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It is men and women like Bildt, who believe that the international order is secured by pen and ink, who have been living in a fantasy land. They have spent a generation inviting catastrophe into their sitting rooms.

They watched Putin jail and destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia.They watched Putin assassinate dissidents on the ground in NATO countries.They watched Putin’s army commit war crimes in Chechnya.They watched his 2007 Munich speech in which he literally said, out loud, that he wanted to roll back the Westernization of Eastern Europe and restore Russia’s dominance.They watched the invasions of Georgia and then Ukraine.

In response these same men and women decommissioned nuclear power plants in Europe and built gas pipelines to Russia so that they could have good feelings about “environmentalism” while also pocketing economic windfalls.They crossed their fingers and closed their eyes.You tell me who “lost contact with reality.”

What do these examples have in common? As Thomas Hobbes could have told you, human beings can only flourish, can only avoid a state of nature in which lives are “nasty, brutish and short,” if they participate in a “commonwealth” — a society in which government takes on much of the responsibility for making life secure.

Thus, we have law enforcement precisely so individuals don’t have to go around armed to protect themselves against other people’s violence.

Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health, when they can; but the nature of infectious disease means that there is an essential role for collective action

Gov. Greg Abbott told state health agencies in Texas on Tuesday that medical treatments provided to transgender adolescents, widely considered to be the standard of care in medicine, should be classified as “child abuse” under existing state law.

“all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children who may be subject to such abuse, including doctors, nurses, and teachers, and provides criminal penalties for failure to report such child abuse.”

It is still unclear how and whether the orders, which do not change Texas law, would be enforced.

There’s a Turkish saying, “Did your ships sink in the Black Sea?” The expression is asked when a person is lost in thought, trying to resolve a seemingly unsolvable problem.

As it turns out, that’s the very body of water that has Turkey on a geopolitical tightrope since Russia invaded Ukraine and began military operations from those waters — because Turkey controls access to the Black Sea.

When there’s a war that doesn’t involve Turkey, warships from the belligerent states can’t use the straits — unless they’re returning to home bases in the Black Sea.

A retired New York City police officer was arrested Friday morning outside of the U.S. Capitol after being found in possession of a fake law enforcement badge, a BB gun, body armor, ammunition and high-capacity magazines, Capitol police said.

"Felipe also made a statement that he was a criminal investigator with the agency," Capitol police said.

The Capitol was stormed on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump. They disrupted lawmakers as they confirmed President Joe Biden's election during a joint session of Congress.

Facing soaring levels of opioid deaths since the pandemic began in 2020, the Canadian government announced Tuesday that it would temporarily decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamines, in the western province of British Columbia that has been ground zero for the country’s overdoses.

The announcement was applauded by families of deceased opioid users and by peer support workers

British Columbia declared drug-related deaths a public health emergency in 2016.

A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus.

The backlash began last month, when a student reading “Mein Kampf,” the autobiographical manifesto of Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, was reported through the school’s “Protected Identity Harm” system.

The reporting system has been in place since the summer of 2021, but faculty say they were unaware of it until the student newspaper wrote about the incident and the system, spurring a contentious campus debate.

After North Korea ushered in the new year with four sets of ballistic missile tests this month, the Biden administration turned to a well-thumbed page in the Washington playbook: It called for more United Nations sanctions.

China and Russia blocked the proposal last week in the U.N. Security Council. And Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, appears unfazed by the threat of more U.N. and Treasury Department sanctions — he fired off two cruise missiles on Tuesday and two more ballistic missiles on Thursday, for a total of six weapons tests this month, equal to the number for all of last year.

“No amount of sanctions could create the pressures that Covid created in the last two years. Yet, do we see North Korea begging and saying, ‘Take our weapons and give us some aid?’ The North Koreans will eat grass.”

Since the Cold War’s end, American foreign policy has been conducted by responding to today’s news. To the extent the United States has had a long-term perspective, it is the hazy dream, first articulated in Christian millennial terms by the Puritans, of an American-led global transformation.

(I wrote about this in a 1992 book, Grand Illusion, and political scientist John Mearsheimer recently described this outlook in The Great Delusion.)

The question to ask about this process is this: how did we get to the point where we were unable to respond constructively to Russian fears of a new encirclement from NATO? As my former colleague Robert Wright put it, how could American and Western European leaders say, on the one hand, that they did not contemplate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO and say, on the other hand, that they would not accede in any way to Putin’s demand — at the center of his December communication with Biden — that NATO commit itself to barring Ukraine’s membership?

Every era has a figure who strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person of the still-young 21st century.

Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.

In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression upended a widespread belief that commerce and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new age of peace.

(CNN)A US Secret Service inspector who helped coordinate then-Vice President Mike Pence's trip to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, testified on Monday that Pence spent several hours in a loading dock underneath the building during the riot.The revelation -- during the second trial for a defendant charged in the Capitol attack -- is the first time that federal law enforcement has confirmed where Pence went after he was evacuated from the Senate chamber on January 6.

"We took him to a secure location ... underground," Secret Service inspector Lanelle Hawa testified. "It was in the loading dock," which is located underneath the plaza on the Senate side of the building, she said.Read MoreHawa said the loading dock counted as a restricted area, established for the Electoral College certification, as did the Capitol grounds. When asked by prosecutors whether Pence ever left that restricted area, Hawa said, "No."

Griffin's legal defense team made it clear before the trial that they wanted to ask about Pence's location during the riot and about the restricted area established for his visit -- appearing to set up the argument that the area was no longer restricted because Pence left. Days before the trial, McFadden allowed Griffin's attorneys to cross examine the Secret Service inspector on Pence's location during the riot, writing that "Griffin must be allowed to test the veracity of the Government's contention that Vice President Pence was on the Capitol grounds during the relevant period."After a half an hour of Griffin's attorney, Nicholas Smith, questioning the inspector, McFadden told Smith that he had not established that Pence had left the restricted area.

The first of my many blessings,” she told the Senate this week, “is the fact that I was born in this great nation.”

She is not an advocate of critical race theory or other progressive ideas about education. She has never taken a public position on hot-button school issues like whether young children should be taught about gender identity.

She has often praised law enforcement, including her proud mention this week that her brother and two of her uncles worked as police officers.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah lawmakers voted Friday to override GOP Gov. Spencer Cox's veto of legislation banning transgender youth athletes from playing on girls teams — a move that comes amid a nationwide culture war over transgender issues. Before the veto, the ban received support from a majority of Utah lawmakers, but fell short of the two-thirds needed to override it. Its sponsors on Friday successfully flipped 10 Republicans in the House and five in the Senate who had previously voted against the proposal.

Salt Lake City is set to host the NBA All-Star game in February 2023. League spokesman Mike Bass has said the league is "working closely" with the Jazz on the matter.

I cannot support this bill. I cannot support the veto override and if it costs me my seat so be it. I will do the right thing, as I always do," said Republican Sen. Daniel Thatcher. With the override of Cox's veto, Utah becomes the 12th state to enact some sort of ban on transgender kids in school sports. The state's law takes effect July 1.

. In 2014, participants in the two seminar groups lived their lives together seamlessly outside of the seminar, exploring Ithaca and the Cornell campus, eating and laughing together, and setting up a system to govern their community togethe

In 2022, however, I was told that the “Critical Black Studies” students would live and learn separately, creating a fully “black space.” My “Anti-Oppressive Studies” students were separated from them. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny).

in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.

In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University, traces Wallace’s repressive creed to his birthplace, Barbour County, in Alabama’s southeastern corner, where the cry of “freedom” was heard from successive generations of settlers, slaveholders, secessionists and lynch mobs through the 19th and 20th centuries. The same cry echoes today in the rallies and online invective of the right

though Cowie keeps his focus on the past, his book sheds stark light on the present. It is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government.

“Freedom’s Dominion” is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest.

Although Republicans have since rallied behind the former president, that day, the chasm between GOP leaders and Trump could not have been wider. From their lockdown off campus, in a series of previously unreported meetings, McConnell and other GOP leaders would turn to their Democratic counterparts for assistance in browbeating the Pentagon to move the National Guard to send armed troops to the Hill. Together, the bipartisan leaders of Congress, agreed in their conviction that Trump was stonewalling if not outright maneuvering against them, joined forces to do what the president would not: Save the Capitol.

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., Trump begrudgingly issued a tweet calling on his supporters to “please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement.” As far as Trump was concerned, the riot was Congress’s problem, he told his aides. It was their job to defend the Capitol, he said, not his. Perversely, the riot had actually buoyed Trump’s hopes that he might be able to strong-arm his way to overturning the election. When the chaos started to unfold, he began calling his GOP allies in Congress—not to check on their well-being, but to make sure they didn’t lose their nerve about objecting to the election results.

he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”

He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood

Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.

You may have seen the tins that contain 15 little white rectangles that look like the desiccant packs labeled “Do Not Eat.” Zyns are filled with nicotine and are meant to be placed under your lip like tobacco dip. No spitting is required, so nicotine pouches are even less visible than vaping. Zyns come in two strengths in the United States, three and six milligrams. A single six-milligram pouch is a dose so high that first-time users on TikTok have said it caused them to vomit or pass out.

We worry about bad actors bullying, luring or indoctrinating them online

I was stunned by the vast forces that are influencing teenagers. These forces operate largely unhampered by a regulatory system that seems to always be a step behind when it comes to how children can and are being harmed on social media.

There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented versus undocumented. But estimates from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2021. That’s down compared to previous decades: Between 2007 and 2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found. Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.

immigrant workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for years to come.

The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants, according to the CBO.