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research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t

Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes to their behaviour. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.

Before humans, orca were their only predators, against whom sperm whales form defensive circles, their powerful tails held outwards to keep their assailants at bay. But such techniques “just made it easier for the whalers to slaughter them”, says Whitehead.

the country is paying close attention to what innovative US companies like SpaceX are doing as well. To get ahead in space, communism is learning from capitalism.

A year after this test, China's main space contractor revealed plans to develop the ability to reuse its Long March 8 booster, which is powered by kerosene fuel, the same type of power that fuels SpaceX rockets. By 2025, Chinese officials said, this rocket would be capable of landing on a sea platform like SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster.

A growing number of semi-private Chinese companies have also announced plans to develop reusable rockets.

For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies.

When religious voices assail humanism, they attack it as a belief in nothing, just another form of faith, no more provable than any other. They blame it for (supposed) American moral rot. But as a humanist, I don't believe morality needs some supernatural source

Humanism is a philosophy, not a religion or faith. It originated in ancient times with thinkers like Epicurus and Lucretius, with a rebirth in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It's a way of understanding life and world, anchored in reason and reality.

Our earthly life is the only one we get. Nothing can ultimately matter except the feelings of sentient beings. We can infer from all this that our purpose is to make human life as good as possible. This purpose gives our lives ample meaning. Humanism provides the bedrock of morality. It encourages every person, oneself included, to live fully and attain happiness, a word that signifies equal respect for the dignity of all humans and freedom of thought and expression.

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday warned against "going to the extreme" on important election issues a day after he was assailed by his liberal competitors at the CNN/Des Moines Register Democratic debate for being too moderate.

Buttigieg's comments reflect some of the most significant fault lines among the party's top tier candidates. The former mayor has presented a more centrist alternative to the progressive views of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, whose ideas have excited liberal voters but, according to moderates like Buttigieg, risk alienating the rest of the country in a general election.

"It's just not true that the plan I'm proposing is small," Buttigieg shot back. "We have to move past the Washington mentality that suggests that the bigness of plans only consists of how many trillions of dollars they put through the Treasury, that the boldness of a plan consists of how many Americans it can alienate."

“This assault happened on Donald Trump’s watch when he wasn’t watching,” President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. accused President Trump on Tuesday of “irrational downplaying” of the widespread hack of the federal government and American industries, saying that the current administration was denying him intelligence and warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to “go unanswered” after he takes office.

Mr. Biden indirectly acknowledged as much when asked about his statement that he could not ensure that government systems could be trusted when he takes office.

The Black Lives Matter movement got a favorable ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.

The justices tossed out a federal appeals court decision that allowed a Black Lives Matter protest organizer to be sued by a police officer injured by an unknown assailant

The officer, who suffered injuries to his brain, jaw and teeth, also sued Black Lives Matter. That was tossed out on the theory that BLM is a social movement and cannot be sued.

A Russian oligarch, nicknamed The Sausage King, has been murdered with a crossbow, investigators say.

Vladimir Marugov and his partner were in an outdoor sauna cabin when they were attacked, reportedly by two masked assailants.

Police have detained a male suspect in connection with the murder. The suspect has not been named.

she asked questions in turn in a set of cases that presented difficult procedural questions but no headlines.

Barrett could well be forgiven for bowing out of the court's work last week, with six days to prep before her Monday debut.

Barrett's choice to forgo participating last week meant she did not vote in two significant cases decided by the court in opinions released Monday.

statements

For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears.

But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the Senate, Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to publicly distance themselves from the president.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, on Tuesday called on her party to “make clear that we aren’t the party of white supremacy,” arguing that elected Republicans must forcefully condemn those responsible for the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

“You saw the symbols of Holocaust denial, for example, at the Capitol that day; you saw the Confederate flag being carried through the rotunda, and I think we as Republicans in particular, have a duty and an obligation to stand against that, to stand against insurrection.”

Allies of Mr. Trump were infuriated by Ms. Cheney’s decision last month to vote to impeach him.

Margaret Thatcher explained the stark difference between American and European political traditions with elegant economy. The Iron Lady said that European nations were made by history but the United States was made by philosophy.

Last month, the State Department issued a thoughtful and carefully reasoned report on that quintessentially American philosophy, and the unique nation that came into existence to conserve and champion it

The report explores the cause of natural law and natural rights, as articulated by the Declaration of Independence (as well as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In this theory, rights inhere in human individuals at birth, which is why we call them natural. “The sacred rights of mankind,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, “are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature.”

Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was the anonymous author of The New York Times Op-Ed article in 2018 whose description of President Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” roiled Washington and set off a hunt for his identity, Mr. Taylor confirmed Wednesday.

“undisciplined” and “amoral” leader whose abuse of power threatened the foundations of American democracy.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump claimed not to know who Mr. Taylor is, despite the fact that there are numerous pictures of the president with Mr. Taylor in meetings.

As President Donald Trump makes a hurried final push for reelection, he is relying not only on his campaign staff but on government officials to transmit his message to voters

his White House press secretary has appeared on television from campaign headquarters, identified as a campaign adviser. His top White House immigration adviser convened a campaign-organized briefing to assail Joe Biden

Seldom does a day go by in a battleground state where a Cabinet member from the Trump administration is not paying a visit -- often with a government announcement in tow.

“The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”

the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation’s character.

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness.

DALLAS — All hostages have been released safely from a synagogue in the Dallas-Fort Worth area following a more than 10-hour standoff, and the man responsible is dead, according to local and federal law enforcement officials.

The group of hostages were being held by a man demanding the release of a federal prisoner being held in North Texas who was convicted in 2010 of attempted murder in a terrorism-related case, officials said.

Around 9 p.m., the FBI's hostage rescue team breached the synagogue and rescued the hostages, Colleyville Police Chief Michael C. Miller said.

Even in his speech announcing the invasion, Putin referred to his oft-stated belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. This, of course, was never true — even when they lived side by side in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The two identities and cultures are distinct. But Russians and Ukrainians are the closest of kin. Even when we speak different languages, as we have increasingly done since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, we understand each other. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made the most of his eloquent speech on the eve of the invasion by speaking in Russian, directly appealing to Russian citizens with the ease of someone who shares a cultural code with them. It runs thick as blood and has nothing to do with official Soviet avowals of brotherhood.

A lot of evidence pointed to Putin's intention to invade. But I kept hoping he would stop at the last moment, because a full-scale attack on Ukraine, guaranteed to spill the blood of Ukrainian civilians, is the worst war crime a Russian can possibly commit. Even the inevitable parallels with Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria, which I drew before when Putin took Crimea and when he published his historical screed assailing Ukraine as an “anti-Russian project,” do not do justice to what happened in the early hours of Feb. 24.

To make the curse permanent, God marked Cain to make sure no one would kill him to end his suffering. Russia, with the nuclear arsenal Putin keeps bragging about, also bears a kind of Cain’s mark now. It is not Putin who is cursed now —  it’s all of us Russians. Our identity, wherever we are, will be tainted by this invasion, by our failure to stop the dictator long before he crossed this unspeakable line.

The reaction to Pakistan’s first women’s march was relatively mild: criticism and condemnation from Islamist parties and conservatives, who called the participants “anti-religion” and “vulgar.”

That did not deter the organizers of the 2018 march in Karachi, the significance of which reverberates to this day.

powerful figures in Pakistan want the event banned altogether.

Every era has a figure who strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person of the still-young 21st century.

Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.

In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression upended a widespread belief that commerce and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new age of peace.