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Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS division—the only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II

hasn’t been told before in English

three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion

There are two procedural issues on which, it seems to me, true conservatives should be outraged at Republicans. The first is the massive, unprecedented, destructive and radical use of a non-filibuster filibuster to make the Senate unable to pass anything significant without 60 votes, rather than 51 (or 50 with the veep). This is not conservative. It's a blatant attack on tradition in defense of pure partisanship.

Most Americans aren't fully aware that a filibuster today doesn't need even a few minutes of what we always thought of as filibustering. The filibusterers barely have to speak at all. They just have to signal their intent to, and the entire legislative process grinds to a halt. This gives a minority party a near-veto that should be solely the preserve of the president. That's an attack on our Constitution. Expose them, Mr President, as the revolutionaries they are. Mock them. Expose their laziness and obstructionism at a time when a huge majority wants compromise; and the country and the world need it.

The second is the outrageous ploy to threaten to destroy the country's credit rating every time there is a conflict over debt. This is a form of legislative terrorism. It is an attack on the entire country in defense of a single fanatical faction.

check this section out from the study he cites: Marijuana intoxication can cause distorted perceptions, impaired coordination, difficulty with thinking and problem solving, and problems with learning and memory. Research has shown that, in chronic users, marijuana's adverse impact on learning and memory can last for days or weeks after the acute effects of the drug wear off. As a result, someone who smokes marijuana every day may be functioning at a suboptimal intellectual level all of the time.

At what point could this not be said of alcohol as well? And yet alcohol is far more addictive, far more related to social problems and violence, and daily drinking of large amounts can be dreadful for the liver (see graph above).

There's also what the study does not analyze: the whole point of marijuana use is to disrupt settled ways of thinking and feeling, to offer a respite, like alcohol, from the deadliness of doing. But for  reasons we don't quite yet understand, marijuana, like other essentially harmless drugs in moderation, can prompt imaginative breakthroughs, creative serendipity, deeper personal understanding, and greater social empathy and connection.

, a brilliant piece of film-making. The direction, acting, and cinematography make it as good as The Hurt Locker. The attention to detail is stunning, and the raw, granular honesty of its dialogue manages to avoid the tired tropes of action movies. It's entirely believable.

the film shows without any hesitation that the United States brutally tortured countless suspects - innocent and guilty - in ways that shock the conscience.

The acts that Lynndie England was convicted for are here displayed - correctly - as official policy, ordered from the very top. In that way, the movie is not an apology for torture, as so many have said, and as I have worried about. It is an exposure of torture

Tom Wolfe headlines Newsweek’s first digital-only issue with a return to Wall Street 25 years after his classic novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Read his searing indictment of how the world of finance went wrong and who the new Masters of the Universe are.

there is, I believe, a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future.

this cynicism, which sounds realistic and worldly-wise, is actually sheer fantasy. Ending stimulus has never been a problem — in fact, the historical record shows that it almost always ends too soon. And in America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion

In the United States, government spending programs designed to boost the economy are in fact rare — F.D.R.’s New Deal and President Obama’s much smaller Recovery Act are the only big examples. And neither program became permanent — in fact, both were scaled back much too soon. F.D.R. cut back sharply in 1937, plunging America back into recession; the Recovery Act had its peak effect in 2010, and has since faded away, a fade that has been a major reason for our slow recovery.

“self-radicalization”—the process by which those unconnected to organized jihad are lured toward extremism via the Web.

how exactly does this process work? How does one become so imbued with hatred online as to be willing to pack a pressure cooker with ball bearings and detonate it at the feet of an 8-year-old boy? What Internet “community” could motivate a floppy-haired teenager to send hot shrapnel into the body of a Chinese exchange student?

The constant on my feed—the thing that made me long for the Facebook where high-school friends squabbled about the efficacy of gun control legislation—was ceaseless images of dead children, mostly killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The GOP base consists of white people who are terrified of losing their skin privilege in Barack Obama’s America. Even if Priebus and a few other Republicans are sincere in their efforts, the minute they start to take steps that are anything but symbolic and that are aimed specifically at trying to win over blacks or Latinos, the base will howl to the moon. I suppose it’s possible that two or three generations from now, which means 30 to 50 years, white Republicans who grew up in our multicultural era will have different attitudes. But even that is a fairly big question mark—there are always going to be vast sections of the country where the population will be 90 or more percent white.

Changing all this can’t be done with some buzzwords and slogans. It is going to be a deeply painful and contentious process for the GOP. I’d say it will be amusing for the rest of us, but it will inject enough poison into the body politic to make it not much fun for anyone.

"No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site," wrote Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in a provocatively titled 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium."

"My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people -- not all of them, but most of them -- who are still basing their positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that's despicable," - Laurence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff for Colin Powell.

‘Islamic State’ Turning Into a Guerrilla Army, Top General Warns

The capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq is now under assault. But ISIS isn’t going anywhere. Instead, the terror group is beginning to rebrand itself from a “caliphate” to an insurgency

It could well mean that there will be no “lasting defeat” of ISIS, even if it loses control of Iraq’s second-largest city, despite Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s claim of such a victory just four days ago

Even Trump’s Kids Haven’t Donated to His Campaign

With less than two weeks until the election, Donald Trump has amassed an impressive army of small donors, fueling his bid with individual contributions of $200 or less. But noticeably absent from the list of contributors is basically anyone with the last name Trump, many of the surrogates who represent The Donald on national television, and members of his own campaign staff.

On Sept. 7, 2016, Eric Trump appears to have contributed $376.20 listed only as “meeting expense: meals.”

Five for FiveMeet the Professor Whose ‘Primary Model’ Says Trump Has 87% Chance to Win

“The model says Trump has between an 87 and 99 percent chance to be president,” he said.

But Norpoth has been right every single time he’s done this—five for five over the last 20 years.

Cruz: ‘Pitchforks and Torches’ If GOP Doesn’t ‘Deliver’ on Promises

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Republican voters would take up “pitchforks and torches” if the party’s leaders don’t deliver on the promises that propelled Donald Trump to the White House and gave the GOP full control of Congress.

“And I think quite rightly. I think people are so fed up with Washington. This election was a mandate with change, and the most catastrophic thing Republicans could do is go back to business as usual.”

Jeff Sessions Wanted to ‘Drop the Case’ Against KKK Lynching, Attorney Testified

they’re sure to include questions that were raised when he was nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986. His confirmation was derailed largely by the testimony of Thomas Figures, an assistant U.S. attorney in Alabama when Sessions was U.S. attorney.

Sessions and his supporters, then as now, defend his civil rights record based on several cases to which Figures was also assigned, including the conviction of Henry Hays for the 1981 murder by lynching of a Donald Figures.

South Korean Prosecutors Seek to Arrest Samsung Head for Bribery

Jay Y. Lee, the head of Samsung Group, in a massive bribery scandal that goes all the way up to the president’s office

accusations he paid multi-million dollar bribes to a friend of President Park Geun-hye in order to secure business deals

NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts

Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural

America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture

Big Win Over ISIS Could Mean a New War

But the potential seizure of the Syrian city of Manbij by U.S.-backed forces is only likely to set off a new battle for control—this time pitting Arabs against Kurds.

On the other hand, some worry that a Kurdish controlled Manbij could be ethnically cleansed, creating the kind of Sunni disenfranchisement that led to the rise of ISIS.