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President Biden faces intensifying pressure at home four weeks into the war, with a solid majority of Americans expressing doubt that he has done enough to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, according to a poll by The Associated Press and NORC released Thursday.

Some 56 percent of Americans — and 43 percent of Democrats — said Mr. Biden, who was meeting on Thursday with European leaders, had not been “tough enough” in his response. About one-third said his handling the crisis was “just right,” according to the poll, which surveyed 1,082 U.S. adults between last Thursday and Monday, more than three weeks into the war.

Mr. Biden has tried to chart a middle course between punishing Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and provoking a direct military confrontation that could start a war between two nuclear superpowers.

A deadly tornado ripped through New Orleans.The twister was part of a severe weather outbreak across the South.Homes were ripped apart and cars flipped from Texas to Alabama.Damage assessments and surveys continued across the South Wednesday as residents began the long cleanup after homes were ripped apart, cars flipped over and at least two people killed in an outbreak of severe weather that included multiple tornadoes.

Authorities said the person killed Tuesday night in St. Bernard Parish was Connor Lambert, 25, the Associated Press reported.A neighbor told nola.com that Lambert had returned home in his truck just as the storm was starting to hit. After the tornado passed, the neighbor saw the destruction and ran over and started calling for Lambert.A news release from St. Bernard Parish Sheriff James Pohmann said Lambert died of "multiple blunt force injuries."

New Orleans Area Damage Consistent With At Least EF-3 Tornado, NWS SaysInitial surveys by the National Weather Service show the damage in Arabi was caused by at least an EF-3 tornado, which has winds between 158 mph and 206.

Racially and politically, Antlers is typical of much of rural Oklahoma, a state forged from the 19th century territory set aside for Native American tribes forcibly removed from other parts of the United States. Antlers is now 75% White and 22% Native American or mixed race, but with very few Latino, Asian, or Black residents. In 2020, Antlers and its county, Pushmataha—which supported former President Bill Clinton in 1996 and even Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980—voted for Republicans, 85% to the Democrats’ 14%, up from an 80% share for Republicans in 2016, 54% in 2000, and 34% in 1996.

Antlers’ social statistics are beyond alarming. Nearly one-third of its residents live in poverty. The median household income, $25,223, is less than half Oklahoma’s $55,557, which in turn is well below the national median of $74,099 in January 2022.

The best-off ethnic group in Antlers is Native Americans (median household income, $35,700; 48% with education beyond high school; 25% living in poverty)

They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“The system was only progressing very slowly internally” but “the public wanted a product in their hands,” said John Bernal, a former Tesla test operator who worked in its Autopilot department. He was fired in February 2022 when the company alleged improper use of the technology after he had posted videos of Full Self-Driving in action

“Elon keeps tweeting, ‘Oh we’re almost there, we’re almost there,’” Bernal said. But “internally, we’re nowhere close, so now we have to work harder and harder and harder.” The team has also bled members in recent months, including senior executives.

The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level

We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups

however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012

After all, much as its backbenchers huff and puff, even Labour has admitted an important principle: there is a limit to the number of refugees this country can accept.

In parliament on Monday, the shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said explicitly that “safe and legal routes” for immigration must be “capped” and “based on prioritisation”

With an estimated 32.5 million refugees in the world, this ought to be a statement of the obvious

“We’re in an incredibly dangerous world right now,” says Jin, who was born in Beijing and earned her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and whose father, Jin Liqun, served as a vice minister of finance for China. “Without more effort made to understand each other’s perspectives, peaceful coexistence may not be possible.”

China’s current economic challenge is to overcome its middle-income trap,11 The term for when wages rise in a country but then stall as a result of higher costs and declining competitiveness. something that the United States might not relate to. It’s not all about displacing the United States as global hegemon, which would come with a huge amount of burdens and responsibilities. And I don’t think China is ready or willing to do that. To see China solely as trying to displace the United States is only going to stoke more fears

That’s not to say that the economic means justify the unfortunate circumstances. But China is a country that has done the most economically for the most number of people in the shortest amount of time. If you look at the new generation, they are open-minded on a whole range of issues, so much more than their parents. They care about animal rights, worker rights, social inequity. That shift gives us hope that China will progress.

In 1989, a policy analyst at a leading conservative Washington, D.C. think tank described a workable planopens in a new tab or window in which private insurers, just as in Germany, provide universal coverage. This plan would:Change the current tax treatment of health insurance (which largely benefits people with employer-based coverage at the expense of lower income Americans)Declare that families face the responsibility of having adequate insuranceOffer government assistance to families unable to afford health coverage on their ownReform the Medicare program

The middle planks of this conservative plan ultimately became the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Marketplacesopens in a new tab or window, where families could purchase health insurance in a new, nationally regulated market with financial subsidies to cover costs for those with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty level (about $92,120opens in a new tab or window for a family of three).

President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law 13 years ago today, transforming a patchwork system of individual health insurance markets into one that today could form a national framework for universal healthcare

Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture.

Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.

the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.

Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.

Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”

In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.

We cannot continue to offer healthcare free at the point of use. Those (like me) who can pay should be charged. We cannot expect to inherit our elderly parents’ houses and so require the state to pay for their old-age care. We middle classes have no right to enjoy rail travel vastly subsidised by the general taxpayer. I have no right to an old person’s London travel card saving me thousands a year when young people on a tenth of my salary must pay — nor to a winter fuel allowance.

The taxpayer should not be subsidising public-school education for the small minority who benefit from it. Pensioners should not, regardless of our wealth, expect increases in our pensions that exceed the increases working people get. Britain should not be merrily promising substantial increases in defence spending when we already shoulder a disproportionate burden in the defence of freedom.

Year on year we are loading bigger national bills on to the ever-smaller proportion of the population who are actually working. People are retiring earlier then demanding to be kept expensively alive for longer

he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”

He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood

Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.

Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.

he belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.

That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?

French President Emmanuel Macron might have been too blunt about his worries about Europe becoming a “vassal” of the United States, but his views are in fact widely shared in Europe and beyond. The war in Ukraine has hurt Europe by raising its energy costs while benefiting the United States, which is the world’s top producer of hydrocarbons and sells many at low cost. European companies are shifting investment to the United States, lured in part by the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies. A German CEO said to me recently, “You cannot expect us to forgo cheap Russian energy as well as the Chinese market. That would be suicide for Europe.”

More broadly, if geopolitical tensions win out and economic ties continue to weaken, we will move into a very different world, marked by much greater chaos and disorder at every level. One sign of this can be seen in the impasse over debt restructuring. Dozens of the world’s most vulnerable economies are in or at high risk of debt distress. (Lebanon, for example, has been in default for three years.) Yet the International Monetary Fund cannot bail out these countries because China (which is one of the world’s largest creditors) cannot come to an agreement with Western nations on the terms of relief. The two sides blame each other and hundreds of millions of people suffer.

The last time two major world powers tried to manage a relationship of economic interdependence and rising geopolitical rivalry was Britain and Germany in the period from the 1880s to 1914. That experiment ended very badly, with a war that destroyed much of the industrialized world. Both sides should try to ensure we do better this time

The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones.

Similarly, Trump’s Christian-right supporters see this adjudicated rapist as a bulwark against sexual libertinism, but he also has a following among young men who admire him as libertine in chief and among people of every stripe who think he’ll somehow make them richer.

Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom.

“What can I even do?”Many people are feeling similarly defeated, and many others are outraged by the political inaction that ensues. A Muslim colleague of mine said she was appalled to see so much indifference to the atrocities and innocent lives lost in Gaza and Israel. How could anyone just go on as if nothing had happened?

inaction isn’t always caused by apathy. It can also be the product of empathy. More specifically, it can be the result of what psychologists call empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.

I felt it intensely this fall, as violence escalated abroad and anger echoed across the United States. Helpless as a teacher, unsure of how to protect my students from hostility and hate. Useless as a psychologist and writer, finding words too empty to offer any hope. Powerless as a parent, searching for ways to reassure my kids that the world is a safe place and most people are good. Soon I found myself avoiding the news altogether and changing the subject when war came up

It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us

I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust

On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.

More is a near-perfect time capsule of the banal pleasure-seeking of wealthy, elite culture in the 2020s, and a neat encapsulation of its flaws. This culture would have us believe that interminable self-improvement projects, navel-gazing, and sexual peccadilloes are the new face of progress.

The climate warms, wars rage, and our country lurches toward a perilous election—all problems that require real action, real progress. And somehow “you do you” has become the American ruling class’s three-word bible.

Charles Taylor has argued that, since at least the late 20th century, Western societies have been defined by “a generalized culture of ‘authenticity,’ or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfillment, ‘do their own thing.’

some Jewish Berliners see criticism of Israel as much more than a foreign policy dispute. “I’m an aggressive Zionist for only one reason: because I want to survive,” Maxim Biller, the author of the novel “Mama Odessa” and one of the country’s leading columnists, told me over coffee. “And I can be a German writer with a Jewish project here only because there is a state of Israel.”

Naturally there is a German compound noun for that interdependence, endlessly slung around and debated in the last few months. The word is Staatsräson, or “reason of state”: a national interest that is not just nonnegotiable but existential, defining the state as such. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, described Israel’s security as Germany’s Staatsräson in a historic address to the Knesset in 2008. Her successor, Olaf Scholz, has repeatedly invoked Staatsräson in his defenses of Israeli policy since Oct. 7.

“Staatsräson means: The existence of Israel is a condition of possibility for the existence of Germany,” explained Johannes von Moltke, a professor of German cultural history at the University of Michigan, who’s currently in Berlin. “Because if there is no Israel, then Germany’s guilt is all-consuming again. And you can’t countenance that possibility.”

The internal probe was meant to find out who leaked information related to a planned podcast episode about that article. But its intensity and scope suggests the Times’s leadership, after years of fights with its workforce over a variety of issues involving journalistic integrity, is sending a signal: Enough.

“The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn said in an interview. “I haven’t seen that happen before.”

while its business hums along, the Times’s culture has been under strain.