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Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”

“They want to fight a culture war in America,” he added. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”

But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.

An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles.

More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” is set to be released over the next months.

while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.

At Cambridge, professors and students alike are afraid to speak critically, or at all, on the subject of gender.

Believing that biological sex is binary and unchangeable – and that gender is culturally constructed – may not seem controversial. Yet gender-critical feminists who hold such mainstream views are often slapped with a derogatory label: Terf, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

heir beliefs, let’s remember, are far from radical: they think that conflating gender with sex leads to violations of the rights of women, children and gay and lesbian people.

Last week, Facebook confirmed that Cambridge Analytica , a data firm hired by President Trump’s campaign, had violated the company’s policies when it purchased the data of 50 million users from a researcher who accessed it in 2013. The stock plunged, lawmakers began demanding answers and users threatened to quit the social network altogether.

Although the trove of information used by Cambridge Analytica was downloaded before 2015, the year Facebook implemented stricter data policies, it has exposed an ugly truth for the social network: user information that was accessed during the company’s earlier years can still be abused today.

The cryptocurrency’s value has dipped recently after passing a high of $50,000 but the energy used to create it has continued to soar during its epic rise, climbing to the equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of Argentina, according to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a tool from researchers at Cambridge University that measures the currency’s energy use.

Now that over 18.5m bitcoin have been mined, the average computer can no longer mine bitcoins. Instead, mining now requires special computer equipment that can handle the intense processing power needed to get bitcoin today. And, of course, these special computers need a lot of electricity to run.

Proponents of bitcoin say that mining is increasingly being done with electricity from renewable sources as that type of energy becomes cheaper, and the energy used is far lower than that of other, more wasteful, uses of power. The energy wasted by plugged-in but inactive home devices in the US alone could power bitcoin mining for 1.8 years, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

In 2016, Donald Trump's campaign targeted 3.5 million Black Americans with negative ads about Hillary Clinton to try and deter them from voting in the last presidential election, according to a new report from the UK's Channel 4 News.

Using a database collected in part by the company Cambridge Analytica, the Trump digital campaign team marked voters in key swing states as "deterrence," or voters they wish to remain at home on Election Day, with African Americans making up a disproportionate amount of those voters,

"They were trying to deter people from voting, because they knew they couldn't win them over," Guru-Murthy told CNN International's Becky Anderson on Tuesday.

Dr. Peterson integrates psychology, history and mythology to describe how people behave and what they can do to live fulfilling lives

He makes tasks like cleaning one’s room or finding a career sound like dragon-slaying voyages. His lectures infuse ordinary activities with new meaning.

In psychological terms, what many people who become Jordan Peterson fans are looking for is called self-efficacy — belief in our ability to achieve goals

“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,” she said.

All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.

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.

the COVID-19 pandemic may have played a large role in exacerbating gender divisions in the electorate. This split wasn’t enough for Trump to win this time, of course, but his attitude toward the coronavirus crisis may actually have been a bonus for some men, which could present a real challenge for Biden moving forward.

Overall, most Americans consistently disapproved of the way Trump handled the pandemic, but the AEI poll found one notable exception — men who identify as “completely masculine.”1

a majority (52 percent) of men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19

A total of 13% of Americans polled in a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project agreed with the statement that the climate is changing “but human activity is not responsible at all”. A further 5% said the climate was not changing.

despite these views, the great majority of US citizens do accept the science of climate change, with nearly four in 10 saying human activity was at least partly responsible, potentially with other factors, and a further third taking the stronger view that human activity is the dominant cause.

Americans also appear unusually prone to climate-related conspiracy theories, the YouGov data suggests. A total of 17% of those polled agreed that “the idea of manmade global warming is a hoax that was invented to deceive people”.

J.G.A. Pocock, who brought new perspectives to historical scholarship by arguing that the first step in understanding events of the past is to identify their linguistic and intellectual context

Among the most important were “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century” (1957), “The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition” (1975) and, most notably, “Barbarism and Religion,” a six-volume study of the life and times of Edward Gibbon,

Professor Pocock, Quentin Skinner and other like-minded scholars, known collectively as the Cambridge School, came to prominence in the late 1960s with a fresh approach to the study of political thought, characterized by an emphasis on context and an unwillingness to assume that all ideas and problems were viewed in the past as they would be viewed today.

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

Our species evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Scientists are still working out how humans later populated the other continents

A lot of evidence indicates that Native Americans originated from a population somewhere in Asia more than 15,000 years ago. In search of clues to that founding population, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues examined a 24,000-year-old bone buried near a village called Mal’ta in eastern Siberia.

the Mal’ta boy belonged to an ancient population spread out across Asia 24,000 years ago. They came into contact with an East Asian population at some point, and members of the two groups had children together. Native Americans are the descendants of those children.

Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a policy of mass detention. This system – “Britain’s gulag”, as Elkins called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.

“I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. “Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.” After nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead”.

lkins knew her findings would be explosive. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. Felicitous timing helped. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. It was a moment when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his sympathetic writing on British colonialism. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. Then came Bagram. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. These controversies primed readers for stories about the underside of empire.

Britain's Prince Charles co-authors a book on climate change

Penguin Books says Prince Charles has co-authored a book on climate change together with an environmentalist and a Cambridge scientist.

The book launched Sunday is part of Ladybird book series, which traditionally targeted children but has recently expanded to a broader audience. It uses the original style of a picture book but offers adults "bite-sized understanding on a sometimes challenging subject."

the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado, announced that the Arctic sea ice had reached a new low. The sea ice shrinks in the summer and grows again during winter’s long polar night. It usually reaches its minimum extent in mid-September. On September 16, 2012, the N.S.I.D.C. reported, the sea ice covered 1.3 million square miles. This was just half of its average extent during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly twenty per cent less than its extent in 2007, the previous record-low year.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this development. We are now seeing changes occur in a matter of years that, in the normal geological scheme of things, should take thousands, even millions of times longer than that. On the basis of the 2012 melt season, one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic ice cap, Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, has predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer by 2016. Since open water absorbs sunlight, while ice tends to reflect it, this will accelerate global warming. Meanwhile, recent research suggests that the melting of the Arctic ice cap will have, and indeed is probably already having, a profound effect on the U.S. and Europe, making extreme weather events much more likely. As Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Rutgers, observed recently in a conference call with reporters, the loss of sea ice changes the dynamics of the entire system: “It’s like having a new energy source for the atmosphere.”

You might have thought that with the Arctic melting, the U.S. in the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, and more than sixty per cent of the lower forty-eight states experiencing “moderate to exceptional” drought, at least one of the candidates would feel compelled to speak out about the issue. If that’s the case, though, you probably live in a different country.