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that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a bit more trust in our society and our economy. Trust is what makes contracts, plans and everyday transactions possible; it facilitates the democratic process, from voting to law creation, and is necessary for social stability. It is essential for our lives. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.

, as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding.

But events — and economic research — over the past 30 years have shown not only that we cannot rely on self-interest, but also that no economy, not even a modern, market-based economy like America’s, can function well without a modicum of trust — and that unmitigated selfishness inevitably diminishes trust.

Jamaica's most senior drug tester says the country's recent rash of failed tests might be the "tip of an iceberg".

Asafa Powell, the former 100m world record holder, was the biggest name to test positive, but four others including Powell's training partner - the Olympic relay gold medallist Sherone Simpson - also failed tests at the country's national trials in June.

Wada officials are due to discuss their visit to Jamaica at an executive board meeting in Johannesburg on Tuesday and could make a series of recommendations to improve the country's anti-doping policies.

Ms. Nuland’s strong message in support of a constitutional solution has forced the protest leaders to confront the likelihood that they will be unable to oust Mr. Yanukovich.

They could, however, still achieve another of their top goals with the resignation of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and his government.

The protesters are a loose coalition of opposition political parties, civic organizations and student groups. No one leader has emerged — indeed, the three party leaders are rivals — and so substantial internal negotiation is expected before there is any formal response to the position expressed by Ms. Nuland.

As the Iranian nuclear talks creep on into double overtime, let’s remember that this isn’t just about centrifuges but also about creating some chance over time of realigning the Middle East and bringing Iran out of the cold.

“A better deal would significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” noted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “A better deal would link the eventual lifting of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to a change in Iran’s behavior.”

Netanyahu also suggests that a deal would give “Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to the bomb.” That’s a fallacy.

Ryan told the Politico Magazine writer that he viewed his congressional exit as an “escape hatch” from a president whose leadership he deplored.

“We’ve gotten so numbed by it all,” Ryan said. “Not in government, but where we live our lives, we have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example.”

Ryan described Trump as painfully ignorant and painted a GOP leadership group toiling behind the scenes to “stop him from making bad decisions. All the time.”

“I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”

Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.

It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.

We will remember the 2010s as a grifter’s paradise. These were the years when our collective sense of objective reality totally fell apart and when politics, business, technology, culture and even ordinary life fell fully under the sway of a new breed of swindler, huckster, influencer, troll and hacker.

this was the big lesson of the 2010s: Almost nothing is as it seems. Doubt everything. Trust no one.

pervasive doubt could just as well bring on civilizational ruin.

After a volcano exploded in Hawaii in May 2018, US scientists used drones to save a man from the lava: "Follow the drone," they said. He made it through the jungle.Drones save people. They also map terrain, survey land and inspect pipelines. The scientists use drones for these and other purposes on a daily basis, and they have bragged about their successes in the field.Many of the aircraft are made by Chinese companies, though. They are now grounded because of concerns about espionage.

the head of the federal agency, David Bernhardt, is apparently now worried that the drones could be used for espionage.

He is examining the agency's civilian drone programme in an effort to determine whether or not it should be continued. During this time, many of the drones are grounded, according to an agency spokeswoman, Melissa Brown.

that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a bit more trust in our society and our economy. Trust is what makes contracts, plans and everyday transactions possible; it facilitates the democratic process, from voting to law creation, and is necessary for social stability. It is essential for our lives. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.

, as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding.

Adam Smith argued forcefully that we would do better to trust in the pursuit of self-interest than in the good intentions of those who pursue the general interest. If everyone looked out for just himself, we would reach an equilibrium that was not just comfortable but also productive, in which the economy was fully efficient. To the morally uninspired, it’s an appealing idea: selfishness as the ultimate form of selflessness. (Elsewhere, in particular in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith took a much more balanced view, though most of his latter-day adherents have not followed suit.)

Polls show Democrats are favored to expand their control of the House on Tuesday night. Nonpartisan analysts predict Democrats will win a net of somewhere between five and 20 seats and GOP strategists said keeping Democrats’ gains in the single digits would be a victory for them.

Both parties are closely watching the race to replace retiring GOP Rep. Susan Brooks in Indiana. Donald Trump won this district, located in the northern Indianapolis suburbs, by 12 points in 2016, and a Democratic victory there could signal that his weakness with suburban women is weighing down Republicans lower on the ballot.

Democrats took back many GOP-held suburban seats in the 2018 midterm election and are hoping to clean up the rest on Tuesday night.

President Donald Trump is trying to steal a free and fair election that he lost by a wide margin to President-elect Joe Biden by tearing at the most basic principle of American democracy: He's trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes.

He asked state Republican leaders in Michigan to visit him Friday, hinting at a possible attempt to convince them to ignore Biden's big win in the state and send a slate of electors to the Electoral College that backs him and not the President-elect.

Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who rampaged through an unhinged news conference Thursday, is in effect baselessly arguing that troves of Democratic mail-in ballots, many of them cast by Black voters, are illegal and that Trump has therefore won the election with room to spare.

rumors began spreading among right-wing influencers and Trump campaign surrogates that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, was being outfitted with a hidden earpiece in order to receive surreptitious help during the debate

If Joe Biden isn’t hiding anything,” wrote the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Twitter, “why won’t he consent to a third party checking for an earpiece before tonight’s debate?”

“Secret earpiece” rumors are nothing new. In fact, they’ve become something of a fixture during presidential debate cycles, and part of a baseless conspiracy theory that tends to rear its head every four years.

American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.

The Winter Olympics have been marked by controversy and scandal since the first Games in 1924. From cheating by East German lugers to the sordid Tonya Harding figure skating fiasco, here are six events that made headlines:

At the Games in Chamonix, France, Norwegians contended the 500-meter speedskating final had been mistimed in favor of American Charles Jewtraw, a heavy underdog who won the gold.

Jewtraw's win, by 1/5 of a second, stunned him. too. In a 1983 interview with Sports Illustrated, Jewtraw said he had never competed in the 500 prior to the gold-medal race and hadn't even trained for the Games.

Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of “higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines.

, Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip.

Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.

We have vastly over-privatized, and in the process lost control over swaths of important policy areas while allowing unaccountable and even outlaw behavior to expand.

And we have created areas where crony capitalism can meet crony government to create crony corruption that cheats all taxpayers.

we can hark back to the last set of outrageous and scandalous privatized behaviors -- the privatization of war, with the sharp proliferation of private contractors sent to Iraq and Afghanistan who operated outside the restraints of the U.S. military, the common conventions of behavior in war, and the laws of the countries in which they operated

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.”

Iceland election could propel radical Pirate party into power

A party that favours direct democracy, complete government transparency, decriminalising drugs and offering asylum to Edward Snowden could form the next government in Iceland after the country goes to the polls on Saturday.

The radical party, founded by activists and hackers four years ago as part of an international anti-copyright movement, captured 5% of the vote in 2013 elections, winning three seats in Iceland’s 63-member parliament, the Althingi.

Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation

Officials are scrutinizing the agent, Andrey Baranov, for bribery and corruption, according to several people familiar with the case who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

The investigators are looking into whether Mr. Baranov conspired with American marathon organizers — including New York City Marathon officials — to allow athletes using banned substances to compete in their events.