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But at the same time, he's struggling to come to grips with the deep racial divisions roiling the nation

As the nation marks the holiday honoring King, the mood surrounding it is overshadowed by deteriorating race relations in an election season that has seen one candidate of color after another quit the 2020 presidential race.

You can't understand a minority if you've never been in a minority situation. Even though you can advocate for us all day, you could never understand the issues we go through on a daily basis."

Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS division—the only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II

hasn’t been told before in English

three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion

His visit should not make us gloss over the very real issues facing both Catholics and Protestants

a radical shift with the arrival of Donald Trump in Washington; the businessman, now president-elect, has often spoken about government as a bumbling failure and an impediment to success.

“Government can be a tremendous force for good,” King said in an interview at his office recently.

“Government really sucks,” ­DeVos, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, said last year at the South by Southwest educational technology conference in Austin. “And it doesn’t matter which party is in power.”

Fighters aligned with Libya’s United Nations-backed unity government are advancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt

first major assault on territory

reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles.

. A new Conservative government will soon emerge, one that has a parliamentary majority and will be faced with a Labour party that is either in the process of disintegrating or reeling from the shockwaves of internal turmoil

The Conservative government will charge forward with reform concurrent with the European negotiations so as to avoid the next election being simply a referendum on the Brexit settlement.

The key question is whether anything has happened in the last seven days to rupture the Osborne-Cameron consensus? Is there still a one-nation will existing within the party?

I wrote a Fourth of July piece trying to explain my patriotic feelings for this country. My focus was an apparent contradiction in the idea of patriotism as a moral virtue. Patriotism seemed to require a commitment to the good of this particular country, even when its good was at odds with the greater good of everyone (“America First,” you might say). Love of a particular country appeared to conflict with the universal demands of ethics

I found a solution in the idea, expressed in our Declaration of Independence, that the American commitment to freedom was a commitment to the freedom of all people, not just of our citizens. My patriotism, I concluded, was a love of my country’s shared project of promoting freedom for all.

Viewed this way, the primary patriotic duty today would be to find some way to restore civil political discourse and a spirit of mutually respectful compromise.

5 reasons the West should care about the protests in Ukraine

Seeing how Western governments placed Ukraine’s simmering crisis on the back burner for months, it’s hard not to recall British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 quote about events in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia: “A quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

1. Civil warUkraine is a country the size of France. Its population is double that of Syria, and more than 10 times the size of Bosnia’s.

Modern history teaches two great lessons about revolution: that revolutions are inevitable, and that a large majority of revolutions either fail or go bad.  Americans almost instinctively look at revolutions in terms of our own past: the 1688 Glorious Revolution that made Parliament more powerful than the King in  England, and the American Revolution that led in relatively short order to the establishment of a stable and constitutional government.

Most revolutions don’t work like this at all.  Many of them fail, with the old despots crushing dissent or making only cosmetic changes to the old system.  (This happened in Austria in 1848 and something very like it may be happening in Egypt today.)  Others move into radicalism, terror and mob rule before a new despot comes along to bring order — at least until the next futile and bloody revolutionary spasm.  That was France’s history for almost 100 years after the storming of the Bastille.  China, Russia and Iran all saw revolutions like this in the 20th century.

the countries that had ‘velvet’ revolutions shared a number of important characteristics.  They had or longed to have close political and cultural ties to the West.  They wanted to join NATO and the EU, and had a reasonable confidence of doing so sooner rather than later.  They could expect enormous amounts of aid and foreign direct investment if they continued along the path of democratic reform.  They lay on the ‘western’ side of the ancient division of Europe between the Orthodox east and the Catholic/Protestant homeland of the modern liberal tradition.

A new poll from the Pew Research Center reports that nearly half of Americans identify states’ rights as the primary cause of the Civil War. This is a remarkable finding, because virtually all American textbooks and prominent historians emphasize slavery, as they have for decades. Even more striking, the poll shows young people put more stock in the states’ rights explanation than older people. The 38 percent of Americans who believe slavery was mainly to blame find themselves losing ground.

New computer-assisted tools and techniques can find and evaluate patterns of language and emphasis, otherwise hard to see, among those debates. Researchers at the University of Richmond have developed a computerized text that allows us to explore those hundreds of speeches over time and space, to find connections buried beneath parliamentary procedure and exasperating digressions.

Some of the patterns in the speeches quickly undermine familiar arguments for Virginia’s secession. Tariffs, which generations of would-be realists have seen as the hidden engine of secession, barely register, and a heated debate over taxation proves, on closer examination, to be a debate over whether the distribution of income from taxes on enslaved people should be shared more broadly across the state. Hotheads eager to fight the Yankees did not play a leading role in the months of debates; despite the occasional outburst, when delegates mentioned war they most often expressed dread and foreboding for Virginia. Honor turns out to be a flexible concept, invoked with equal passion by both the Unionist and secessionist sides. Virtually everyone in the convention agreed that states had the right to secede, yet Unionists in Virginia won one crucial vote after another.

This all speaks to a point that the White House never forgets: President Obama's speeches polarize in a way candidate Obama's didn't. Obama's supporters often want to see their president "leading," but the White House knows that when Obama leads, his critics become even less likely to follow. The evidence political scientists have gathered documenting this dynamic is overwhelming

If Obama's speeches often aren't as dramatic as they used to be, this is why: the White House believes a presidential speech on a politically charged topic is as likely to make things worse as to make things better. It is as likely to infuriate conservatives as it is to inspire liberals. And in a country riven by political and racial polarization, widening those divides can take hard problems and make them impossible problems.

When Obama gave the first Race Speech he was a unifying figure trying to win the Democratic nomination. Today he's a divisive figure who needs to govern the whole country. For Obama, the cost of becoming president was sacrificing the unique gift that made him president.

Saudi Arabia announced Sunday it was severing diplomatic relations with Shiite powerhouse Iran amid escalating tensions over the Sunni kingdom's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

The move came hours after protesters stormed and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and followed harsh criticism by Iran's top leader of the Saudis' execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Iranian diplomatic personnel had 48 hours to leave his country and all Saudi diplomatic personnel in Iran had been called home.

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.

The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns

The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue

On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and President Obama’s failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism.”

The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings — policy, endorsements, commercials, donations — and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans.

In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout had tumbled to the lowest level since the 1920s, less than 52 percent. Turnout rose slightly in November 2000. Then, suddenly: overdrive. In the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008, voter turnout spiked to levels not seen since before the voting age was lowered to 18, and in 2012 it dipped only a little. Voters were excited by a hailstorm of divisive events: the dot-com bust, the Bush-versus-Gore recount, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the bailouts and stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act.

Putnam was right that Americans were turning away from traditional sources of information. But that was because they were turning to new ones: first cable news channels and partisan political documentaries; then blogs and news aggregators like the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post; after that, and most decisively, social media.

Politics was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century than it ever was in the 20th. Would you be upset if your child married a supporter of a different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did.

“Who’s the baby?” Terry Latham, the director of the shelter, recalled asking.“I’m no baby,” the girl shouted, her ribs visible in her emaciated body. “I’m 4.

The girl, identified as Olivia Y., who suffered from profound malnourishment and possibly sexual abuse, would become one of 13 children whose experiences formed a class-action lawsuit in 2004 against the state’s Division of Family and Children’s Services for “failing in its duty” to protect its own children.

Mississippi’s foster care system, like those in other states, is designed to protect children who have been removed from their homes by a court order after a social worker’s investigation into the conditions there. Ideally, children are placed with licensed foster families, who receive between $684.90 and $1,546.50 per month per child, depending on the age and needs of the child. But, according to data provided by the state agency, Mississippi had just 1,486 licensed foster homes for 5,142 children in its custody as of December.

Among richer families, youth sports participation is actually rising. Among the poorest households, it’s trending down. Just 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport at least one day in 2017, versus 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000. In 2011, those numbers were roughly 42 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

This isn’t a story about American childhood; it’s about American inequality.

In his 2017 book, Dream Hoarders, the economist Richard Reeves wrote that economic mobility in the U.S. has been declining in the past few decades in part because of “opportunity hoarding.” For example, rich parents may pull special levers to get their kids into hyper-select schools, or elite internships, or exclusive entry-level jobs. In so doing, they—in effect— snatch precious opportunities away from the less fortunate.

The recruitment of athletes in such sports may be an even bigger factor in the admissions process at colleges in the N.C.A.A.’s lowest tier, Division III, where athletic scholarships are forbidden.

Division III is also the largest tier, with nearly 450 institutions, including many of the country’s most selective small liberal arts colleges, where acceptance rates can be as low as 15 percent. These colleges might field as many as 30 teams from enrollments as small as 2,000, with varsity athletes, many of them afforded an advantage in admissions, making up 30 percent to 45 percent of the student body.

The cost of fielding a successful sports team in the ultracompetitive college athletic landscape often leads to other troubling conflicts of interest.

Those are the words Ed Gillespie uses to describe many of the 168,000 Virginians who have had their civil rights restored by my administration. In an ad clearly-designed to scare and confuse voters, Gillespie implies that giving people their voting rights back who have made mistakes and served their time somehow makes Virginia less safe. This is deeply misleading and the lowest point yet in a Republican campaign that has been based entirely on fear, division, and Trump-style dog whistle politics.

n 1902, Virginia’s constitution was amended to expand the policy of felon disenfranchisement and to add literacy tests and a poll tax. Discussing these changes, Virginia State Senator Carter Glass said, This plan will eliminate the ‘darkey’ as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county... will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.

n 2009, Republican nominee and future Governor Bob McDonnell campaigned on restoring voting rights to those who had served their time. In 2013, my opponent was the sitting Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli. While we disagreed on many issues, both of us presented plans to restore voting rights to felons who had served their time. Until Ed Gillespie brought Trump-style divisive campaigning to Virginia, restoration of rights was generally a bipartisan issue.

Contra Barack Obama, there is a white America and a black America. There are also varying versions of Latino and Hispanic Americas across different regions of the country. There are robust, enduring differences in belief across races and communities about just what America’s identity should be and how politics are experienced, and they in turn create the political reality of the countr

these differences might be structural, informed by the basic fact of human geography, a geography itself built on the fact of American apartheid.

The PRRI/Atlantic poll, a random survey of slightly more than 1,000 people taken in December, reveals major differences among racial groups on some of the basic questions about what makes America America, and what makes Americans so