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The 10-minute post was one of more than 4,500 videos in an unusually large network of YouTube channels spreading pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives, according to a report this week from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

ome of the videos used artificially generated avatars or voice-overs, making the campaign the first influence operation known to the institute to pair A.I. voices with video essays.

The campaign’s goal, according to the report, was clear: to influence global opinion in favor of China and against the United States.

I have a feature piece in this month’s Prospect using 13 charts to tell the story of 13 years of government failure. Had they wanted to fill the whole magazine I could have used 100 charts. With a handful of exceptions (exam results, use of renewable energy, workplace pension enrolment) every trend graph is going in the wrong direction. The public sector is in a bad way. Hospitals are at breaking point, the police are charging fewer criminals, prisons are full, most schools have to run food banks, care homes can’t find staff. And so on.

But even this bleak picture puts a gloss on reality because of how institutions react in conditions of scarcity. If demand for a service is higher than providers can manage they will start rationing access more aggressively.

The NHS is a great example. The waiting list for elective treatments has risen over the course of the year from 7.2 million to 7.7 million, despite Rishi Sunak’s pledge to bring it down. But there hasn’t been any increase in the numbers joining the list compared to pre-pandemic.

haven’t we been adapting to new technologies for most of human history? If we’re going to use them, shouldn’t the onus be on us to be smart about it

This line of reasoning avoids what should be a central question: Should lying chatbots and deepfake engines be made available in the first place?

A.I.’s errors have an endearingly anthropomorphic name — hallucinations — but this year made clear just how high the stakes can be

The dissents were gobsmacking—for their weakness. They did not want for legal craftsmanship, but they did lack any semblance of a convincing argument.

For starters, none of the dissents challenged the district court’s factual finding that Trump had engaged in an insurrection

Nor did the dissents challenge the evidence—adduced during a five-day bench trial, and which, three years ago, we saw for ourselves in real time—that Trump had engaged in an insurrection by any reasonable understanding of the term.

Decrying what he saw as the liberal bias of ChatGPT, Elon Musk earlier this year announced plans to create an artificial intelligence chatbot of his own. In contrast to AI tools built by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which are trained to tread lightly around controversial topics, Musk’s would be edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke,” meaning it wouldn’t hesitate to give politically incorrect responses.

Musk is fielding complaints from the political right that the chatbot gives liberal responses to questions about diversity programs, transgender rights and inequality.

“I’ve been using Grok as well as ChatGPT a lot as research assistants,” posted Jordan Peterson, the socially conservative psychologist and YouTube personality, Wednesday. The former is “near as woke as the latter,” he said.

“I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said this month. “The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.”

Since it first emerged in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. The organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies, according to political and military specialists

In addition, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader segment of the population, inspiring new recruits.

Only 11 days ago there was Buffalo, with a man driven by racism gunning down 10 people at a supermarket. The next day another angry man walked into a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, Calif., and killed one person and wounded five others. And now, Uvalde, Texas — a repeat of what was once thought unfathomable: the killing of at least 19 elementary school children in second, third and fourth grades.

What is it like to be a student in the shadow of this violence? How have repeated mass shootings shaped young people? We invite your students to reflect on these questions in this writing prompt, and post their answers to our forum if they would like to join a public conversation on the topic.To help students think about the issue from different angles, we invite them to read the article “A ‘Mass Shooting Generation’ Cries Out for Change,” which was published in 2018 following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Then we ask questions such as:

Because The Learning Network is for students 13 and older, most of the resources in this resource focus on understanding this shooting and its implications. The Times has published this age-by-age guide to talking to children about mass shootings. And for parents and teachers of younger students this advice from The Times Parenting section might be helpful:

In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey unpacked lipstick, an iPhone and something else from her purse in one campaign advertisement — “a little Smith & Wesson .38,” she said. A Republican candidate for governor in Georgia declared in a different spot, “I believe in Jesus, guns and babies.”

As the nation reels from a massacre at a Texas elementary school in which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, a review of Republican and Democratic advertising during the first months of 2022 highlights the giant cultural chasm over guns in America. As both parties have navigated their respective primary seasons, Republicans have been far more likely to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms than Democrats — who are largely in agreement on the issue of combating gun violence, but have seen one legislative effort after another collapse.

But more than 100 television ads from Republican candidates and supportive groups have used guns as talking points or visual motifs this year. Guns are shown being fired or brandished, or are discussed but not displayed as candidates praise the Second Amendment, vow to block gun-control legislation or simply identify themselves as “pro-gun.”

But those plans, experts say, may be just that – plans and proposals, many of which need unlikely approval by an uncooperative Congress or are subject to the whims of hostile foreign leaders, unpredictable markets or other forces beyond any president's control.

"Did you anticipate that the closure of the Abbott facility, because it was not producing the quality that was necessary, that it would have this profound effect immediately, or did it take a little time?" Biden asked. The question appeared directed at criticisms that the administration did not work better, earlier, to head off shortages when Abbott was forced to recall contaminated formula.The public relations effort, however, may not be enough to boost Biden's low approval ratings in time to help Democrats in a challenging midterm election season this fall. And in many cases, Biden's ability to fix the problems bedeviling the administration is limited.

On COVID-19, Biden has indeed ramped up testing and vaccinations during his term, Perry says. But he can't fight Mother Nature and human nature, she adds, noting that public impatience with masking and the virus's mutations aren't things he can control.On Ukraine, Biden has repeatedly noted his success in strengthening the NATO alliance. But "has he ended the war? No. That's something a president can't do," Perry adds. Aside from the threat of the war itself, the ongoing Russian invasion means higher gas prices as well, since the U.S. and its allies have imposed embargoes on Russian energy.

Beginning in the eighth century B.C., Ancient Rome grew from a small town on central Italy’s Tiber River into an empire that at its peak encompassed most of continental Europe, Britain, much of western Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean islands

After 450 years as a republic, Rome became an empire in the wake of Julius Caesar

s rise and fall in the first century B.C.

Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.

Instead of trapping the United States, Mr. Putin has trapped himself. Caught between armed conflict and a humiliating retreat, he is now seeing his room for maneuver dwindling to nothing. He could invade and risk defeat, or he could pull back and have nothing to show for his brinkmanship.

Mr. Putin’s gamble has failed.

Mr. Putin — whose instinctive cautiousness I’ve observed at close quarters for two decades — has a record of withdrawing at the first sign of real conflict. When Russian mercenaries were killed by U.S. troops in Syria in 2018, for example, he had the perfect opportunity to retaliate. Instead, Russia denied the slaughter ever took place.

A full Russian invasion would be Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s, and the first toppling since then of a democratically elected European government by a foreign invader.

Russians would not only suffer casualties, especially during a long-running insurgency, but also cause the death of untold Ukrainians—fellow Slavs, with whom many have family ties.

War would affect the prices of other commodities, too. Oil is already spiking. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, with Ukraine close behind. Russia is a big source of metals: in today’s tight markets even a small shock could send commodity prices upwards.

Kevin McCarthy and his House Republican leadership team have called on Newt Gingrich to advise them on their midterm election strategy

Man of No Principles hires Man of Low Character: What could possibly go wrong?

Before and during his four-year reign as speaker of the House, Gingrich pioneered much of the savagery we see today: treating opponents as criminals, un-American and subhuman; using shocking language; perpetrating a grinding attack on the press; and sabotaging government operations and institutions.

In Russia, power is a pyramid. This pyramid was built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century – an ambitious, brutal tsar overrun by paranoia and a great many other vices. With the help of his personal army – the oprichnina – he cruelly and bloodily divided the Russian state into power and people, friend and foe, and the gap between them became the deepest of moats

His friendship with the Golden Horde convinced him that the only way to rule the hugeness of Russia was by becoming an occupier of this enormous zone. The occupying power had to be strong, cruel, unpredictable, and incomprehensible to the people. The people should have no choice but to obey and worship i

And a single person sits at the peak of this dark pyramid, a single person possessing absolute power and a right to all.

The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world.

I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power.

it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.

The risks of working for Trump were elaborated upon well in 2017 by my Atlantic colleague David Frum; our colleague Eliot Cohen also went back and forth on it and even changed his mind. The danger was obvious: You will end up selling your soul and you will likely fail to do much good

The counterargument was also obvious: The interests of the United States of America require that this train wreck of an administration—staffed with the likes of Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and His Faux-Britannic Excellency Sebastian Gorka—should have at least some non-stupid, non-craven, non-nutball types in the executive branch.

I argued at the time that there was no way to put child-safety bumpers on all the sharp edges of the White House, and that if Trump was going to drive the country into a ditch, the sooner we got on with it, the better. I am not sure now if I was wrong, but the best evidence against my position is that Esper may well have prevented a war with North Korea by averting Trump’s idiotic evacuation order for Americans in South Korea. If that’s the case, I’d have to say it was worth it to have someone in the right place.

A retired New York City police officer was arrested Friday morning outside of the U.S. Capitol after being found in possession of a fake law enforcement badge, a BB gun, body armor, ammunition and high-capacity magazines, Capitol police said.

"Felipe also made a statement that he was a criminal investigator with the agency," Capitol police said.

The Capitol was stormed on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump. They disrupted lawmakers as they confirmed President Joe Biden's election during a joint session of Congress.

We tend to think of corruption as a failure of morality, when a greedy person decides to benefit by steering public resources toward private gain.

But while that’s not exactly untrue, it misses the most important thing: namely, that corruption is a group activity. You need bribe-payers and bribe-takers, resource-diverters and resource-resellers, look-the-other-wayers and demand-a-share-of-the-takers.

When that kind of corrupt network behavior becomes widespread, it creates its own parallel system of rewards — and punishments.