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The two nations share several historical parallels. The last time they traded places in population, in the 18th century or earlier, the Mughals ruled India and the Qing dynasty was expanding the borders of China; between them they were perhaps the richest empires that had ever existed

But as European powers went on to colonize most of the planet and then industrialized at home, the people of India and China became among the world’s poorest.

As recently as 1990, the two countries were still on essentially the same footing, with a roughly equal economic output per capita. Since then, China has shaken the world by creating more wealth than any other country in history. While India, too, has picked itself back up in the three decades since it liberalized its economy, it remains well behind in many of the most basic scales.

Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery

it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?

The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer usually means a quick death—but not for Roger Royse, who was in Stage II of the disease when he got the bad news in July 2022. The five-year relative survival rate for late-stage metastatic pancreatic cancer is 3%—which means that patients are 3% as likely to live five years after their diagnosis as other cancer-free individuals. But if pancreatic cancer is caught before it has spread to other organs, the survival rate is 44%.

some public-health experts think that’s just as well. They fret that widespread use of multicancer early-detection tests would cause healthcare spending to explode. Those fears have snarled Galleri and similar tests in a web of red tape.

Early diagnosis is the best defense against most cancers,

a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.

as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.

First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.

D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.

the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.

Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.

The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.

Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.

Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.

Last month, OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, said it was working to prevent abuse of its tools in elections, partly by forbidding their use to create chatbots that pretend to be real people or institutions. In recent weeks, Google also said it would limit its A.I. chatbot, Bard, from responding to certain election-related prompts “out of an abundance of caution.” And Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, promised to better label A.I.-generated content on its platforms so voters could more easily discern what material was real and what was fake.

Anthrophic also said separately on Friday that it would prohibit its technology from being applied to political campaigning or lobbying. In a blog post, the company, which makes a chatbot called Claude, said it would warn or suspend any users who violated its rules. It added that it was using tools trained to automatically detect and block misinformation and influence operations.

How effective the restrictions on A.I. tools will be is unclear, especially as tech companies press ahead with increasingly sophisticated technology. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled Sora, a technology that can instantly generate realistic videos. Such tools could be used to produce text, sounds and images in political campaigns, blurring fact and fiction and raising questions about whether voters can tell what content is real.

Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.

Nor is it new for Russia to violate nuclear arms control agreements. In recent years, Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, suspended its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and de-ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Backing out of arms control commitments is part of Russia’s modus operandi.

What appears unprecedented now is that Russia could be working toward deploying nuclear weapons on satellites, which are constantly orbiting the Earth, to be detonated at times and locations of Moscow’s choosing.

some Jewish Berliners see criticism of Israel as much more than a foreign policy dispute. “I’m an aggressive Zionist for only one reason: because I want to survive,” Maxim Biller, the author of the novel “Mama Odessa” and one of the country’s leading columnists, told me over coffee. “And I can be a German writer with a Jewish project here only because there is a state of Israel.”

Naturally there is a German compound noun for that interdependence, endlessly slung around and debated in the last few months. The word is Staatsräson, or “reason of state”: a national interest that is not just nonnegotiable but existential, defining the state as such. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, described Israel’s security as Germany’s Staatsräson in a historic address to the Knesset in 2008. Her successor, Olaf Scholz, has repeatedly invoked Staatsräson in his defenses of Israeli policy since Oct. 7.

“Staatsräson means: The existence of Israel is a condition of possibility for the existence of Germany,” explained Johannes von Moltke, a professor of German cultural history at the University of Michigan, who’s currently in Berlin. “Because if there is no Israel, then Germany’s guilt is all-consuming again. And you can’t countenance that possibility.”

Mr. Biden has abdicated his obligation to build bipartisan support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine. He has made no show of outreach to the Republicans who have voted for U.S. support to Ukraine.

Voters hold Presidents responsible for trouble on their watch, and they know Mr. Biden has framed the fight in Ukraine as an inflection point in history in the struggle between freedom and autocracy. The White House is so far indicating that it won’t abide a trade on natural gas, but is the President’s election-year LNG sop to the climate lobby really worth an historic blow to U.S. credibility if Ukraine falls to Mr. Putin?

n the end we hope he will let the House work its will in a floor vote on the Senate’s aid bill. House Republicans can rightly sell the vote as a down payment on U.S. rearmament on everything from 155mm ammunition to Patriot missiles. Ditto for more funding for Israel’s air defenses and Taiwan that is also part of the Senate bill thanks to Republicans like Alaska’s Dan Sullivan.

President Biden’s effort to build American security alliances in China’s backyard is likely to reinforce the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s view that Washington is leading an all-out campaign of “containment, encirclement and suppression” of his country. And there is not much Mr. Xi can do about it.

To China, Mr. Biden’s campaign looks nothing short of a reprise of the Cold War, when the world was split into opposing blocs. In this view, Beijing is being hemmed in by U.S. allies and partners, in a cordon stretching over the seas on China’s eastern coast from Japan to the Philippines, along its disputed Himalayan border with India, and even across the vast Pacific Ocean to a string of tiny, but strategic, island nations.

The summit ended with agreements to hold more naval and coast guard joint exercises, and pledges of new infrastructure investment and technology cooperation. It builds on a groundbreaking defense pact made at Camp David last August between Mr. Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea, as well as on plans unveiled last year to work with Australia and Britain to develop and deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines.

S. Jaishankar, Mr. Modi’s external affairs minister, admitted recently that there were “no easy answers” to the dilemma posed by India’s aggressive neighbor. “They are changing, we are changing,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “How do we find an equilibrium?”

In a book published in 2020, just as he had taken over as Mr. Modi’s trusted foreign policy architect, Mr. Jaishankar wrote that the tensions between the United States and China set “the global backdrop” for India’s choices in a “world of all against all.” India’s ambitions as a major power, he wrote, would require a juggling act: “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.”

India’s rise as a large, growing economy has allowed it to hold its ground — working with any partner it can benefit from — in a polarized and uncertain world.