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A lot of the work is educational, Chae said. At a police-run facility, visitors are shown objects that contain a hidden camera: a baseball hat, a belt, a watch, a lighter, a USB stick, a necktie, a set of car keys. A sign warns that a man could install a camera in his shoe. There are even two hidden cameras in the room. Visitors are asked: Can you spot them?

Violators currently face up to five years in prison or a fine of up to about $9,000. Police statistics from the past five years showed that only 5.3 percent of those indicted on illegal filming charges went to prison, Kim said

all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints. “There are many police officers who’ve had a cloud fall over them because of an unfounded accusation of abuse,” he said. “Now police officers won’t have to worry so much about that kind of thing.”

Negotiations continue in Vienna to see if both the U.S. and Iran can re-enter the deal, which limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Iran and the U.S. aren’t directly negotiating, however.

He also acknowledged Iran’s upcoming June 18 presidential election could mean new faces at the negotiating table. So far, Grossi has been dealing with the administration of the relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani, which clinched the nuclear deal. Analysts believe hard-liners have an edge going into the vote.

But they made an even more devastating case by chronicling his inaction as commander-in-chief during the most frightening moments of the siege with clips from Twitter, Parler and YouTube; cell phone footage from reporters and members of Congress; desperate police radio dispatches calling for backup; officer body camera footage that was marked as being obtained by the US attorney's office; and an array of surveillance camera footage from across the Capitol that captured a bird's-eye view of key moments.

Wielding the element of surprise by unearthing many previously unreleased videos, they showed the harrowing moments where then-Vice President Mike Pence, his wife and daughter, were rushed to safety down a narrow stairway on the Senate side of the Capitol. They juxtaposed that surveillance video from an overhead Capitol camera with a video shot from within the angry mob outside chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" -- then crystallized the danger with a chilling photograph of a noose and a gallows that was erected that day outside the Capitol.

The managers tried to give it all context by showing Trump's tweet attacking Pence two minutes before the vice president was evacuated down those steps

To rebut Trump's defenders' claims that he did not incite violence and had no bearing on the events that unfolded that afternoon, the managers then showed video of a Trump loyalist outside the Capitol reading the former President's tweet accusing Pence of disloyalty in real time over a bullhorn as anger mounted.

Never before in history have Americans seen one attack on their nation from so many different perspectives. For hours, the managers outlined in painstaking detail what unfolded in each critical minute of the siege with timestamps — later played back against the President's actions or inaction. Sometimes, they showed the same few minutes or seconds from the vantage point of two or three different videos to punctuate their arguments. The montages were brutal, searing and unforgettable.JUST WATCHED'Storm the Capitol!': Rioters react to Trump speechReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH PlayM19.15 55.34l30.07-20a4 4 0 0 0 0-6.66l-30.07-20A4 4 0 0 0

At another point, impeachment managers tried to portray the danger that staff members felt as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was being hunted down by rioters who pounded on doors demanding to know where she was.

"They're pounding the doors trying to find her," the aide whispers into the phone. The bookend to the call was a video from minutes later, showing a rioter jamming his shoulder into an outer door and then breaking through near where they were hiding, before turning away.

In another near miss, new surveillance video showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman sprinting down a Senate hallway to respond to the breach, encountering Sen. Mitt Romney and gesturing for the Utah Republican, who had been critical of Trump's baseless election rhetoric, to turn and run in another direction to avoid encountering the mob.

The Democratic managers also used shaky, disjointed video to try to capture the confusion and fear that ensued when a Capitol Police officer shot pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt

The gunshot is heard, then a gasp of profanity capturing the fear in that moment: "Take your pins off," members are heard telling one another. Swalwell noted that the buzzing sound in the background of the video emanated from the gas masks members were holding.

At 4:17 p.m. Trump finally tweeted an on-camera message telling rioters to disperse. A video displayed during the trial Wednesday showed the "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley, who was seen inside the Capitol dressed in horns, a fur headdress and red, white and blue face paint, back outside on Capitol grounds telling others a short while later that Trump had released a video message conveying that they should all now go home.

Especially in contrast to comments on YouTube, the conversations on Vimeo are unusually positive and constructive. This is thanks, in part, to Vimeo's role as a forum for low-budget filmmaking.

Since Canon released its 5D Mark II DSLR, a digital still camera with HD video, in 2008, the proliferation of inexpensive cameras has driven both an explosion in high-quality video content and a cottage industry around working with the cameras. Because DSLRs aren't optimal for video production, videomakers have had to figure out workarounds

video equipment is now good enough that it doesn't need to need to take center stage.

Credential stuffing is “at the root of probably 90 percent of the things we see happening,” said Emmanuel Schalit, chief executive of Dashlane, a password manager that allows people to store unique, random passwords in one place. Only about 1 percent of Internet users, he said, use some kind of password manager.

The company was forced to respond. “Nest was not breached,” it said in a January statement. “These recent reports are based on customers using compromised passwords,” it said, urging its customers to use two-factor authentication. Nest started forcing some users to change their passwords.

According to at least one expert, though, Nest users are still exposed. Hank Fordham, a security researcher, sat in his Calgary, Alberta, home recently and opened up a credential-stuffing software program known as Snipr. Instantly, Fordham said, he found thousands of Nest accounts that he could access. Had he wanted to, he would have been able to view cameras and change thermostat settings with relative ease.

Snipr, which costs $20 to download, is easier to use. Snipr provides the code required to check whether hundreds of the most popular platforms, such as “League of Legends” and Netflix, are accessible with a bunch of usernames and passwords — and those have become abundantly available all over the Internet

The reason Nest has not employed all of Google’s know-how on security goes back to Nest’s roots, according to Nest and people with knowledge of its history. Founded in 2010 by longtime Apple executive Tony Fadell, Nest promised at the time that it would not collect data on users for marketing purposes

A state of emergency is now in effect in Elizabeth City, the county seat. The city also closed all its government offices for the day, citing the potential for public unrest once the video becomes public.

City police also announced downtown road closures around the county courthouse and sheriff's office on Monday, saying the streets "are closed for citizens exercising their constitutional right to a peaceful protest."

Initial details about Brown's death "are tragic and extremely concerning," North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said on Friday. He added, "The body camera footage should be made public as quickly as possible and the SBI should investigate thoroughly to ensure accountability."

I think a lot of Chinese people feel more secure from the cameras, there’s been a lot of propaganda out there saying the cameras are here for your safety. There is this extremely positive, almost Utopian take on technology in China, and a lot of the stuff that I think, our knee-jerk response from the United States would be to be worried about, they kind of embrace as a vision of the future. .

The main reasons WeChat is a concern if you were the United States government is number one, it’s become a major vector of the spread of Chinese propaganda and censorship, and because it’s a social network that is anchored by a vast majority of users in China who are censored and who are receptive to all this propaganda, even if you’re overseas using WeChat and not censored in the same way, what you get is mostly content shared from people who are living in a censored environment, so it basically stays a censored environment. I call that a super filter bubble; the idea is that there are multiple filter bubbles contending in a website like Facebook, but with WeChat, because it’s so dominated by government controls, you get one really big mega pro-China filter bubble that then is spread all over the the world over the app, even if people outside of China don’t face the same censorship. So that’s one thing.

The second is the surveillance is immense and anybody who creates an account in China brings the surveillance with them overseas

And most people, frankly, using WeChat overseas probably created the accounts in China, and even when they don’t create the account in China, when national security priorities hit a certain level, I think they’re probably going to use it to monitor people anyway. I’ve run into a number of people who have had run-ins with the Chinese Internet Police either in China, but some of them outside of China, in their day-to-day life using WeChat, and then they return home and it becomes apparent that the Internet Police were watching them the whole time, and they get a visit and the police have a discussion with them about what their activities have been

So it’s also a major way that the Chinese government is able to spy on and monitor people overseas and then unsurprisingly, because of that, it’s used as a way for the Chinese intel services to harass people overseas. . . .

WeChat is particularly suited to this in part because every single person who uses WeChat within China has it linked to their real identity. And then because everybody on WeChat has linked to their real identity, you can map their relationship networks and lean on them that way.

It also has a bunch of tools that the Chinese police use, for instance key words, where you can set an alarm so that if you were to say “Tiananmen”, they could set an alarm so that anytime you say that they get a warning about that, and then they go look at what you’ve written. So there’s all these tools that are uniquely created for Chinese state surveillance that are within the app that they can also use, so there’s a bunch of ways that the app is just better.

It’s also one of the very few unblocked communication tools that goes between the two countries. So for all these reasons it’s a very, very big deal. For the Chinese government, it’s an important tool of social control, and it’s been a way that they’ve been able to take the social controls that exist within China and expand them to the diaspora community in some pretty unnerving ways.

Rulennis called a county crisis intervention line to see if Ricardo could be committed for inpatient care. It was Sunday afternoon. The crisis worker told her to call the police to see if the officers could petition a judge to force Ricardo to go to the hospital for psychiatric treatment, in what's called an involuntary commitment. Reluctant to call 911, and wanting more information, Rulennis dialed the non-emergency police number.

It was a tragedy for the Muñoz family — but it's not that unusual. According to a Washington Post tracker, police killed about a thousand people in the U.S. in the past 12 months. Like Ricardo, a quarter of those people had a diagnosis of a serious mental illness.

When the dispatcher questioned Deborah further, she also mentioned that Ricardo was trying "to break into" his mom's house. She didn't mention that Ricardo also lived in that house. She did mention that her mother "was afraid" to go back home with him.

The Muñoz family has since emphasized that Ricardo was never a threat to them. However, by the time police got the message, they believed they were responding to a "domestic disturbance."

"Within minutes of ... that phone call, he was dead," Rulennis says.

A Lancaster police officer walked toward the house. Ricardo saw the officer approach through the living room window, and he ran upstairs to his bedroom. When he came back down, he had a hunting knife in his hand.

In video from a police body camera, an unidentified officer walks toward the Muñoz residence. Ricardo steps outside, and shouts "Get the f—k back." Ricardo comes down the stairs of the stoop and runs toward the officer. The officer starts running down the sidewalk, but after a few steps, he turns back toward Ricardo, gun in hand, and shoots him several times. Within minutes, Ricardo is dead.

After Ricardo crumples to the sidewalk, his mother's screams can be heard, off camera. Police made the body camera video public a few hours after Ricardo's death, in an effort to dispel rumors about Ricardo's death and quell rioting in the city. The county district attorney has since deemed the shooting justified, and the officer's name was never made public.

A recording and transcript of the 911 call show that the dispatcher gave Deborah three options: police, fire or ambulance. Deborah wasn't sure, so she said "police." Then she went on to explain that Ricardo was being aggressive, had a mental illness and needed to go to the hospital.

Across the U.S., people with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely than the overall population to be killed by police, according to one study from the mental health nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center.

Miguelina Peña, says she tried for years to get help for her son.

Among the problems, the family couldn't find a psychiatrist who was taking new patients, Peña says. Additionally, Peña speaks little English, and that made it difficult to help Ricardo enroll in health insurance, or for her to understand what treatments he was receiving. Ricardo got his prescriptions through a local nonprofit clinic for Latino men, Nuestra Clinica.

Instead of consistent medical care and a trusted therapeutic relationship, Ricardo got treatment that was sporadic and fueled by crisis: He often ended up in the hospital for a few days, then would be discharged back home with little or no follow-up. This happened more times than his mother and sisters can recall.

Laws in Pennsylvania and many other states make it difficult for a family to get psychiatric care for someone who doesn't want it; it can only be imposed on the person if he or she poses an immediate threat, says Angela Kimball, advocacy and public policy director at National Alliance on Mental illness. By that point, it's often law enforcement, rather than mental health professionals, who are called in to help.

"Law enforcement comes in and exerts a threatening posture," Kimball says. "For most people, that causes them to be subdued. But if you're experiencing a mental illness, that only escalates the situation."

"Dialing 911 will accelerate a response by emergency personnel, most often police," she says. "This option should be used for extreme crisis situations that require immediate intervention. These first responders may or may not be appropriately trained and experienced in de-escalating psychiatric emergencies."

The National Alliance on Mental Illness continues to advocate for more resources for families dealing with a mental health crisis. The group says more cities should create crisis response teams that can respond at all hours, without involving armed police officers in most situations.

There has been progress on the federal level, as well. Kimball was happy when President Trump signed a bipartisan Congressional bill, on Oct. 17, to implement a three-digit national suicide prevention hotline. The number — 988 — will eventually summon help when dialed anywhere in the country. But it could take a few years before the system is up and running.

"And instead of a cop just being there, there should have been other responders," Rulennis says. "There should have been someone that knew how to deal with this type of situation."

This finding is the latest example of how tough it is to vet products we buy online. Buggy software in off-brand smart devices is a recurring problem

digital marketplaces such as Amazon have done little to rein in offending manufacturers. Combine that with sponsored search results and opaque labeling — Amazon repeatedly called the Eken doorbells an “Amazon’s Choice: Overall Pick” — and shoppers have little recourse to figure out which devices are safe.

Smaller brands churn out smart lightbulbs and speakers to compete with bigger companies, often cutting corners on security. Big brands, meanwhile, do a better job with security but create new privacy concerns — do we really want Amazon peeking into every corner of our homes? Efforts to label consumer tech with simple security facts have languished.

Meanwhile, large online marketplaces put unvetted gadgets in front of millions of shoppers. In January alone, Amazon sold 4,200 Eken doorbells under 11 product listings, according to Consumer Reports. Whether you’re shopping for smart home tech or a simple tank top, having to navigate a sea of unfamiliar brands and dubious product reviews is now common

There is, instead, a practiced authenticity. The biggest stars — even Kylie Jenner — get ahead by giving you deep access to their real lives. As a result, much of what you see on Snapchat feels less like a performance than on other networks. People aren’t fishing for likes and follows and reshares. For better or worse, they’re trying to be real.

The diminution of personalization algorithms and virality also plays into how Snapchat treats news. Snapchat’s primary format is called a Story, a slide show of a user’s video clips that are played in chronological order. This, too, is an innovation; before Snapchat, much online content, from blogs to tweets, was consumed in reverse chronological order, from the most recent to the oldest. Snapchat’s Stories, which have since been widely copied, ushered in a more natural order — start at the beginning and go from there.

insiders at Snapchat noticed that Stories were an ideal vehicle for relaying news. They could be crowdsourced: If a lot of people were at a concert or sporting event or somewhere that breaking news was occurring, a lot of them were likely to be snapping what was happening. If Snapchat offered them a way to submit their clips, it could spot the best ones and add them to a narrative compilation of the event.

Snapchat began hiring producers and reporters to assemble clips into in-depth pieces.

Every day, Snapchat offers one or several stories about big and small events happening in the world, including football games, awards shows and serious news.

Snapchat has said that it thinks of itself as a camera company rather than a social network. This sounds like marketing puffery (after all, it only just started making its first actual camera, Spectacles), but I think its determination to set itself apart from the rest of the tech industry is important to note. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“It was frightening. I’d surrendered myself to these guerillas, men the Americans were hunting and I had found, not knowing if they were friends or if they were going to kill me. I guess I knew it was insane, but I couldn’t help myself,”

They also began filming beheadings on camera, a tactic that has become one of the signatures of Islamic State.

When al-Zarqawi wanted to declare his arrival on the global stage he released a video through Ware. Other insurgents also gave him videos filmed during their actions. This was before the rise of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

“But it was at this moment, where there’s two of them arguing about how to work my camera, that my insurgent escort finally piped up and stepped in and said that they could not kill me. He said that there will be a turf war between our two groups if you kill this man because he’s our guest, and it was only through gritted teeth that Zarqawi’s men literally pushed me back and I became the only Westerner who ever survives Zarqawi’s organisation.”

While the Iraqi Prime Minister has made comments this week that Islamic State did not start in Iraq, but in Syria, Ware said this was “absolutely wrong”.“We of the West removed the regime of Saddam Hussein, we presented a new platform for global jihad, right there in the Middle East. And the man who stepped into that breach was the founder of the Islamic State, a man called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”

He said that the only way to regain control of Ramadi was for the local population and the Sunni tribes to rise up again as they did in 2006 and 2007 but this was almost certainly not going to happen. “It’s not a battle that can be won,” he said.

“A soldier once wrote that there’s certain dark chambers of the heart that once opened can never be closed again. And when you’re living that human experience in war, which is stretched to its extreme, you start to find these places within your own self,” Ware told Lateline.

“In so many ways, the experience of going to war is humbling. It brings you a whole new perspective to life. I will never see the world the same way again, and in so many ways, that’s a privilege. That from now on, every day is a gift, for me and for so many of my friends. And I wouldn’t trade that. But it takes work to get there, as any soldier will tell you. Often, the homecoming is harder than the war itself.”

Daily Deals

the main lesson of the analysis is a sobering one. The rise of inequality over the last four decades has created two very different Americas, and life is a lot harder in one of them.

Income has stagnated in working-class communities, which helps explain why “selling avon” and “social security checks” correlate with the hardest places from our index. Inequality in health and life expectancy has grown over the same time. And searches on diabetes, lupus, blood pressure, 1,500-calorie diets and “ssi disability” – a reference to the federal benefits program for workers with health problems – also make the list. Guns, meanwhile, are in part a cultural preference, but they are also a health risk.

In the places on the other end of the spectrum, the picture is much brighter. People have disposable income to buy new technology and take faraway vacations. Their time spent prostrate on a foam roller or out running with the baby in a jogging stroller is more than enough to make up the occasional cupcake. And of course they are intent on passing down their way of life to the next generation, via Baby Bjorns and early access to technology.

The video showed deputies repeatedly firing at the man, even after he fell to the ground. The Sheriff's Department said the man had fired shots into the air and pointed the weapon at the deputies before they opened fire. Officials also said they recovered a loaded .45-caliber handgun at the scene.

The incident comes amid increasing public scrutiny over police-involved shootings both in the Los Angeles area and nationwide. Over the last two years, the Los Angeles Police Department has dealt with several controversial shootings by officers, including one involving an unarmed homeless man on skid row that was also captured on video. That case is still under investigation.

The suspect, whose name has not been released by the Sheriff's Department, was pronounced dead at the scene. No deputies were injured. Relatives identified the suspect as Nicholas Robertson, 28.

At the shooting site, more than a dozen people gathered in protest Saturday evening, holding signs and yelling into megaphones, “No more stolen lives!” Helmet-clad deputies formed a line and looked on, and one recorded the scene with a video camera.

In the 29-second video obtained by KTLA and filmed from a restaurant across the street, a sheriff's deputy follows Robertson as he appears to be walking away from the deputy.

According to authorities, witnesses said that moments before, Robertson turned and pointed the gun at the deputies.At least a dozen gunshots are then heard, and Robertson falls to the ground. He drags himself on the ground alongside an Arco gas station.

A brief pause in gunfire follows, then shots begin once more.When the camera pans back, two deputies can be seen a few yards way, both with arms up, pointing their weapons in Robertson's direction.

Seth Stoughton, a criminal law professor at the University of South Carolina and a former Tampa, Fla., police officer, said there are circumstances under which an officer can shoot at a suspect walking away from them. “If the deputies reasonably believe the suspect with a firearm presents a danger by walking toward a gas station with vehicles and bystanders, they would be justified in using deadly force.

“It does not strike me as egregious like [the] Walter Scott video here in South Carolina.... If the suspect wasn't armed or they didn't have a solid basis for that belief, that would more problematic,” Stoughton said. More facts, he cautioned, are needed to determine what occurred outside the video.

Once the suspect is on the ground, how close the gun is to him is key in whether shots are justified, he added.

Experts familiar with use-of-force cases said deputies will need to explain why they opened fire and continued to shoot as Robertson was on the ground.

“They are going to have to articulate why they made every one of those shots,” said Ed Obayashi, an Inyo County deputy and an attorney. “They must show they reasonably used deadly force.”

Just two blocks away, a big order of tacos was picked up after midnight on Jan. 8 by a man driving a white van, like the one believed to be driven by Mr. Guzmán’s associates, witnesses said.

Hours later, on a highway heading out of town, the authorities finally got Mr. Guzmán, arguably the most powerful drug dealer in the history of the trade, for the third time since 1993.

Mr. Guzmán’s capture — described using information from interviews with witnesses and government officials, police reports, military video and Mexican news reports confirmed by officials — brings to a close, for now, one of the most exhaustive manhunts the Mexican government has conducted, an endeavor that drew in more than 2,500 people across the nation.

As the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Mr. Guzmán is the embodiment of an identity the country has fought to shed for decades.

Either way, Mr. Guzmán represents a deep crisis for Mexico’s leaders as they struggle to define the country’s image.

His daring escape from prison last July, in view of the video camera in his cell, cast a lurid spotlight on the incompetence and corruption that has long dogged the Mexican state, driving many to view the government on a par with criminals.

El Chapo’s image, by contrast, seemed only to grow after his escapes. Perhaps more than the infamy he gained as a cartel chief — responsible for shipping tons of drugs to more than 50 countries around the world, with a wider reach than even Pablo Escobar in his heyday — Mr. Guzmán has earned a reputation as the world’s pre-eminent escape artist.

During the 17 months Mr. Guzmán was locked up, he met often with associates, not only to plan his legal defense, but also to plot his escape, Mexican officials said. His men purchased land within sight of the prison, constructing an outer wall and an unfinished building on the site. From there, a mile away, the digging began.

The Mexican authorities were monitoring the phones of Mr. Guzmán and his accomplices, reading the odd and unexpectedly tender exchanges between him and the actress. Mr. Guzmán promised to protect Ms. del Castillo as he would his own eyes, an affectionate phrase Mexican parents often say of their children.

Six days later, a detachment of marines swept in to capture Mr. Guzmán on his ranch, acting with information from American authorities. During the raid, Mr. Guzmán, who always took his two cooks with him wherever he went, darted into a gully as he fled, injuring his face and leg.

In the following weeks, operations continued in and around areas under Mr. Guzmán’s control. The brutal weather of an approaching winter also concerned the cartel leader — Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, where life could be more comfortable, was under constant surveillance. He needed to go somewhere outside his traditional zone of influence.

The government, aware that Mr. Guzmán was planning a trip to an urban center, followed one of his associates to a house in Los Mochis, on a busy road with a movie theater, restaurants and shopping nearby.

A commander ordered one of the marines to toss a grenade in front of one of the many doors blocking their advance. As the mission continued, two marines advanced down another hallway, pressing cautiously toward a staircase used by the surviving gunmen to escape to the roof, drawing fire away from the interior of the house.

After the marines arrived, Mr. Guzmán was taken to Mexico City in a helicopter, the capture finally over. Soon everyone was gone, leaving behind just one thing: an unpaid bill, according to an employee of the hotel.

To keep him locked up this time, the authorities said they would rotate his cells, never allowing him to stay anywhere long enough to burrow his way out again. Vigilance would be enhanced, with more officers and round-the-clock surveillance from extra cameras.

But to many, the longer the drug lord remains in prison in Mexico, the higher the risk of flight. His imprisonment could drag on for a year, perhaps longer, given the numerous — and creative — injunctions filed by his team of lawyers to fight his extradition to the United States, where he faces federal indictments on charges that include narcotics trafficking and murder.

“Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.”

Beard is one of three “presenters” (or hosts) of the series, joining the historians Simon Schama and David Olusoga for a round-the-world, millennia-spanning tour of human hustle and bustle. The series has its faults of pacing and plotting, but it offers plenty of opportunities for Beard-like tingles

The new program is best understood as a kind of delayed rebuttal, sometimes quite explicit, to Clark and his view of history

The association is all to the good, and to Clark’s benefit, if it leads audiences back to civilization, and Civilisation, all 13 episodes of which are playing 24/7 at your neighborhood YouTube.

He wasn’t a natural TV star, but he was an accomplished lecturer, a brilliant stylist, and an unrivaled historian of art. When, in 1966, the BBC decided to produce a series on the history of European culture, Clark was the unanimous choice for presenter.

The job fell to the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough to introduce color to the BBC audience. He got the idea to film a survey of the greatest artworks of Europe, as a way of bringing color into British living rooms as tastefully and vividly (and cheaply) as possible.

It is hard to imagine, at this remove and with the conventions of documentary TV so well established, how strange Civilisation must have seemed 50 years ago. Color was just the first of the technological innovations, and the range of subjects and locales was unheard of

No one had seen a single presenter so dominate a nonfiction program of such length as Clark did. Unprecedented too were the long stretches in which Clark disappeared, leaving the camera to move tenderly over the surface of something beautiful.

The narration, full of anecdote and grand pronouncements, was pitched at the highest level, without condescension or pedantry

About that word civilization, the mere utterance of which set Clark off on his great televised adventure. He confronts it in the first episode’s opening moments, as he stands on the banks of the Seine with Notre-Dame Cathedral rising up behind him. “What is civilization?” he asks us. Then, amazingly—this is, after all, the title of his TV show—he shrugs! “I don’t know,” he says. It is a shrug at once amused, modest, and perhaps genuinely baffled. “I can’t define it in abstract terms. But I think I can recognize it when I see it.” He turns to look over his shoulder at the cathedral. “And I’m looking at it now.”

a sense of civilization’s meaning, by his lights, forms soon enough. Throughout the programs certain words come up over and over: enlarge, deepen, extend, broaden, expand, and above all, life-enhancing. An act or piece of art that is life-enhancing—that allows us to have life, and to have it more abundantly—is civilized; one that isn’t isn’t.

In the first episode Clark compares the ornamental prow of a Viking ship, showing a fearsome animal head, with the head of a once-celebrated sculpture from antiquity known as the Apollo Belvedere. The prow is “a powerful work of art,” he acknowledges, and “more moving to most of us” than the Apollo.

Each expresses a cultural ideal. The prow emerged from “an image of fear and darkness” while the Apollo, the product of “a higher stage of civilization,” emerged from an ideal of harmony and perfection, justice and reason and beauty held in equilibrium. This is the civilizing ideal that Western Europe inherited from Greece and Rome

As Beard says, his “great man” theory of history was even then at odds with the prevailing academic view, which saw (and sees) history as a process swept along by technology, economics, and shifts in the balance of brute power.

He was a confessed “hero worshipper.” “I believe in genius,” he said. When an excellent biography of Clark was published a year ago—Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and ‘Civilisation’ by James Stourton—nearly all reviewers mentioned this hoary defect. Clark’s approach was “scandalous,” “outrageous,” and of course it was stuffed with dead white males

it’s hard to see how any survey of European high culture up to the First World War could include large numbers of nonwhite non-males, since it was produced almost exclusively by persons who had the temporary advantage of being white and male

Clark was too sophisticated, too honest to be a cheerleader. Alongside the glories he shows examples of what happens when civilization goes wrong.

Clark was acutely aware of his program’s shortcomings and omissions. He regretted not dwelling more on philosophy and law, but he “could not think of any way of making them visually interesting.”

Critics too often forget the subtitle of Civilisation: A Personal View. “Obviously,” Clark wrote, “I could not include the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome, because to have done so would have meant another ten programmes, at least.” Ditto India, China, and “the world of Islam.

He reckoned that any misunderstanding was worth the risk. “I didn’t suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East.

Yet the charge against Clark hasn’t been that he was forgetting non-Western cultures but that he was willfully dismissing them, committing an act of denigration.

relativism—a term that Beard and her costars would reject as right-wing cliché—is the motive force behind the series. A variety of academics, plus a narrator, are brought in to reinforce the presenters in their judgment that it is wrong to make judgments.

The story Clark wanted to tell was relatively straightforward—one critic cleverly compared Civilisation to a relay race, with one great man passing the baton to another. Civilisations, by contrast, does a great deal of jumping about, forward and backward and sideways, not merely in geography and chronology but in the sequence of ideas

question-and-answer combo recurs throughout Civilisations. It has a dual purpose: It’s meant first to rattle our confidence in our objective judgment—hey, that figurine is pretty!—and then to turn our attention back on ourselves to discover the cultural conditioning that has manipulated us into the illusion that our judgments are objective—that we have good reason to think the figurine is pretty. “Different eyes behold different things,” we are told.

To the extent Civilisations treats particular pieces of art, it dwells on their function—to what purposes were they put? Mostly, it turns out, art was about projecting and protecting the power of an elite

If you are uncomfortable with this approach—seeing the glories of human creativity reduced to tools for class warfare—too bad

“I love the history of art,” he tells the camera. “I love looking at these beautiful images. But I also recognize that there’s something quite sinister about their past.

“Sinister” sounds judgmental, doesn’t it? So judgmental indeed that I don’t think even Clark used it at all in his Civilisation. But it nicely summarizes the attitude toward the West that viewers of the new Civilisations will find unavoidable, even if they’re confident enough to find it unpersuasive

Next to life-enhancing, the most important word in Clark’s account of civilization was confidence. Several things came together to make a civilization, Clark said: a measure of material prosperity, a sense of history, a range of vision, and a feeling of permanence, of being situated in a particular moment between past and future, that makes it worthwhile to construct things meant to last

“But far more,” he said, “it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, confidence in one’s own mental powers.” His program was an effort to persuade his audience that confidence in their inherited civilization was well-earned.

It was only two weeks ago that the White House got word, in response to its inquiries, that heat and humidity may not cause a decrease in coronavirus cases. After receiving a request from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, researchers at the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering delivered a report on April 7 indicating a "decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed."

How each medical expert approaches the situation has differed. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, isn't hesitant to offer unvarnished thoughts or analysis even when it seems to contradict the President. This week, Fauci has offered a message on the potential return of the virus that ran counter to Trump's own, more optimistic projections -- including the President's suggestion that it's "possible it doesn't come back at all." Fauci's message was different: "There will be coronavirus in the fall," he said bluntly, adding later: "I am convinced of that."