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What I want to discuss is the chapter about Donald Trump and Russia.

Something drove me back to that chapter recently — maybe because we have to vote this horrid man out, when history will surely show that the Senate should have removed him when it had the chance. Rereading it now, what leaps out isn’t how long that chapter was. It’s how right it was. I

This is the thing, if you go back and review Hillary’s speeches and tweets and debate performances from 2016: She was right about an awful lot.

The prospect that Trump will lose but try to remain in office has spooked analysts. The question on their mind is how many Americans would go along with such a blatant attack on democratic institutions.

A clear majority of Americans, including six out of every 10 Republicans, said they were confident that “votes for president in November will be counted fairly, accurately and securely.” But, crucially, confidence in the election is strongly conditional on its outcome.

Above all, they urged voters to be alert to how politicians might try to sow confusion.

Whatever its recent feints towards communitarianism and economic activism, the Conservative party seems unable to shake off its attachment to a vision of go-getting utopia, and its resultant contempt for a public that looks to the state for help and fails to match up to its ideal.

This credo, of course, took hold in the Conservative party during the leadership of that era-defining grocer’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher. Under David Cameron and George Osborne, the same basic beliefs endured, while the party once again chose its leaders from the ranks of the wealthy and entitled. The result was Thatcherism taken away from its petit bourgeois roots and revived by public schoolboys whose determination to hack back the state was made all the more zealous by both arrogance and ignorance of how most people live.

The results are now plain to see: after a decade of austerity we went into this crisis in a state of disastrous social fragility; and the innate Tory distrust of collectivism and state intervention – which Johnson shares, whatever his rhetoric – has surely been a big part of the reason it has been so badly handled.

The Biden senatorial papers comprise 1,875 boxes of “photographs, documents, videotapes and files” and 415 gigabytes of electronic records at the University of Delaware in his home state. They recently came to public attention when Biden was accused by Tara Reade, a former staffer, of sexually assaulting her in a Capitol Hill basement in 1993.

“The fact is that there’s a lot of things, of speeches I’ve made, positions I’ve taken, interviews that I did overseas with people, all of those things relating to my job, and the idea that they would all be made public in the fact while I was running for public office, they could be really taken out of context,” he told interviewer Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program.

“They’re papers or position papers, they are documents that existed and that – for example, when I met with [Vladimir] Putin or when I met with whomever, and all of that could be fodder in a campaign at this time.”

A series of cyberattacks is underway aimed at the companies and government organizations that will be distributing coronavirus vaccines around the world, IBM’s cybersecurity division has found, though it is unclear whether the goal is to steal the technology for keeping the vaccines refrigerated in transit or to sabotage the movements.

“cybersecurity diligence at each step in the vaccine supply chain.” He urged organizations “involved in vaccine storage and transport to harden attack surfaces, particularly in cold storage operation.”

Outside experts said they doubted it was China, which has been accused of trying to steal vaccine information from universities, hospitals and medical researchers, because it would be unlike Chinese hackers to impersonate executives at a major Chinese firm.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs in a message on Twitter, accusing him without evidence of making a “highly inaccurate” statement affirming the Nov. 3 election was secure and rejecting claims of fraud.

Krebs’ work in protecting the election from hackers and combating disinformation about the vote won praise from lawmakers of both parties as well as state and election officials around the country.

Reuters reported last week that Krebs had told associates he expected to be fired.

On October 8, the Fifth Circuit summarily reinstated Texas’s “heartbeat” anti-abortion law, overturning district court Judge Robert Pitman’s careful, 113-page October 6 decision enjoining the onerous law. And so, the Supreme Court may soon have an opportunity to weigh in again, via its “emergency docket,” on the most restrictive abortion law in the nation. It authorizes “bounty-hunters” to inform on anyone helping a woman protect her right to control her body.

. The Court’s legitimacy is bound up with its ability to convince litigants and citizens alike that its rulings are the result of a careful, deliberative, and fair process. Its increasing resort to the emergency docket, dubbed the “shadow docket” in 2015 by law school professor William Baude, calls those virtues into question.

Critics rightly say that the Court’s use of emergency orders, issued without oral argument and full legal briefing, to decide issues with enormous substantive effect on the nation, may help its conservative members advance their agenda. But reconciling this development and the requirements of judicial legitimacy is no easy task.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history

This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families

A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,

What’s striking about AITA is the language in which it states its central question: you’re asked not whether I did the right thing but, rather, what sort of person I’m being.

We would have a different morality, and an impoverished one, if we judged actions only with those terms of pure evaluation, “right” or “wrong,” and judged people only “good” or “bad.”

, if Aristotle’s ethics is to be sold as a work of what we call self-help, we have to ask: How helpful is it?

Today, Britain is very much not on the edge of national annihilation, whatever the hyperbolic coverage of the past few weeks might suggest. But it is in the grip of chaotic mismanagement that has left the country poorer and weaker, having lost its fourth prime minister in six turbulent years since the Brexit referendum and with an economy pushed close to its breaking point.

when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?

He had also signed up to a new European treaty that left a fatal tension at the heart of Britain’s membership in the European Union. Major’s European compromise left Britain inside the European Union but outside its single currency. In time, the inherent tension in this position would reveal itself in disastrous fashion—the historian Niall Ferguson has called it “Brexit 1.0.”

“Conflict” brings together one of America’s top military thinkers and Britain’s pre-eminent military historian to examine the evolution of warfare since 1945. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who co-authored the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency warfare and oversaw the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, brings a professional eye to politico-military strategy. Andrew Roberts, who has been writing on military leadership since the early 1990s, offers an “arc of history” approach to the subject of mass destruction.

The pair’s ambitious goals: to provide some context to the tapestry of modern conflict and a glimpse of wars to come.

The book begins with the early struggles of the postwar era. China’s brutal civil war, the authors observe, demonstrated “that guerrilla warfare undertaken according to Maoist military principles by smaller forces could ultimately be successful against a Western-backed government.”

Taken together, they chronicle the shifting lenses through which Spain’s Catholics saw the country’s Jewish population between 1285 and 1492. As the title suggests, the show also explores how, as time went on, Catholic Spain propagated the otherness of its Jewish inhabitants as a means to affirm, forge and galvanise a Christian identity. “The relationship between the Christian and Jewish communities in the middle ages is one of the key themes in the history of our country,” said Miguel Falomir, director of the Prado. “If ever there was an exhibition that showed how vividly and eloquently images can be used, then this is it.”

Noble portrayals of Old Testament prophets give way to depictions of Jews as wilfully blind – and often literally blindfolded – before the divinity of Christ. By the late 13th century, something more sinister is under way: an illuminated parchment created around 1280 shows a Jew stealing an icon of the Virgin Mary in Constantinople and dropping it into a latrine. The offending Jew is killed by the devil, but the icon survives its fetid dip and remains fragrant, thereby prompting the local Jewish community to convert to Catholicism.

Fast forward 100 years and an altarpiece shows a Jew – who has been given a communion wafer by a Christian woman hoping to get back her pawned dress – profaning the bleeding, if miraculously resilient, host. According to the exhibition’s curator, Joan Molina, head of Spanish Gothic art at the Prado, the increasingly “militant and virulent” brushstrokes came to mirror the beatings, hackings and burnings.

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.

He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”

“China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it,”

“We can’t rely on Beijing to change its trajectory,” he said. “So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open and inclusive international system.”