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the A.A.P.’s startling victory is a turning point because it marks the advent of a new kind of politics in India.

I am very cleareyed about the hurdles to finally closing Guantánamo: The politics of this are tough,” Mr. Obama said during a 17-minute address. “I don’t want to pass this problem on to the next president, whoever it is. And if, as a nation, we don’t deal with this now, when will we deal with it?”

He said the issue had cost him “countless hours” of consternation as he toiled to craft a workable solution to a problem that he inherited from his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and that forced him to apologize on the world stage for an approach to terrorism he never supported.

Reprising arguments he has made since he first campaigned for president, Mr. Obama said the prison had fueled the recruitment efforts of terrorists, harmed American alliances and been a drain on taxpayer dollars.

It was also a final bid to erase what has become a painful and persistent blot on his tenure: his inability to tackle an issue that animated his campaign in 2008 and in many ways encapsulates his approach to national security.

The White House refused on Tuesday, as Mr. Obama’s advisers have done consistently, to rule out the prospect that he would use his constitutional powers as commander in chief, if Congress refuses to act, to close the prison unilaterally before leaving office.

The nine-page plan was immediately rejected by Republican presidential candidates and members of Congress.

“Not only are we not going to close Guantánamo, when I am president, if we capture a terrorist alive, they are not getting a court hearing in Manhattan. They are not going to be sent to Nevada,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a presidential candidate, said at a campaign rally in Las Vegas before the state’s Republican caucus. “They are going to Guantánamo, and we are going to find out everything they know.”

Democrats, too, were skeptical of the strategy, which centers on bringing to a prison on domestic soil 30 to 60 detainees who are deemed too dangerous to release, while transferring the remaining detainees to other countries.

The blueprint offered few specifics, refraining from mentioning any of the potential replacement facilities the Pentagon had visited in preparing it, including military prisons in Leavenworth, Kan., and Charleston, S.C., as well as several civilian prisons in Colorado.

At the start of his administration, Mr. Obama noted, Republicans — including his predecessor, George W. Bush, and his rival for the White House, Senator John McCain of Arizona — backed the idea of closing the prison. “This was not some radical, far-left view,” Mr. Obama said. But “the public was scared into thinking that, well, if we close it, somehow we’ll be less safe.”

The Pentagon argued in its proposal that replacing Guantánamo would cost less than keeping detainees at the naval base in Cuba. Upgrading an existing prison could cost as much as $475 million, but would save the government as much as $85 million annually in operational costs compared with Guantánamo, it found.

The president’s plan faces steep obstacles, however. Congress has enacted a law banning the military from transferring detainees from Guantánamo onto domestic soil, and lawmakers have shown little interest in lifting that restriction.

Human rights groups and lawyers for detainees were divided. Some oppose bringing detainees who are being detained indefinitely without trial onto domestic soil, saying that would simply relocate the problem without solving it.

The Bush administration opened the prison in January 2002 and sent detainees from the Afghanistan war there. It declared that the detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions and that courts had no authority to oversee what the government did to prisoners at the base. In the prison’s early years, interrogators frequently used coercive techniques on detainees.

In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Obama issued an executive order instructing the government to shut the prison down within a year. But that proved easier said than done, and as the administration studied how to go about achieving that goal, political support for it melted away.

Mr. Obama has refused to add any more detainees to the 242 he inherited, instead working to chip away at the population. Of the 91 who remain, 35 are recommended for transfer if security conditions can be met, 10 have been charged or convicted before the military commissions system, and 46 have neither been charged with a crime nor approved for transfer.

A parolelike periodic review board is slowly working its way through their numbers and moving some to the transfer list. It was meeting even on Tuesday, senior administration officials said, as Mr. Obama strode into the Roosevelt Room to say, “Let us go ahead and close this chapter.”

“He’s saying how the people really feel,” one Trump supporter from Massachusetts, Janet Aguilar, told The Times. “We’re all afraid to say it.”They’re saying it now. So more than a third of Trump supporters in South Carolina wish the South had won the Civil War, and 70 percent think the Confederate flag should be flying over the state capital. And 32 percent believe internment of Japanese-American citizens was a good thing — something that the sainted Ronald Reagan apologized for.

ignorance is not the problem with Trump’s people. They’re sick and tired of tolerance. In Super Tuesday exit polls, Trump dominated among those who want someone to “tell it like it is.” And that translates to an explicit “play to our worst fears,” as Meg Whitman, the prominent Republican business leader, said.

With media complicity, Trump has unleashed the beast that has long resided not far from the American hearth, from those who started a Civil War to preserve the right to enslave a fellow human to the Know-Nothing mobs who burned Irish-Catholic churches out of fear of immigrants.

“To support Trump is to support a bigot,” wrote Stevens, the former Romney strategist. “It’s really that simple.”

The German magazine Der Spiegel called Trump “the world’s most dangerous man.” The Germans know a thing or two about the topic.

I would like to think our better angels always prevail. But there are also dark episodes, when the beast is loose, and what stares back at us from the mirror is something ugly and frightful. Now is one of those times.

In an email Friday, Ms. Gordon-Reed said she had been influenced by her scholarship on Hemings. “This is my life’s work,” she said. “I sincerely believe that we owe it to the enslaved to work through those feelings and think of ways to carry their stories forward. And we should do that in a way that shows the inherently entwined nature of the good and bad of our past, using written text and symbols like the sheaves and, even, buildings like Monticello.”

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc

losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”

ovation of the White House, but later becoming a much-loved figure.

"with the passing of Nancy Reagan, God and Ronnie have finally welcomed a choice soul home".

"Nancy Reagan once wrote that nothing could prepare you for living in the White House. She was right, of course. But we had a head start, because we were fortunate to benefit from her proud example, and her warm and generous advice. Our former first lady redefined the role in her time here."

She will be buried next to her husband, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, the library said in a statement.

"I am saddened by the passing of my stepmother Nancy Reagan... She is once again with the man she loved. God bless..."

"I remember Nancy as a noble woman who supported President Reagan and stood by his side. She will be remembered as a great friend of the State of Israel,"

She served as first lady of California during her husband's stint as California governor from 1967 to 1975 before moving into the White Ho

"I see the first lady as another means to keep a president from becoming isolated," she once said."I talk to people. They tell me things. And if something is about to become a problem, I'm not above calling a staff person and asking about it. I'm a woman who loves her husband and I make no apologies for looking out for his personal and political welfare."

“These are always situations which, as everybody here knows, have the ability, if not properly guided, to get out of control. I’m appreciative for the quick and appropriate response of the Iranian authorities.”

In fact, it is clear that today this kind of issue was able to be peacefully resolved, and officially resolved, and that is a testament to the critical role that diplomacy plays in keeping the country safe, secure and strong.”

The US defence secretary, Ash Carter, said: “I am pleased that 10 US navy sailors have departed Iran and are now back in US hands. I want to personally thank secretary of state John Kerry for his diplomatic engagement with Iran to secure our sailors’ swift return. Around the world, the US navy routinely provides assistance to foreign sailors in distress, and we appreciate the timely way in which this situation was resolved.”

The Revolutionary Guards patrol Iranian waters in the Gulf, especially near the strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes in tankers.

The swift release of the Americans contradicted speculation that the hardline Revolutionary Guards were seeking to sabotage improving relations between Iran and the west days before the planned implementation of the nuclear deal reached in Vienna in July

In an unusual move, the Guards last week condemned the attack by a group of hardliners on the Saudi embassy in Tehran, showing an approach in line with that of the Rouhani administration.

Once Iran finishes swapping the core of a heavy water nuclear reactor at Arak with cement, they will receive an influx of cash under the July deal.

“There are no excuses. The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead.

Sanders' main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, has also called for an explanation of what Snyder's administration knew and said that the situation was "unconscionable."

The former Secretary of State has also called on Michigan to pay for water purchases from Detroit for Flint residents until their water is safe again.

"The best thing for the people of Flint is that every effort is focused on solving this emergency, getting the aid needed to help the residents, and ensuring that clean drinkable water is restored to the city," he said in a statement.

Mr. Cruz acknowledged that Mr. Trump had begun to sound “fairly conservative” on the campaign trail, but he said voters were “far more discerning.”

But the point remains that saying so both belittles a serious issue of violence -- that of men raping other men in prison, which has nothing to do with turning anyone gay and everything to do with criminal activity. And it's a serious lapse in logic. Being around a bunch of dudes -- or ladies -- in prison doesn't change a person's innate sexual attractions.

The KMT forged closer ties with China under President Ma Ying-jeou. The new president will take over from Ma, who will step down on May 20 after serving two four-year terms. China and Taiwan -- officially the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China -- separated in 1949 following the Communist victory on the mainland in the civil war.

From Taiwan, she is part of the South Korean pop act Twice. She appears in the video reading her apology off a sheet of paper, leading many to speculate that her Korean management company JYP Entertainment had coerced her to appease mainland Chinese fans, who represent a lucrative market

In particular, a younger generation fears a future under the influence of Beijing and doesn't want Taiwan to become another Chinese territory.

"Taiwanese people are very peaceful. We want a peaceful relationship with mainland China, but that shouldn't mean we have to sacrifice our way of life and our democracy," said Huang Kuo-chang, leader of the New Power Party, one of a number of smaller opposition parties.

Taiwan has elected its first female president

Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won the presidency with 56.1% of the vote,

A fifth American, Matthew Trevithick, was also released by Iran, though his release was not part of the negotiated prisoner swap.

The International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iran had fulfilled its obligations under the nuclear deal that six world powers struck with Tehran. The United States responded by announcing it would end its sanctions on Iran, freeing up $150 billion in frozen assets.

Now it has spent two and a half years trying to sabotage its future. As Bill and others are discovering, this can be a painful truth to contemplate.

Many of the founding faculty members' "throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, advocated segregation, the inferiority of African-Americans, and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery,” that recast the South as an idyllic place for both slaves and masters and the Civil War as a battle fought over Southern honor, not slavery

The faculty opposed racial equality after Emancipation and advocated for the maintenance of white political control and against extending suffrage to African Americans, the report said

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the seminary faculty relied on pseudoscience to justify its white supremacist positions, concluding that "supposed black moral inferiority was connected to biological inferiority,

“It is past time that The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — the first and oldest institution of the Southern Baptist Convention, must face a reckoning of our own,” Mohler wrote.

a spokesman for Mohler, said the theologian launched the historical investigation because people asked him specific questions “he didn’t know the answer to. We knew there was involvement. We didn’t know the full history.

What does matter, the experts said, are the actions the seminary takes from here and whether it makes reparations.

The school’s leadership needs to sit down with racial and ethnic minorities and “let themselves be led” to racial reconciliation, Tisby said. “They are at the very beginning of the journey,”

Jemar Tisby, a historian who writes about race and Christianity, said he expects many white Evangelicals will push back on the report by saying the seminary is being divisive and re-litigating its past

Critics and other observers said the Southern Baptist Convention for too long has been hesitant to take full ownership of its past, for decades framing its split with northern Baptists as one over theological differences, not slavery

“I think that what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to force the Convention to have a conversation on race and racism that the Convention has really not wanted to have,

while the report is “a step in the right direction,” some sections seem to soften the severity of the seminary’s racist actions. He called the report’s description of faculty’s mixed record on the civil rights movement “double-handed”

In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution stating its explicit connection to slavery: “Our relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention; many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery; and in later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans.”

Mohler wrote in the report. “At that time, I think it is safe to say that most Southern Baptists, having made this painful acknowledgment and lamenting this history, hoped to dwell no longer on the painful aspects of our legacy. That is not possible, nor is it right,” he wrote. “We have been guilty of a sinful absence of historical curiosity. We knew, and we could not fail to know, that slavery and deep racism were in the story."

“[T]he moral burden of history requires a more direct and far more candid acknowledgment of the legacy of this school in the horrifying realities of American slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racism and even the avowal of white racial supremacy,” Mohler wrote in the report. “The fact that these horrors of history are shared with the region, the nation, and with so many prominent institutions does not excuse our failure to expose our own history, our own story, our own cherished heroes, to an honest accounting — to ourselves and to the watching world.”

There have also been notable stumbles. The group voted at its annual meeting in 2017 to condemn the white nationalist movement known as the alt-right — but only after it faced backlash to an earlier decision not to vote on the issue.

In a world of endless distraction, Mueller kept his focus. It is hard not to see the inquiry as an epic cultural and moral clash between the honorable American and the irredeemably ugly one; between the war-hero public servant and a draft-dodging liar and thug; between elegant, understated class and fathomless, bullhorn vulgarity

if Trump is charged or accused of anything, he has the identical reflex. Always deny. Always lie. Always undermine. Never concede. Accuse your opponents of doing exactly what they accuse you of. Even if you’re innocent

Above all, I’m grateful Mueller did not find a clear-cut case of provable treasonous criminality either on the president’s part or his family’s. The reason I’m relieved is that, however grave the crime, Trump would almost certainly have gotten away with it

ere was always a real danger that this entire ordeal would end with an obviously proven high crime and misdemeanor, a thereby unavoidable impeachment process, and then an inevitable failure to convict in the Senate. And so Trump would become an openly criminal president, a walking inversion of the rule of law, leverage impeachment into his reelection, and our slide into strongman politics would have accelerated still further.

In a liberal society, it really does matter more that the rules are fair than that any side wins. Mueller walked that line — and did not fall off it, as, for example, James Comey did.

When we get to read the report — and the detail in the narrative will matter a lot — we’ll find out more. I suspect it will be more damning than most Republicans now believe, but less definitive than many Democrats hope. Which is, to my mind, a pretty sweet spot — at least compared to all the alternatives.

The beauty of day care for old and young is that it works perfectly for both. Seniors have the time and patience for kids that harried parents often don’t. And young children often delight in the company of the old and can learn from them.

there is an odd equality to the relationship between the very young and the very old that I felt in that sleepless bedroom. Each get to see in one another the end and the beginning of life. That gives each perspective and respect as well as mutual curiosity — and the time to explore it.

In a saner world, this would be at the center of our politics: the simple repair of human bonds, broken by capitalism and modernity and loneliness. But we can make it saner

I have to say I’m happy that Jussie Smollett will not be going to jai

There are too many young black men in jail already, and if a plea deal can help someone avoid time in a case where no one was actually hurt, unless you count beating yourself up, great.

what makes absolutely no sense is that Smollett is still refusing to accept responsibility and apologize for the hoax. In fact, he still appears to be outright lying.

An English professor at Northern Arizona, Anne Scott, did end up on Fox News. After she deducted one point from a first-year student’s paper last spring for using “mankind” instead of “humankind” — she said she had told the class that “inclusive” vocabulary is required — the student contacted the website Campus Reform. She received more than 400 emails, rude voice mail messages and dropped calls. This semester, when the student’s name appeared on the wait-list for a course she was teaching, Dr. Scott said, “I was terrified.”

These clashes are affecting curriculum. After meeting with a professor to plan a spring course on fascism and anti-fascism, “we decided it was probably not worth it,” said Lori Poloni-Staudinger, head of the department of politics and international affairs, who has also received threats. The class won’t be offered. “People are more guarded,” she said. “They are watching what they say.”

Tools she shares are new to professors focused on conveying content. On the first day, she urges instructors to work with students to create ground rules for class discussions, including what to do when talk gets heated. She shares tricks like asking students, before peers pounce, to rephrase or repeat a provocative utterance (often it’s less harsh). If someone suggests that people who ride busses are poor, instead of calling him “classist,” she said, a teacher could reframe: “Let’s talk about the labels that come up when we talk about social class.”

It’s also important to openly discuss cultural identity with students, rather than make assumptions. “You can be from the same background and be very different,” she said. “Or you can be from very different backgrounds and think very similarly.” Digging below the surface is critical because students “are asking for more opportunity to be complicated individuals.”

Professors who once skipped pre-semester faculty workshops now want to know “how to model productive disagreement,”

In “Conflict in the Classroom,” a sketch recently staged at Skidmore College, a statistics “class” discusses correlation and causation. The “professor” posits an example: the link between infant mortality and maternal income. The “students” raise questions that have nothing to do with math. “It becomes a debate about the variables,” said Sara Armstrong, the artistic director: One student wonders why the example doesn’t consider household income, and defines a household as man and woman. Another objects. The first accuses the other of attacking. The instructor interjects, “I don’t think this is appropriate for this class. We really can’t talk about this.” The upset student insists, “This is a problem! We have to talk about this!” A student records on his phone.

In the post-performance discussion, the faculty members backtrack: What could the instructor have done ahead of time to prevent problems? What could the instructor do in the moment? And afterward? Approaches involve addressing not just what is taught, but how and why. The professor might explain why he chose the case study, pause the discussion, or email the class, acknowledging the disruption and, perhaps, apologizing.