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A chat app can be social like a huddle of people in focused conversation. Participants are speaking to be heard by one another, not by the entire world. There is more concentration and potential for intimacy, and much less performance.

For Ukrainians and Russians resisting the war, the different ways of engaging through Telegram—receiving information through dedicated channels, forming groups committed to one topic, or chattering in hushed tones—benefit a people that will likely have to sustain a long insurgency.

It was, Salem wrote, “group-think on steroids—an abomination of a monster with thousands of arms and no brain.”

Chat apps are merely the latest expression of the smaller, more controlled spaces that have always been central to incubating new ideas or challenging existing ones.

in the Soviet Union, samizdat played this role. The underground, illegal, and self-produced writing, passed hand to hand, kept alive a shadow civil society during repressive periods.

The lineage of such underground communication stretches across history, from the 17th-century scholars in Europe who collaborated through letters on scientific experiments in defiance of Church doctrine all the way to the xeroxed and stapled zines of the 1990s, which set the tone of third-wave feminism.

What matters is that embattled Ukrainians and anti-war Russians are attempting to practice privacy and quiet communication—necessary virtues for a resistance movement.

If Putin defeats the Ukrainians, the conservatives that are standing against Putin will look ineffectual and weak. The Trumpists will then be able to solidify their control over the GOP.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the socialist Left that started to revive itself with the antiwar movement and Occupy blossomed into a full-blown generational movement with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign that revived the DSA, spawned a new generation of activist orgs like the Sunrise movement, and created a new (though still modest) socialist medi

So far, despite fierce factionalism, the socialists have not yet succeeded in taking over the Democratic party like Trump took over the GOP. But in highlighting the failures of centrist Dems to curb inequality, revive unions, fix health care, or save the welfare state, they clearly hope to be able to pull off a takeover at some point.

Establishment failures equal insurgent opportunities. That shouldn’t be too controversial.

Both the liberal center-Left and the conservative center-Right are basically committed to upholding the global liberal order. Putin, by invading and attempting to conquer a sovereign state, challenges that order. If Putin succeeds, even modestly, it represents a failure for the U.S. establishment figures who tried to stop him.

It was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq, laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump — sort of took over the party.

it also means a victory for raw power and will (perhaps implying that efforts like the January 6th putsch are the preferred method for attaining power).

But if Putin loses, then Trump and his allies who for years praised and defended Putin’s regime will be discredited. Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan.

Even more damningly, if Putin loses, it’ll be a success for the globalist order — sanctions and aid to Ukraine will represent a triumph of international cooperation. Exactly the kind of world order the Trumpists want so badly to smash.

If Putin defeats Ukraine, it’ll be a debacle for Biden and the establishment, and perhaps a socialist candidate will be a little closer to winning the next primary.

So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO loss.

What these people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible systems of human organization.

many people all over the ideological spectrum allowed themselves to see the chaos of the last decade as a high and beautiful wave that would carry them to power…and now, if Putin is ejected from Ukraine by a triumphant international liberal West, the various Chaos Climbers may see their waves break and roll back.

some neighborhoods produce more successful kids: One in every 864 Baby Boomers born in Washtenaw, Michigan, the county that includes the University of Michigan, did something notable enough to warrant an entry in Wikipedia, while just one in 31,167 kids born in Harlan County, Kentucky, achieved that distinction

The results showed that some large metropolitan areas give kids an edge. They get a better education. They earn more money: The best cities can increase a child’s future income by about 12 percent. They found that the five best metropolitan areas are: Seattle; Minneapolis; Salt Lake City; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Madison, Wisconsin.

a website, The Opportunity Atlas, that allows anyone to find out how beneficial any neighborhood is expected to be for kids of different income levels, genders, and races.

We find that one factor about a home—its location—accounts for a significant fraction of the total effect of that home.

I have estimated that some 25 percent—and possibly more—of the overall effects of a parent are driven by where that parent raises their child. In other words, this one parenting decision has much more impact than many thousands of others.

Three of the biggest predictors that a neighborhood will increase a child’s success are the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms.

These are neighborhoods, in other words, with many role models: adults who are smart, accomplished, engaged in their community, and committed to stable family lives.

Data can be liberating. It can’t make decisions for us, but it can tell us which decisions really matter. When it comes to parenting, the data tells us, moms and dads should put more thought into the neighbors they surround their children with—and lighten up about everything else.

The exhibition is one of several ways that Ukraine’s government is highlighting the devastation its people have endured even as new suffering is inflicted every day.

And Ukraine has taken the rare step of prosecuting Russian soldiers for war crimes just months after they were allegedly committed, greatly accelerating the normal judicial timetable.

“It is necessary to explain to our children what is happening in Ukraine now,” Mr. Spodinskiy said, as other visitors took photographs of the debris. “We cannot speak with our children as if nothing is happening,” he added, “because they clearly understand everything, and they see what happens in our country.”

“The history of our country is being created, and now this is an opportunity to get in touch with it,” said another visitor, Serhiy Pashchukov, a 31-year-old from Luhansk, which was occupied by Russia in 2014.

Those discoveries and many others have become items in an exhibition called “Crucified Ukraine” that opened on May 8 at Mr. Savchuk’s museum, an unusual effort to chronicle the war even as battles continue to rage in Ukraine’s east and south.

The rooms are dank and cold, but the most striking thing, many visitors said, was that it smells as if the people who sheltered with their belongings there — including onions, blankets, and toys — had just left.

“We had a similar basement in Bucha in a newly built apartment building,” said Evgeniya Skrypnyk, a 32-year-old from a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed and terrorized civilians.

The one historical inaccuracy in the shelter was the absence of the five buckets that stood in the hallway where the people who lived underground for more than a month relieved themselves.

Remembrance of World War II has become more complex since the war started. In Russia, the Kremlin has sought to glorify the Soviet victory — to which millions of Ukrainians contributed — as a source of national pride. But it has also called upon memories of that war to justify and build support for the invasion of Ukraine, with Mr. Putin seeking to falsely portray Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis.”

Mr. Savchuk said that in light of the current war, people were talking about a “complete reconstruction” of the museum complex, whose architecture is intended to awe visitors with the memory of the Soviet victory in World War II, to de-emphasize the fight against Nazi Germany.

“This war changed everything,” he said. “A museum is not only an exhibition, it is a territory, it is its monuments, it is a place of memory. We are thinking about changing not only the ideology, but also the architecture, the emphasis.”

"We will expand US Coast Guard presence and cooperation in Southeast and South Asia and the Pacific Islands, with a focus on advising, training, deployment, and capacity-building," the strategy's action plan says.

"Don't be too anxious and don't be too nervous, because the common development and prosperity of China and all the other developing countries would only mean great harmony, greater justice and greater progress of the whole world," he said.

The pact, if accepted, would have marked a significant advance in Beijing's connection to the region, which holds geo-strategic importance in the Indo-Pacific.

The relationships the US Coast Guard has forged in the Pacific islands have deep roots, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

With fish as the main food source and key economic driver of the island nations, the Coast Guard says the emphasis of Operation Blue Pacific is to deter illegal and unregulated fishing.

"You cannot understate the Coast Guard's importance to ... relationships in the Central and Western Pacific," he said.

"It's difficult to imagine China having sufficient political capital to push for something analogous to what the US is currently doing," Koh said.

What Friedman believed in was capitalism, or what he called “economic freedom.” Political freedom might come — but capitalism, he said, could do just fine without it.

the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.

it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government

The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980

He and other observers are trying to make sense of what might happen next — and, befitting our current bewilderment, they offer a range of perspectives. Some, like Wolf, hope the relationship can be repaired; others argue that the pairing has always been fraught, if not impossible.

he has also read his Marx and Engels, looking askance at their solutions while commending them for how “brilliantly” they described capitalism’s relentlessness and omnivorousness. Left to its own devices, capitalism expands wherever it can, plowing its way through national boundaries and local traditions — making it marvelously dynamic or utterly ruinous, and not infrequently both.

In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment. Born in 1946 in postwar England, he recalls in his preface how “the world seemed solid as I grew up.” He describes the feelings of “confidence” in democracy and capitalism that flourished with the collapse of the Soviet Union

Yet the “democratic capitalism” that Wolf wants to preserve was, even by his own lights, short-lived. Democracy itself — or “liberal democracy” with universal suffrage, which Wolf says is the kind of democracy he means — is a “political mayfly.” Democratic capitalism ended, in his account, with the financial crisis of 2008

Robert Reich has offered another measure, arguing that democratic capitalism, at least in the United States, began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Reagan, when “corporate capitalism” took over.

The left-wing German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck stakes out a decidedly different position, suggesting that the tendency to equate “democratic capitalism” with a few decades of postwar plenty is to misinterpret a “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class

In “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016), Streeck argues that it’s not compromise but the cascade of crises following the postwar boom — inflation, unemployment, market crashes — “that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism.” Where Wolf wistfully invokes a “delicate flower,” Streeck writes contemptuously of a “shotgun marriage.”

the historian Gary Gerstle explores in his fascinating and incisive “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” (2022). Before the New Deal order started to falter in the late 1960s and ’70s, Gerstle writes, a majority of Americans believed that capitalism should be managed by a strong state; in the neoliberal order that followed, a majority of Americans believed that the state should be constrained by free markets. Each order began to break down when its traditional ways of solving problems didn’t seem to work

capitalism, according to Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has obtained the status of civic religion. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” the authors argue that industry groups and wealthy donors have engaged in a concerted campaign to promote “market fundamentalism” — “a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way.”

The main implication of “The Big Myth” seems to be that “market fundamentalism” is so horrifically egregious — enriching the few and despoiling the planet — that Americans had to be plied with propaganda to believe in it.

as Gerstle’s book shows, neoliberal ideas proved so seductive because they also happened to dovetail with the stories that Americans wanted to tell about themselves, emphasizing individuality and freedom.

A new generation of swashbuckling billionaires entertain the prospect of secession, using their money to realize fantasies of escape, whether through seasteading or spaceships. The book quotes one seasteading enthusiast declaring, “Democracy is not the answer,” but merely “the current industry standard.”

Slobodian’s excellent if discomfiting new book, “Crack-Up Capitalism” (forthcoming in April), explores other neoliberal evasions of the nation-state: tax havens, special economic zones, gated communities — enclaves that are “freed from ordinary forms of regulation.

in “Globalists” (2018) the historian Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals have found ways not just to liberate markets but to “encase” them in international institutions, thereby shielding capitalist activities from democratic accountability. He observes that neoliberals were especially alarmed after World War II by decolonization, adopting a condescending “racialized language” that pitted “the rational West,” with its trade rules and property laws, against a postcolonial South, “with its ‘emotional’ commitment to sovereignty.”

“It’s the stuff that kills that we want to talk about, the stuff that stunts lives that we want to talk about, the stuff that deforms lives that we want to talk about.”

The outgoing chair pointed to the increasing concern of a school-to-prison pipeline in the UK, where young minority ethnic children excluded from schools are forced into pupil referral units where they are groomed by criminal gangs – a clear example of systemic racism, he claims.

“To talk about unconscious biases is an obvious sidestepping of the matter. And it’s also wanting to let people off,” Prescod said.

The institute “insistently” talked about institutional racism then, but was in the minority and faced significant opposition, Prescod said. “In the end, it stuck because we then had the Macpherson report amongst others using a term which was not invented by them, but by communities of resistance.”

: “Ambalavaner Sivanandan [former director of IRR] and we at the institute were taking our cue from what the communities of resistance were saying. Institutionalised racism was not invented in the academy. It’s not invented by the politicians, it comes off the ground.

“It comes out of slow realisation where you start with one case that shows you injustice and after a while you pull that out and you realise that you’re looking at a whole string of things that tell you there’s something more than simply a wrongdoer in this situation.”

Prescod was not surprised at the government’s recent decision to drop crucial reform commitments made after the Windrush scandal. “This is not unlike what happened after the Macpherson report, which says very clearly institutionalised racism exists. And this is not just in the police. Any number of institutions have been looked at in this kind of way

When asked what he felt was the most significant change in Britain in terms of race, Prescod turned to a lyric from the British jazz band Sons of Kemet: “Don’t wanna take my country back, mate. I wanna take my country forward.” He said he finds it powerful black youth have claimed the country as their own.

“We now have populations here who are not thinking of themselves from some other place or going to some other place, but here, and are aware of their history of struggle. When Sons of Kemet says something like ‘we want to take our country forward’, notice all the words in the phrase.” He believes it shows a significant cultural shift of “new generations [of black Britons] born here, belonging here, speaking with a different kind of authority”.

Prescod said while there was no room for “triumphalism” when looking at racial progress, he was leaving his position with some hope. “There is always resistance. It’s only too clear. If you look at any situation in which somebody starts to be down-pressed, you will realise that there is somebody who is saying: get off my back, get off my throat. We don’t simply curl up.”

It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.

“Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”

In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.

In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine.

“If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”

The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet

Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”

A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace

“The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,

“In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,”

“Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”

Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine.

“Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,

“But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”

“boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.

“If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine

“The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,”

“There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”

In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.

Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.

Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”

At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran

Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”

Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”

They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization

My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security priso

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks

they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones

My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet

I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry

We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades.

Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits

No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements.

And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?

Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail

However, there is widespread skepticism about the prospect for change. In eight of the 17 publics, roughly half or more of those polled say the political system needs major changes or a complete overhaul and say they have little or no confidence the system can be changed effectively.

We found that the strongest predictor of being dissatisfied was being unhappy with the current state of the national economy. Another significant predictor was how someone feels about economic opportunity.

dissatisfaction with the way democracy is working was much more common among people who expect that when children in their country today grow up, they will be worse off financially than their parents. The economic pessimists are also especially likely to think their country’s political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. For example, in the United Kingdom, 61% of respondents who are pessimistic about the next generation’s financial prospects think their country needs significant political reform, compared with just 34% among those who are optimistic that the next generation will do better financially than their parents.

People who believe their country is doing a poor job of dealing with the pandemic are consistently more likely to say they are dissatisfied with the way their democracy is working and that they want significant changes to the political system. For instance, 73% of Germans who feel their country is handling the crisis poorly say they believe their political system needs major changes or should be completely overhauled, while just 32% of those who think the country is handling it well express this view.

Across 27 nations we polled in 2018, a median of 54% said that most politicians in their country are corrupt. This sentiment was especially high in Greece (89%) and Russia (82%). When we asked Americans a similar question in the fall of 2020, two-thirds said most politicians are corrupt.

A median of 78% across the 38 nations polled said that “a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law” is a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. More than half expressed this view in every country polled. However, even at this broad level, enthusiasm for representative democracy was somewhat subdued – a median of only 33% said it is a very good approach to governing.

Across the 16 advanced economies surveyed, a median of just 17% consider American democracy a good model for other countries to follow. A median of 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. And around a quarter say the U.S. has never been a good example. The belief that democracy in the U.S. has never been a good model for other nations is especially common among young adults.

For example, a median of 49% believed a system in which “experts, not elected officials, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country” would be very or somewhat good. 

A median of 26% considered “a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts” a very or somewhat good way to govern.

A median of 24% said “a system in which the military rules the country” would be a very or somewhat good system. In five countries – Vietnam, Indonesia, India, South Africa and Nigeria – roughly half or more expressed this opinion, as did at least 40% in another six nations. And higher-income nations weren’t completely immune: 17% in the United States, Italy and France believed military rule could be a good way to run the country.

For example, 27% of Americans who identified as conservative thought autocracy would be a good way to govern, compared with 14% who identified as liberal. And 20% of conservatives supported military rule, compared with 12% of liberals. People with lower levels of educational attainment were more likely to consider military rule a good way to govern in 23 countries.

A median of more than 67% across 34 countries rated a fair judicial system, gender equality and freedom of religion as very important. But there was less support for holding regular competitive elections, freedom of speech and press freedom. A median of roughly six-in-ten or fewer said it was very important to have free expression on the internet or to allow human rights groups and opposition parties to operate freely.

In Greece, for example, the share who say having people of many different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds makes their country a better place to live more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Over the same period, favorable views of diversity increased by about 10 percentage points or more in Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain. Slightly smaller increases can be seen in Germany, South Korea, Australia and Sweden.

A median of 67% across the same 17 publics say racial or ethnic discrimination is a problem where they live. Roughly three-in-ten or more in Germany, Spain, the UK, Greece, France, the U.S. and Italy say it is a very serious problem in their country. Younger adults and those on the ideological left are often more convinced on this point. In the U.S., about two-thirds of Americans on the left say racial and ethnic discrimination is a very serious problem in their country, compared with only 19% of Americans on the political right.

median of 56% across 17 advanced economies surveyed in 2021 say their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. Roughly two-thirds or more express this opinion in Italy, Spain, the U.S., South Korea, Greece, France, Belgium and Japan.

Across the 17 advanced economies we surveyed in 2021, a median of 61% say their country is more divided than before the outbreak. Moreover, the share of the public that feels this way has risen substantially as the pandemic has worn on. In the spring of 2020, only months into the crisis, just 29% of Canadians believed they were more divided, but a year later 61% express this view.

a median of 64% disagreed with the statement “most elected officials care what people like me think.”

A median of 50% disagreed with the statement “the state is run for the benefit of all the people,” while 49% agreed.

For example, 88% of Italians in 2002 said their government was run for the benefit of all, but only 30% held this view in 2019.

Across 34 nations polled in 2019, a median of 67% agreed that voting gives ordinary people some say about how the government runs things.

At least three requests have been filed to the International Criminal Court demanding that Libyan and European officials, as well as traffickers, militiamen and others be investigated for crimes against humanity.

A U.N. inquiry published in October also found evidence that abuses committed in Libya may amount to crimes against humanity.

The EU report noted the “excessive use of physical force” by a Libyan patrol during the Sept. 15 interception of a wooden boat with about 20 migrants off the coast of Libya.

In 2018 she got on a smuggler’s boat bound for Europe but her group was caught by Libyan authorities and taken to the notorious Tajoura detention center where detainees were beaten and abused. She was only released after a friend paid a $700 ransom to the guards.

Questioned about the detention centers in Libya, Stano said the EU’s position is clear: “They are unacceptable. The current arbitrary detention system must end.”

The Libyan government last month named Mohammed Al-Khoja, a militia leader implicated in abuses against migrants, to head the Department for Combating Irregular Migration, which oversees the detention centers.

“The Europeans pretend to show the good face,” said a Cameroonian woman who arrived in Libya in 2016 with her child thinking she would find work. Instead, she was trafficked and forced into prostitution after being separated from her daughter. The AP does not identify victims of sexual violence.

The Libyan forces used tactics “never observed before and not in compliance with (EU) training ... as well as international regulation,”

Now with Putin’s recognition of the separatist regimes, he has, perhaps, set the stage for a wider conflict; and the United States and its allies in NATO would have no choice but to respond with sanctions. But sanctions, such as those imposed after Russia seized Crimea, are unlikely to deter Putin. And really draconian sanctions, such as those used against Iran, could plunge Europe and the U.S. into a recession.

On the basis of this entirely unrealistic view of the world, the U.S. has stumbled into crises that it didn’t know it was creating.

The conflict with Russia over Ukraine would seem to have called for what Richard Nixon called “playing the long ball.” Nixon had played the long ball — defied prevailing opinion — by going to China

The United States might have stepped back from the years of provocations and resets to propose a “grand bargain” with Russia that would resolve or at least ease the conflict — one based, perhaps, on a neutral Ukraine or on the enforcement of the Minsk II agreement.

it seems to me that without such a bargain, we could be headed for another foreign policy disaster — one that will have repercussions in the United States and Western Europe as well as in Russia and Ukraine. Think war, skyrocketing energy prices, recession, refugees and a Russian-Chinese alliance against the United States and its allies.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding that the West rewrite the post-Cold War security arrangements for Europe and demonstrated that Russia has the military capability to impose its will despite Western objections and economic sanctions.

“We all thought we were looking at a Europe whole, free and at peace indefinitely,” said Michele Flournoy, who served as the Pentagon’s top policy official during the Obama administration. “We knew that Russia would conduct gray zone operations and that Putin would use his KGB playbook to create instability on his periphery. But a wholesale invasion of a sovereign country to reorient its government is a different moment.”

“And we’re seeing that while Beijing doesn’t really like Putin’s tactics, they’re willing to band together as authoritarian states against the Western democracies,” Ms. Flournoy added. “We are going to see more and more of that in the future.”

China’s Communist Party leadership also saw pro-democracy protest movements in former Soviet republics as U.S.-engineered plots that could ultimately be used against Beijing.

For much of the past decade, the U.S. security establishment began taking note of what the Pentagon in 2015 called the “re-emergence of great power competition” and shifted from its emphasis of counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has repeatedly cast China as the “pacing challenge” while Russia was seen as the lesser longer-term danger.

Even with annual defense budgets that soared over $700 billion, coping with an urgent Russian-generated crisis while preparing for a Chinese threat whose peak is still years away presents an enormous challenge for the Pentagon.

”The United States is particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously,” said a Congressionally mandated study of the Pentagon’s strategy that was issued in 2018

The era of nuclear reductions may come to an end as the U.S. military establishment argues for a large enough nuclear arsenal to deter both Russia’s formidable nuclear weaponry and China’s rapidly growing nuclear forces, which aren’t limited by any arms-control agreement.

“The United States is going to have to get used again to operating in multiple theaters simultaneously—not just militarily, but in terms of psychology and foreign-policy making,”

Already, debates are emerging among U.S. defense experts on whether the Pentagon should give equal weight to the twin challenges from Beijing and Moscow or focus more on the Pacific.

Should the West impose crippling sanctions on Russian banks and major companies, Moscow is likely to become more reliant on Beijing, which has issued a digital currency and is building a payments system separate from the West’s.

“It is already ending the amnesia about the importance of energy security,” said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of research firm IHS Markit. “It means a new emphasis on diversification of energy sources for Europe and a new look at U.S. domestic and international energy policies.”

Advocates of using energy as a geopolitical tool say Washington should promote investment in U.S. oil and natural gas and approve new LNG export terminals and pipelines in the United States.

The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act precludes the alliance from permanently stationing additional substantial combat forces on the territory of its new Eastern and Central European members, but could now be repealed.

A recent poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations noted most Europeans see the Ukraine crisis as a broader threat to Europe. Some current and former officials, however, worry that the alliance’s solidarity could fray in the years ahead as it debates the need for greater military spending and wrestles whether its military ties with Georgia might stir new confrontations with Moscow.

the Alphen Group by former officials and other experts urges that European members of the alliance and Canada provide for 50% of NATO’s minimum military requirements by 2030 so the U.S. can focus more on deterring China.

“Everybody’s unified right now and outraged about what the Russians are doing,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who also served as the alliance’s deputy secretary-general from 2012 to 2016. “But when we get down to making longer-term commitments to strengthen NATO’s defense posture and potentially revisit nuclear issues, it could become very divisive.”

Beyond that, Mr. Putin is a Soviet nostalgist. He is the product of a system in which power produced truth and truth reinforced power.

Mr. Putin is an immensely skilled ruler, the most formidable Russian figure since Stalin, but he has his problems, too. Russian power remains limited by material and demographic constraints

In the same way, accusing Mr. Putin, even accurately, of planning or committing atrocities may weaken him among human-rights activists in the West, but it may strengthen him at home and in Ukraine.

Letting the world know that Mr. Putin has a kill list for Ukraine is more likely, Mr. Putin may believe, to reduce resistance to his rule in Ukraine than to boost it.

Exposing Mr. Putin as, by our standards, a liar does not weaken him at home or, in his view, in Ukraine.

If Western leaders can overcome their posthistorical parochialism and develop coherent strategies for the actual world as opposed to the world of their dreams, effectively countering Vladimir Putin is an eminently achievable goal, though in no way a simple or a trivial one.

The two argued that democracy “can be realized in multiple ways” and isn’t the prerogative of any one country or group of countries. It called China “a whole-process, socialist democracy” and said democracy was the fundamental principle of Russia’s “democratic federative law-governed state.”

The Feb. 4 joint statement said both countries “have profound democratic traditions rooted in a thousand years of development,

It was Beijing that suggested including that the two countries’ friendship has “no limits”—wording read with apprehension in the West—according to the officials and advisers. The intention was less a declaration China would stand by Russia in case of war than a strong message to the U.S. about the resolve the two have in confronting what they see as increased American threats, the people said.

“China’s eagerness to present a strong alignment with Russia to counter the U.S. caused it to miss all the signs and to go in a dangerous direction,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank focused on promoting peace and security.

Beijing has refrained from coming to Moscow’s aid in a significant way. China is taking steps to buy Russian farm and energy products. But it is complying with the more damaging financial sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Russia, for fear of losing access to the dollar-dominated global trading system, say some Chinese bankers. They say their default position is to comply with the sanctions unless higher-ups tell them otherwise.

“We believe they chose not to weigh in in advance.”

“It’s undeniable that right now, China is occupying an awkward nexus in which they’re trying to sustain their deep and fundamental relationship with Russia,”

China’s ambiguous stance on the Russia-Ukraine war will likely speed up moves by countries from the U.K. and Australia to Japan to guard against Beijing,

a planned summit between China and the EU for April, if it isn’t canceled, is now likely to be dominated by discussions of China’s position on Ukraine.

Beijing’s most difficult contortions are on territorial sovereignty. China has built its foreign policy around the principle that a country’s territory is inviolable and its internal affairs should be free from interference by others.

China’s commitment to that principle seemingly would force it to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, something it has refrained from doing. Its policy statements have called for dialogue to resolve the crisis, avoiding the word invasion. Meanwhile, Western officials worry that Russia’s actions based on the argument that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia could embolden China to step up its own long-stated goal to bring Taiwan into its fold.

Since rising to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has made himself the dominant force in China’s foreign policy and put emphasis on what he calls “big-power diplomacy”—a marked change from the relatively unassuming foreign-policy agendas of previous Chinese leaders that featured compromise and focused on building up ties with the U.S.

Today, despite Chinese state media’s pro-Russia rhetoric, some advisers privately question whether the partnership could cut China off from Western technologies and other resources and hurt its development, according to the foreign-policy advisers. After all, they have noted in private discussions, it is China’s opening to the U.S. and its allies that has propelled enormous Chinese growth in the past four decades.

China and Russia’s shared interest in confronting the U.S. has helped drive their relationship to its closest point since early in the Cold War. Part of that is due to the personal ties between Messrs. Xi and Putin, authoritarians who have visions of restoring their countries to past glory, even if in China’s case that past was centuries ago.

Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pointed to instances where Mr. Putin would be deliberately late for meetings with foreign dignitaries. On one occasion, he brought out his dog to a meeting with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel who, Mr. Putin knew, was terrified of dogs.

“He would never let himself do anything like that to Xi,” Mr. Radchenko said. “He’s extremely respectful to Xi because he sees a close relationship with China as one of Russia’s most valuable political assets.”

Upon his arrival at Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, Biden will be greeted by Polish President Andrzej Duda and receive a briefing on the humanitarian response to the war. He'll meet with service members from the 82nd Airborne Division in Rzeszów before traveling to Warsaw in the evening.On Saturday, the White House says Biden will hold a bilateral meeting with Duda to discuss how the US and allies are responding to the refugee crisis that has ensued as a result of the war. He'll also deliver remarks before returning to Washington.Biden's travel to Poland comes after meetings on Thursday in Brussels, where he attended a slate of emergency summits, announced new actions -- such as sanctions against hundreds of members of Russia's parliament and a commitment to admit 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine -- and conferred with global leaders on how the world will respond if Russia deploys a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.

Poland, which borders Ukraine to the west, has registered more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees crossing into the country. However, the number of refugees staying in Poland is lower, with many continuing on in their journey to other countries.Earlier this month during Vice President Kamala Harris' trip to Poland, Duda personally asked the vice president to speed up and simplify the procedures allowing Ukrainians with family in the US to come to the country. He also warned Harris that his country's resources were being badly strained by the influx of refugees, even as Poland welcomes them with open arms.The White House says that since February 24, the US has provided more than $123 million to assist countries neighboring Ukraine and the European Union to address the refugee influx, including $48 million in Poland.

Biden brought up that he has visited war zones, saying he understood the plight of refugees."I've been in refugee camps. I've been in war zones for the last 15 years. And it's -- it's devastating," he said.Biden also said the refugee influx is "not something that Poland or Romania or Germany should carry on their own."

The Poland trip also comes two weeks after the US rejected Poland's proposals to facilitate the transfer its MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. The US rejected Poland's proposals over fears that the US and NATO could be perceived as taking an escalatory step, further fomenting conflict between the alliance and Russia -- which adamantly opposes Ukraine's ambitions to join the NATO alliance.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly requested more aircraft for the invasion, making another appeal to NATO leaders on Thursday.

After winning the 2017 national championship, Columbia, South Carolina's mayor named a street near the Colonial Life Arena 'Dawn Staley Way.' In January 2021, the university installed a statue of A'ja Wilson for her accomplishments with that championship team. Just nine months later, on October 15, 2021, the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees approved a seven-year, $22.4 million contract extension, making Staley the highest paid Black coach in women's basketball and one of the highest paid in the country.

Staley feels that South Carolina has grown the game and women's sport as a whole, especially when it comes to equal pay. She wants to see the rest of the country make the same commitment to women's basketball that South Carolina has. Staley believes the passion for women's basketball is already there; players, coaches and fans are all locked into the game, the only thing that's missing is investment.

For now, while she waits for others to invest in women's basketball, Staley invests in her players and helps them reach their own aspirations. The goals players set for themselves are far and beyond what Staley imagined at their age; she even heard one player say she wants to be a millionaire by the time she graduates college."I want them to get everything they can get out of the sport," she said. "I've introduced my entire team to agents all over the country so they can get their brands in order, so they can get the wealth that they deserve."

"I know my impact in Philly. I know my impact here in South Carolina. I'm beginning to find myself and my impact across the country because I hear it from other people," Staley said."So I choose people because of the impact they can make in their neighborhoods. If those neighborhoods can get fixed because of someone that came back and they're giving back and they're pouring into them, we're going to have better neighborhoods."

Growing up in the projects of North Philadelphia, Staley said she learned so many lessons and wouldn't trade her childhood for another in suburbia: "North Philly raised me, and I take it everywhere I go."Her mother, Estelle Staley, was a disciplinarian and Staley freely admits she was scared of her mom, but the way she raised Staley and her siblings was integral to all her accomplishments in basketball. As time goes on, Staley sees more and more of her mother in herself. She said she's her mother's child through and through, in the way she coaches, mentors and treats those around her.

"Honestly, I just want to be known as an odds-beater. Like just simply beat the odds because no one from North Philly -- no one from the projects in North Philly -- gave me a shot at any of this, like really none of this."I had a praying mother. She made sure we went to church, and all of this is divine intervention because you could not have dreamt of this happening to just one individual."

On Thursday, rescuers said they had found engine components, part of a wing and other “important debris” as they searched the mountainside in a rural part of the Guangxi region for a fourth day.

Mr. Zhang, who was born in 1963, was one of China’s most experienced pilots,

A day earlier, the workers had found a black box, believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, which could provide investigators with crucial details. Officials said it was damaged but that its memory unit was relatively intact. The plane’s second black box, which records flight data, has yet to be recovered.

Their past performance was “very good,” Sun Shiying, the chairman of China Eastern Airlines’ Yunnan branch, said on Wednesday. When reached by phone, an airline representative declined to answer further questions about the crew.

At the main crash site, a state broadcaster showed the workers digging with shovels around a large piece of wreckage that the reporter described as a wing, which bore part of the China Eastern logo and was perched on a steep, barren slope fringed by dense thickets of now-flattened bamboo. Heavy rains had left the roads slick and inundated the earth with muddy pools.

Over his career as a commercial pilot with China Yunnan, which later merged with China Eastern, Mr. Zhang flew four different models of aircraft and accumulated 31,769 hours of flight experience.

The airline commonly paired young pilots with older pilots, and Mr. Zhang had mentored more than 100, CAAC News said. Mr. Yang was one of them.

Experts said that investigating the crash, which involved a sudden dive from cruising altitude in good weather, would require a close look at both the aircraft and the pilots, including the possibility that the plane was deliberately brought down. But they stressed that the cause was far from determined.

“Certainly an intentional downing is always a part of any investigation, and especially with this particular flight profile,” said Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization created after World War II to promote aviation safety. But he cautioned that it was “premature to jump onto any possibilities.”

“If the captain were intending to commit suicide, they’d have to overcome the other flight crew members,” Mr. Marks said.

“He was asked what he thought. He said they are very good people on both sides. And that’s when I decided I wasn’t going to be quiet any longer,” Biden said of Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. The president, eschewing the historical norm of avoiding domestic political commentary while traveling abroad, proceeded to claim that even US news outlets that oppose him know of his commitment to do “the right thing.”

The president added, “The first G7 meeting I attended, like the one I did today, was in Great Britain. And I sat down and I said, ‘America’s back.’ And one of my counterparts, colleagues, who is a head of state, said, ‘For how long? For how long?’ And so I don’t blame, I don’t criticize anybody for asking that question.”

Biden opened his address saying that Ukraine is now a front line battle in the fight between autocracy and democracy, casting Russia's invasion of its neighbor as part of the decades-long battle that has played out between the West and the Kremlin."My message to the people of Ukraine is ... we stand with you. Period," said Biden.

"America's ability to meet its role in other parts of the world rests upon a united Europe and a secure Europe," Biden said Saturday as he met with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw. "We have learned from sad experiences in two world wars, when we've stayed out of and not been involved in stability in Europe, it always comes back to haunt the United States."Biden's comments came during the final day of a last-minute trip to Europe aimed at synchronizing how Western allies address Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Biden and Duda spent a lengthy stretch in a one-on-one meeting before beginning an expanded session with aides. Biden said he raised the world war comparisons during the private meeting.

The President's comments are a sharp contrast from the "America First" foreign policy of former President Donald Trump, who called NATO "obsolete" before he came into office and often questioned the value of American alliances with European nations. Trump's time in office was marked by his spats with foreign leaders and the often-contentious nature of his dealings with traditional American allies in Europe and across the globe.

As it got underway, Kuleba described an arduous journey from Kyiv to Warsaw that included a train and three hours in a car."It's like flying from Kyiv to Washington with a connecting flight in Istanbul," Kuleba said. "The good thing is that since the beginning of the war I've learned how to sleep under any conditions. So I slept on the train, I slept in the car."

Ukraine has been pressuring the US and NATO to increase the military assistance they are providing to Ukraine, including calls from President Volodymyr Zelensky to establish a no-fly zone.After talks in Brussels this week, during which Zelensky appeared virtually, it did not appear NATO members had warmed to the idea. Biden has said becoming more directly involved in the conflict could usher in World War III.That left Ukraine's leaders dismayed. "We are very disappointed, in all honesty. We expect more bravery. Expected some bold decisions. The alliance has taken decisions as if there's no war," said Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in a live interview with the Atlantic

Biden met with chef José Andrés and other volunteers in Warsaw Saturday at a food distribution site for Andrés' World Center Kitchen, the nonprofit devoted to providing meals in the wake of disasters. Biden met with some of the volunteers, some from Europe and some from the United States."God love ya," the President could be heard saying to them and asking if he could help them.

The Polish President added that Biden's visit "demonstrates a huge support and also a big significance attached by the United States to the stability and world peace, to reinstating the peace where difficult situations are happening in places where somebody resorts to acts of aggression against other democratic and free nations -- as it is happening today against Ukraine where the Russian aggression, unfortunately, happening for a month now is effect."This story has been updated with additional developments on Saturday.