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Among the paramilitary volunteers are bikers, ex-soldiers, hunters, and stockbreeders. Each group has its own division dedicated to training young men and women in military tactics and patriotism; some volunteers are as young as 12 years old. These groups insist they are apolitical. They seek to defend their borders and train the warriors of tomorrow to prepare for whatever Putin has planned next.

Central bankers, like those running the Fed, try to portray themselves as apolitical and technocratic. This is never quite true in practice, but it’s an ideal toward which they strive. Thanks to Trump, however, whatever the Fed does next will be seen as deeply politica

if I were Powell, I’d be worried about an even worse scenario. Suppose the Fed were to cut rates, and growth and inflation end up being higher than expected. Conventional policy would then call for reversing the rate cut — right on the eve of the 2020 election. The political firestorm would be horrific

in Trump’s America no institution can ignore the political ramifications of its actions, if only because these ramifications will affect its ability to do its job in the future

Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council

My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities

I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations

It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned

It took only 10 days for signs that the approach here — “elimination” rather than the “containment” goal of the United States and other Western countries — is working.

The number of new cases has fallen for two consecutive days, despite a huge increase in testing, with 54 confirmed or probable cases reported Tuesday. That means the number of people who have recovered, 65, exceeds the number of daily infections

: the little-known story of the Irish slaves who built America, who are sometimes said to have outnumbered and been treated worse than slaves from Africa.But it’s not true.

Historians say the idea of Irish slaves is based on a misreading of history and that the distortion is often politically motivated. Far-right memes have taken off online and are used as racist barbs against African-Americans. “The Irish were slaves, too,” the memes often say. “We got over it, so why can’t you?”

Last year, 82 Irish scholars and writers signed an open letter denouncing the Irish slave myth and asking publications to stop mentioning it

there’s one small element of truth to the “Was that wrong?” argument. Everything we know about the Trumps suggests they are fundamentally amoral people. Their loyalty is to a triad of enrichment, power and family – the order in that hierarchy I don’t really know. The idea that there are limits to what you do in pursuit of those goals is, I believe, quite alien to them.

it’s not that somehow Don Jr was so profoundly clueless that he didn’t know this was a problem. He knew enough to lie about it for at least a year. It’s not that he doesn’t know it’s wrong or against the law. It is that in this family having that be a brake or obstacle to action is simply alien. Dad’s good, Hillary’s bad

The additional factor to the Trump’s is the coterie of lackies and toadies who trail around them. There are numerous people in the Trump universe who were either apolitical or relatively committed Democrats before 2016 and now they’re the most committed Trumpers. Other people who probably had not entirely embraced a total amorality are nonetheless dragged alone.

What are Sufis? This was a question many were asking after at least 305 Egyptians were massacred on Friday in the Sinai. They were killed in an assault by Islamist militants (likely from the local Islamic State affiliate, although the group has not yet made a claim of responsibility) on Al Rawdah mosque, which is commonly described as a “Sufi mosque.” The implication is that its congregants observed a more “mystical” version of Islam, one that, for example, venerates saints. While such a description is not necessarily inaccurate—it is common to refer to mosques by their apparent ideological or spiritual orientation—like most things related to Islam, it’s a bit more complicated. Many Sufis do not self-define as Sufis, since for them, this is just how Muslims practice—and have always practiced—Islam.

For most of Islamic history, Sufism wasn’t considered as something apart. That it is today has much to do with the rise of Islamism, which is generally perceived as anti-Sufi.

To describe Sufis as “tolerant” and “pluralistic” may also be true, but doing so presupposes that non-Sufi Muslims aren’t tolerant or pluralistic. On the other hand, describing Sufis as heterodox, permissive, or otherwise less interested in ritual or Islamic law is misleading.

Only 13 months after the House first impeached President Donald Trump, lawmakers were back on Wednesday voting to impeach Trump an unprecedented second time for a US president. During the debate on the resolution, which charges that Trump incited a violent insurrection against the government on January 6, some of Trump's allies were still using many of the same arguments they did a year ago to criticize Democrats and defend Trump's actions.

Rep. Tom McClintock said that Trump's remarks at the Washington, DC, rally that preceded the Capitol insurrection were overly confrontational and sometimes inaccurate

"But what did he actually say? His exact words were: 'I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.' That's impeachable? That's called freedom of speech," McClintock said.

More than half of Chinese in their 20s express a desire to start their own business. Others will climb up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party

How they understand their country’s past and what they ask of its future are essential to understand how they might one day lead China.

Youth often stands for trendsetting and rebellion. In China, the young must navigate an authoritarian state and a bruisingly competitive education system. This is when big life decisions are made and adult identities formed.

At Princeton, however, conservative-leaning students and professors are mostly insulated from the day-to-day tumult. They’re more interested in a bigger question: What should conservatism—and America—look like moving forward?

Elite conservative circles at these universities tend to focus on great books and big ideas, on statesmanship and lofty principles. Nothing could be further from the culture of American politics at the national level today, driven as it is by tribalism and thirst for the blood of political enemies.

Even something so basic as collegiality can seem quaint these days. Although American politics have always been ugly and divisive, elite manners and sensibilities at least superficially governed how political life was conducted. The art of persuasion was at the very least afforded lip service. Not so much anymore.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden has selected William J. Burns, a career State Department official who led the U.S. delegation in secret talks with Iran, to run the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Burns has also long worked with Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s pick for national security adviser, and has been influential in helping foster the younger man’s career.

“shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect.”

He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty.

Wilson’s contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions. 

In the decades that followed, however, his ideas became an inspiration and a guide to national leaders, diplomats, activists, and intellectuals around the world.

At the Pennsylvania long-term care facility where Tisheia Frazier works, the coronavirus was a terror. During the most harrowing weeks of the pandemic in April and May, she said, four residents died in a matter of hours, and 70 people in an 180-bed unit died in less than a month.

At the height of the pandemic, he sat at his desk, a shield over his face, so frustrated by the government’s handling of the virus and his own organization's bureaucracy that he thought to himself: “I don’t want to do this.”

The deaths of almost 40 percent of all Americans killed by the coronavirus have been linked to nursing homes and similar facilities — indoor spaces crowded with vulnerable adults.

But chief among those concerns is whether their commander in chief might order American troops into any chaos around the coming elections.

His hedging, along with his expressed desire in June to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send active-duty troops onto American streets to quell protests over the killing of George Floyd, has incited deep anxiety among senior military and Defense Department leaders, who insist they will do all they can to keep the armed forces out of the elections.

the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,”

President Donald Trump this week refused to commit to a peaceful transition should he lose the November election, leading some to speculate that he might seek to use the tools of presidential power including his role as commander in chief of the armed forces to prolong his time in office.

"The Constitution and laws of the US and the states establish procedures for carrying out elections, and for resolving disputes over the outcome of elections ... I do not see the US military as part of this process," Milley said in the letter to two members of the House Armed Services Committee.

"The Department of Defense does not play a role in the transition of power after an election,"

White House aides improperly intervened to prevent a manuscript by President Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton from becoming public, a career official said in a letter filed in court on Wednesday, accusing them of making false assertions that he had revealed classified material and suggesting that they retaliated when she refused to go along.

The disclosures by the official who oversaw the book’s prepublication review, Ellen Knight, were the latest a series of accounts by current and former executive branch officials as the election nears accusing the president and his aides of putting his personal and political goals ahead of the public interest and an evenhanded application of the rule of law.

In an extraordinary 18-page document, a lawyer for Ms. Knight portrays the Trump administration as handling its response to the book in bad faith. Her account implied that the Justice Department may have told a court that the book contains classified information — and opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Bolton — based on false pretenses.

Germany, which scaled up testing capacity to over 1.1 million tests a week, trained hundreds of people, many of them medical students, to help with contact tracing across the country. A contact-tracing mobile phone app that was launched there just over a month ago has been downloaded nearly 16 million times. The number of tests carried out varies, but on average is nearly 300,000 a week.

In Italy, widespread contact tracing and testing means a large number of asymptomatic carriers are being identified and isolated. In fact, the majority of those who tested positive for the coronavirus in recent weeks in Italy were identified not because they developed symptoms but because they were tested as a result of contact tracing or after testing positive for antibodies.

“The fundamental difference between Europe and America is that Europe has taken the virus seriously, and America largely has not,” says Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “We didn’t build testing and tracing programs, and in parts of the country we didn’t even bring cases down. We have done things half way.”

A Facebook Inc. team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together. They were driving people apart.

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.

Milley told NPR's Morning Edition. "And if there is, it'll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the U.S. Congress. There's no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero. There is no role there."

Nov. 3 promises to be an Election Day unlike any other, and public safety entities say they're preparing for tensions and the possibility of violence.

Poll workers are usually the first line of defense in case of disputes between voters, though they may be backed up by private security guards. Some local election authorities say they'll be adding guards

With census data now in hand and the 2022 midterm election just over a year away, states are busily redrawing their electoral maps to take account of population shifts since 2010. In some states, the task falls to non-partisan commissions. In most others, however, state legislatures redraw district lines, fully aware of the political implications. In a country in which the word gerrymander dates to the Founding (a portmanteau of Elbridge Gerry and salamander, after the shape of the district he engineered), it should surprise no one that state elected officials draw district lines that favor themselves and members of their own political party.

New York voters approved a plan to hand over redistricting responsibility to a bipartisan commission that would use apolitical criteria to draw fair maps. But then Democrats won supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.

Given Democrats’ repeated complaints about gerrymandering by Republican-controlled state legislatures, Republicans and their allies will no doubt label the move by New York to respond in kind hypocritical. Is the charge fair? Perhaps, but as I shall explain below, not necessarily, and in the end, there are worse sins than hypocrisy.