raise the corporate tax rate to 26.5 percent for the richest businesses and impose an additional surtax on individuals who make more than $5 million.

fall short of fully financing the entire package Democrats are cobbling together, despite promises by Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders that it would be fully paid for in order to assuage concerns from moderates in their caucus.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

The logic of warfare now seems to lock the two sides into further, perhaps escalating military, economic and political conflict as each looks for some pathway to victory. Russia is refocusing its military efforts on the east and stepping up the level of violence on the battlefield and against civilians to terrorize Ukrainians into accepting Russian dominance. Ukraine is redoubling its appeal to Western countries for more military aid and tougher economic sanctions.

the Biden administration has three ugly options from which to choose.

The first option, helping Ukraine win, is the most emotionally appealing and would certainly be the most morally justifiable and politically beneficial, but the risks and costs are high.

More than five months after the fall of Kabul, the Afghan economy is on the brink of collapse, leaving millions of people at risk of extreme poverty or starvation. One major culprit: the US decision to halt aid to the country and freeze billions in Afghan government funds.

“virtually every man, woman and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty”

The organization is requesting more than $5 billion in aid to help the Afghan people, both inside the country and in refugee camps in bordering nations like Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

All told, this amounts to a different turn of events than might have been expected. Why?

A few potential explanations emerge.

First, Republican leaders blocked a serious independent or bipartisan examination of what happened on Jan. 6. That led instead to the creation of a largely partisan congressional committee, with only two renegade Republicans willing to take part alongside Democrats.

On March 10, Twitter users in Russia suddenly experienced a sharp slowdown in the service.

Russian authorities wanted Twitter to remove more than 3,000 “illegal” posts, which human rights groups saw as an effort to stifle dissent.

When Twitter did not comply, the government was ready. It deployed a new technology so it could do the job itself.

An earthquake in China's southwestern province of Sichuan left at least three people dead and 60 injured on Thursday

US Geological Survey (USGS) put it at 5.4-magnitude on an 8-point scale.

the epicenter located about 52 kilometers (32.3 miles) southwest of Yongchuan district in Chongqing

The share of adults who say spending on policing in their area should be increased now stands at 47%, up from 31% in June 2020. That includes 21% who say funding for their local police should be increased a lot, up from 11% who said this last summer.

Support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly: 15% of adults now say spending should be decreased, down from 25% in 2020. And only 6% now advocate decreasing spending a lot, down from 12% who said this last year.

White (49%) and Hispanic (46%) adults are more likely than Black (38%) or Asian (37%) adults to say spending on police in their area should be increased.

For instance, 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they personally own a gun, compared with 20% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Men are more likely than women to say they own a gun (39% vs. 22%).

And 41% of adults living in rural areas report owning a firearm, compared with about 29% of those living in the suburbs and two-in-ten living in cities.

A majority of Americans trust that elections are fair, are confident in their state and local governments' ability to administer elections, and will trust the results in 2022 and in 2024 regardless of whether their preferred candidate wins,

most Americans feel that former President Donald Trump has continued to say the 2020 election was rigged mostly because he didn't like the outcome.

There was a big education gap — between those with college degrees and those without — that emerged in the survey when it came to Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Apple is on the verge of yet another major milestone. The iPhone maker is close to topping a market value of more than $3 trillion — the first publicly traded company ever to be worth that much.

Shares of Apple (AAPL) were up about 1% in premarket trading Monday to around $181.75. The stock needs to hit $182.85 for Apple to surpass the $3 trillion mark.

Apple's market value first crossed the $1 trillion threshold in August 2018 and passed $2 trillion in August 2020.

“It feels like we’re definitively in a new era,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser in the Obama White House. “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us. And we’re not sure what’s next.”

The attack by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his neighbor has become a prism through which nearly all American foreign policy decisions will be cast for the foreseeable future, experts and officials said.

In the near term, Russia’s aggression is sure to invigorate Mr. Biden’s global fight for democracy against autocracies like Moscow

According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.

The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.

According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.

Yegor Gaidar, the wunderkind who shaped the first post-Communist reforms in Russia, mulled on this cyclical pattern in an article in the newspaper Izvestia in 1994, wondering — as did many in Russia and in the West at the time — whether the pattern would repeat itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Russia’s race for a place in the civilized world recalls Achilles’ chase after the tortoise,” Gaidar wrote. “Through superhuman effort, Russia would manage to catch up and overtake, especially in military technology. Yet the world would unnoticeably but steadily move on, and again after disgraceful and tortuous setbacks the country would regroup for a leap and make another lurch, and everything would be repeated.”

Nearly 30 years later, Vladimir Putin’s ruthless efforts to reconstitute a Great Russia by brute force, in the process mauling Ukraine with shocking cruelty and weakening his own country for decades to come, appear to be falling into Gaidar’s pattern

Mr. Putin’s strongest pitch, that “losing” Ukraine represents a humiliating demotion of Russia the superpower, still resonates among people who were raised on the Soviet ethos, in which empire was a far stronger bond than nationalism.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

They describe someone whose closest friendships (many of them longstanding) are with other wealthy tech luminaries of middle age.

He regularly takes meetings until 9 or 10 p.m., but when he goes out, he does so with frenetic bombast, almost as if live-action role-playing a billionaire playboy

A fan of lavish costume parties, Mr. Musk revels in settings, like the desert art festival/rave Burning Man, where he can take on a role outside himself.