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“It was an accident and happened in combat conditions, the pilot just confused the planes.”

The Ukraine government claims none of its jets were in the air when the flight went down yet the Russian government released radar data proving otherwise. Russia has since been accused of faking the pictures.

Earlier this week, the Russian maker of the Buk air defence missile system concluded the flight was downed by an older version of the BUK-M1 system, which is no longer in service with the Russian military but is used within Ukrainian arsenals.

a coded message in Russian, allegedly intercepted by Swedish intelligence, sent from the archipelago to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea.

It could have been mapping or training, it could of course have been spying. Or is it even possible that it set out to be noticed - just to send a message? Here I am. Catch me if you can.

f so it would appear to be part of a pattern of Russia trying to probe the defences of some of its near neighbours - both countries like Sweden which aren't in Nato, and countries like Estonia which are. Last month Sweden protested to Moscow after two Russian fighter jets entered its airspace. And across the Baltic in Estonia, an intelligence official working close to the border was abducted by Russian agents and taken to Moscow.

The plot thickens.

Tuesday’s manoeuvre, which saw the guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sail close to artificial Chinese islands, came after Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping failed to find common ground over the issue during recent talks at the White House.

Twenty-four hours after Washington challenged Beijing’s territorial claims in the region by deploying a warship to waters around the disputed Spratly archipelago, the notoriously nationalistic Global Times accused the Pentagon of provoking China.

Lu Kang, a foreign ministry spokesperson, said China would “resolutely respond” to any deliberate provocations but declined to be drawn on any potential military response.

China’s military buildup in the South China Sea – including the construction of a 3km runway capable of supporting fighter jets and transport planes – has become a major source of tension between Beijing and Washi

Washington hoped Tuesday’s mission would encourage Beijing to step back from its controversial island building campaign, which China claims is for civilian purposes but critics believe is an attempt to use military power to cement its grip over the region.

Townshend said the US mission may have temporarily strengthened Washington’s hand. “[But] there’s an element of you win the battle but you lose the war if actually these freedom of navigation missions make China more determined to militarise these islands,” he added. “These islands are not going away – unless global warming takes them out.”

Nasa’s chief administrator, Charles Bolden, said the new class of space-farers would work on missions that will pave the way for putting humans on the surface of Mars. The agency last advertised for astronauts in November 2011.

Flights on the Boeing and SpaceX vessels are expected to allow a seventh person to live on the International Space Station, meaning the equivalent of one astronaut can work full time on scientific research in space. One priority of space station science is to understand more completely how long duration space travel takes its toll on the human brain and body. Two crew members, Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko, are taking part in the One Year Mission on the station, the results of which could help devise ways of keeping astronauts healthy on the way to and from Mars.

Before they can hope to join the 47 active astronauts in the corps, candidates need a bachelor’s degree in maths, engineering, biological or physical sciences, but preferably an advanced degree too. On top of that, to meet the basic requirements, at least three years’ professional experience is needed, or at least 1,000 hours piloting a jet plane.

“This next group of American space explorers will inspire the Mars generation to reach for new heights, and help us realise the goal of putting boot prints on the Red Planet,” he said.

Nasas new rocket, the space launch system, along with its Orion capsule, are expected to take astronauts into lunar orbit for missions that will act as stepping stones for the far more ambitious, and technologically challenging, trip to Mars.

Abdeslam is allegedly the brother of another suspect currently in custody and being questioned — and of one of the deceased attackers, officials said.

French officials were working with authorities in Belgium, Spain and Serbia in an attempt to shed more light on the attack, which ISIS claimed responsibility for and which French President Francois Hollande described as an "act of war."

Less than two days after the attacks Sunday, French warplanes conducted raids in Syria, targeting ISIS' stronghold in Raqqa, the defense ministry said. Reuters reported that the operation was France's biggest strike against ISIS in Syria to date.

"The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the ministry said in a statement.

The airstrikes, which were carried out in coordination with the U.S., hit a command post, a jihadist recruitment center, a munitions depot and a militant training camp, the statement said.

Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said seven terrorists died in the attack on Friday. Officials initially said there were eight attackers — as did ISIS. It seems now Abdeslam is believed to be the eighth attacker.

A French prosecutor also said officials have identified two more assailants, whose names were not released to NBC News — a 20-year-old who was part of the attack on the Stade de France and a 31-year-old who was part of the attack on one of the restaurants in the 10th arrondissement. Both were French nationals living in Belgium.

"We consider this means they have a network," Francoise Shepmans, mayor of the town of Molenbeek where the individuals were detained, told Belgium's TV RTBF.

The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stoppe

Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.

that year marked the end of net upward mobility. Before 2000, the size of both the lower and middle classes had shrunk, while the percentage of households with inflation-adjusted incomes of $100,000 or more grew. Americans were moving up the ladder.

After 2000, the middle class continued to shrink, but so did the percentage of households making $100,000 or more. The only group to grow larger after 2000 was households with incomes of $35,000 or less. Americans were moving down the ladder.

The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated

If one had to project the impact of China’s momentous economic reform for the U.S. labor market with nothing to go on other than a standard undergraduate economics textbook, one would predict large movements of workers between U.S. tradable industries (say, from apparel and furniture to pharmaceuticals and jet aircraft), limited reallocation of jobs from tradables to non-tradables, and no net impacts on U.S. aggregate employment. The reality of adjustment to the China shock has been far different. Employment has certainly fallen in U.S. industries most exposed to import competition. But so too has overall employment in local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains either in export-oriented tradables or in non-tradables have, for the most part, failed to materialize.

High wage workers find it relatively easy to adjust and “do not experience an earnings loss,” argue Autor and his colleagues. Low wage workers, in contrast, “suffer large differential earnings loss, as they obtain lower earnings per year both while working at the initial firm and after relocating to new employers.”

The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.

The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.

“It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,

, TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.

The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.

On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.

A Bloomberg poll last September found that 78 percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned, and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80 percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.

. Obamacare, a program many in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.

By the midterm elections of 2010, voter dissatisfaction among whites found expression in the Tea Party movement, which produced the sweeping defeat of Democrats in competitive congressional districts as well as of moderate and center-right Republicans in primary contests.Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”

To many of those who cast their ballots in anger in 2010 and 2014, however, it appeared that their votes had not changed anything. Obamacare stayed in place, Wall Street and corporate America grew richer, while the average worker was stuck going nowhere.

Already disillusioned with the Democratic Party, these white voters became convinced that the mainstream of the Republican Party had failed them, not only on economic issues, but on cultural matters as well.

A September 2015 Ispos survey asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats. Two thirds of Republicans, 62 percent, agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” compared to 53 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats. Here is one place where Trump’s scathing dismissal of political correctness found fertile ground.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.

the consequences of disillusionment with old guard Republicans:The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.

This election has demonstrated that there is no Republican Party organization, per se. The Republican Party exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles (e.g., SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and the like). When people ask why the “establishment” or “the party” has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean.

The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

In these circumstances, Bernstein wrote, the logic supporting the traditional Republican Party fell apart:The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.

Missing in your narrative were 2 other factors that contributed to American anger and the turn to Mr. Trump. Those two factors are: the group of very wealthy American's who were convened by the Koch brothers to pool their resources to destroy President Obama and the Congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans, e.g. Senator Lugar.

were suffering from a major contraction and the drying up of credit & jobs and the President unwisely & wrongly appointed the Simpson-Bowles commission to rein in the debt. Remember Harvard's Rogoff & Reinhart who came up with that Debt to GDP ratio? And the rally of our elites & Pete Peterson et al that Deficits were the problem, when the truth, based on history, was just the opposite.

The 2nd factor which can also be attributed to the White House as well as Democrats in the Congress who joined Republicans in misdiagnosing the problem as deficits and debt.

Explosives experts said it was feasible the device shown in the photo could bring down a plane, depending on where it was located and the density of explosives in the soft drink can. The most vulnerable locations include the fuel line, the cockpit or anywhere close to the fuselage skin.

Experts added that the photo could also provide a key clue in tracking Islamic State as the detonator pictured was a commercial one, which could be traced back to its manufacturer.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday the U.S. government was not in a position to confirm "the veracity" of the magazine's claim.

activity is likely the reason," he said, referring to the crash.

"We do believe that terrorist

also published a photo of what it said were passports belonging to dead Russians "obtained by the mujahideen". It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the published photos.The group, which has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, said it had exploited a loophole at Sharm al-Sheikh airport, where the plane originated, in order to smuggle a bomb on board.

The airport is widely used by budget and charter airlines to fly tourists to the nearby resorts on the Sinai coast.

said it had initially planned to bring down a plane belonging to a country participating in the U.S.-led coalition bombing it in Syria and Iraq, but it changed course after Moscow started its own air strikes campaign in Syria.

Islamic State's Egyptian branch, Sinai Province, claimed responsibility for the attack the day it happened but Egyptian officials were quick to dismiss talk of a bomb as premature.

He said the downing of the Russian plane would hamper efforts to form a united front against the terrorist group ISIS.

In March of 2014, Turkey shot down a Syrian fighter jet after the warplane strayed into its airspace, according to then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

None of them have been able to attend school -- or at least a real school.

There is no education. Five to 11-year-old kids are in the same class. Teachers don't show up and older kids harass them."

"You can count the number of doctors on one hand and they only service ISIS. Every day hundreds gather for free food hand outs. It's not a lot. You stand there being humiliated trying to get something to eat."

"ISIS gives anything for free to people who join them. The rest of us get nothing. There is no food, electricity or money. The people join ISIS out of hunger.

Electricity lasts for roughly 12 hours a day.

"Generally, the strikes kill a relatively low number of ISIS fighters. When we were in Raqqa city, for example, the court (was) hit three times. It was empty.

Following the French airstrikes, ISIS cracked down on internet usage, fearing their targets might be revealed.

We've seen a lot of people who've been beheaded and killed, accused of being spies."

Kids, some as young as 10, patrol the street. They are trained in ISIS camps."You can see a 10-year-old kid holding a Russian AK47. It's surreal," he said. "That kids can shout at you and sometimes they stop you and you can't say anything because he is a member of ISIS."

hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees making the dangerous journey to Europe's shores.

"We are not in favour of tension," Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying after the incident."We have always been in favour of overcoming tensions through dialogue rather than conflict."

"We were not aware that they had fired shots at us," Muzaffer Gecici said. "We have video footage and we have handed this to the coastguard. We didn't even know it was a Russian ship."

And last week, Turkey complained over what it said was a sailor on a Russian naval ship brandishing a missile launcher as the vessel passed through Istanbul. R

ussia rejected the criticism, saying the crew had a "legal right" to protect the ship.

President Vladimir Putin described as a "stab in the back" Turkey's downing of the Russian bomber and has imposed economic sanctions.

With Turkey refusing to apologise over the incident, Russia announces a package of economic sanctions against Turkey, including restrictions on imports and travel.

Turkey condemns Russian "provocation" after Turkish media publish an image showing a Russian serviceman holding a rocket launcher aboard a warship passing through the Bosphorus.

A Russian warship fires "warning shots" at a Turkish fishing vess

"Despite numerous attempts by the crew of the Smetlivy, the crew of the Turkish fishing boat did not make radio contact and did not respond to visual signals by semaphore or warning flares,"

A Turkish F-16 fighter jet shoots down a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft, allegedly because it violated Turkish airspace

Russian warship fires warning shots at Turkish fishing boat

In November, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Islamic State targets than in any other month, while U.S. forces working with local partners have taken out senior leaders of the extremist group, also called ISIL or ISIS.

our next message to them is simple: you are next,” Obama said.

acknowledged that progress needs to come faster, and said diplomatic efforts are just as critical in seeking to end the 5-year-old civil war in Syria that has complicated the fight there.

deploy about 100 more special operations troops to Iraq

move came weeks after the military said fewer than 50 U.S. special operators would be sent to Kurdish-controlled areas in northeastern Syria to advise vet Syrian and Kurdish rebel groups.

The army has been unable to break through hundreds of booby traps and other defenses built by a small force of Islamic State fighters holed up in the city, about 60 miles west of Baghdad

American fighter jets and drones take off daily from the Incirlik air base on bombing runs against Islamic State

Turkey said the bomber had entered its airspace, something denied by Russia.

In an update on Russian operations, Mr Putin said the military was now supporting Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces.

That includes "contacts to ensure flight safety with the Israeli air force HQ and the US-led coalition forces," he said.

Syrian opposition politicians meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh have also agreed a statement to guide peace talks with the government.

All those targets (in Syria) must have exploded all by themselves then!” he said with a sardonic smile, insisting that every Russian missile hit its target.

The coalition has in recent weeks also increased attacks on the Islamic State’s oil wells, refineries and more than 400 tanker trucks that ferry the illicit cargo. American aircraft dropped warning leaflets and made strafing runs near the trucks to persuade the civilian drivers to abandon their vehicles before the bombing began, military officials said.

“The U.S. has indeed been successful in minimizing civilian harm in its airstrikes against ISIS, and should continue to take precautions even as they intensify airstrikes,” said Federico Borello, the executive director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, an advocacy group.

The three-month-old Russian air campaign has stood in stark contrast to the caution of American military planners. The Russian campaign has mostly targeted rebel groups in northwestern Syria that are opposed to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and it has deployed fighter jet that use largely unguided bombs to strike their targets, killing hundreds of civilians, human rights groups say.

The fear among many in Syria and the West is that the Russian campaign is handing the Islamic State and other militants a major propaganda victory. American officials say that if the United States were to go the same route, it would be likely to alienate the local Sunni tribesmen whose support is critical to ousting the militants, and the Sunni Arab countries that are part of the fragile American-led coalition.

Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.

Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).

The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.

The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.

What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.

It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.

The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership

In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.

The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.

Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.

What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans

More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.

Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”

He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.

Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.

there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.

Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.

Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.

The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.

Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”

Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.

Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio

Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right

True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.

“The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.

There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature

Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change

Several times in late July and early August, so many workers were missing that the furnace line had to shut down in midday — even more disruptive than an early-morning halt. That hadn’t happened in years, employees said. Some workers cite illness, while others claim days under the Family and Medical Leave Act, saying they are taking care of sick relatives

On the worst days, according to one group leader, up to one in five workers are out. It’s true that the company has been running the factory hard — up to 60 hours a week with mandatory overtime, six days in a row — and some absenteeism could be due to sheer exhaustion, Mr. Roell allowed. But “bad blood,” as he put it, is at least as much to blame. “Workers feel like Carrier is going to leave,” he said, “whether we come to work or not.”

A week after the election, the president-elect called the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies. They worked out terms: Carrier would lay off 632 of its roughly 1,350 blue-collar employees in Indianapolis, but in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks, it would keep the plant open and invest $16 million in new equipment. A little more than half of the workers would keep their jobs.

“There have been a few days when three people don’t show up and I’ve had to work on the line all day,” Mr. Maynard said. “The attitude, the demeanor — they’re not grateful that they have a job. The absenteeism is real bad. A lot of us need our jobs. Others look at it and they don’t really care anymore.”

The bad vibes can be catching. “It makes it so depressing you don’t feel like going in,” he added. “I need the job, but some days you just want it to be over with.”

Yes, Mr. Hayes said, the company would invest in the Carrier facility, as it had promised Mr. Trump. But those funds were earmarked for automation, and would ultimately mean fewer jobs in Indianapolis, not more. Assembly-line positions there were not ones “that people really find all that attractive over the long term,” Mr. Hayes said. There were “great, great people” there, he added, “but the skill set to do those jobs is very different than what it takes to assemble a jet engine.” The Carrier faithful didn’t appreciate the slights

Even before the closure announcement, he said, supervisors gathered people from the lines and pointed out, ominously, that their counterparts in Mexico missed fewer days. “I’m worried they will use the absenteeism as an excuse to shut the factory,” Mr. Roell said. “They aren’t doing anything to improve morale.”

Mr. Roell doesn’t want his son, 10, or his daughter, 15, to follow him into factory work. “We tell them all the time to go to college or trade school,” he said. “It’s just not stable working in manufacturing. One day, the factory is going to go to another state or country.

it faces the same daunting task that confronted Carl Bosch a century ago: How much can it bring costs down? And how fast can it scale up

They believe that over the next seven years they can bring expenses down to a level that would enable them to sell CO₂ into more lucrative markets. Air-captured CO₂ can be combined with hydrogen and then fashioned into any kind of fossil-fuel substitute you want. Instead of making bread from air, you can make fuels from air.

What Gebald and Wurzbacher really want to do is to pull vast amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bury it, forever, deep underground, and sell that service as an offset

companies like Climeworks face a quandary: How do you sell something that never existed before, something that may never be cheap, into a market that is not yet real?

It’s arguably the case, in fact, that when it comes to reducing our carbon emissions, direct air capture will be seen as an option that’s too expensive and too modest in impact. “The only way that direct air capture becomes meaningful is if we do all the other things we need to do promptly,” Hal Harvey, a California energy analyst who studies climate-friendly technologies and policies, told me

In short, the best way to start making progress toward a decarbonized world is not to rev up millions of air capture machines right now. It’s to stop putting CO₂ in the atmosphere in the first place.

If the nations of the world were to continue on the current track, it would be impossible to meet the objectives of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which set a goal limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius or, ideally, 1.5 degrees. And it would usher in a world of misery and economic hardship. Already, temperatures in some regions have climbed more than 1 degree Celsius, as a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted last October. These temperature increases have led to an increase in droughts, heat waves, floods and biodiversity losses and make the chaos of 2 or 3 degrees’ additional warming seem inconceivable

A further problem is that maintaining today’s emissions path for too long runs the risk of doing irreparable damage to the earth’s ecosystems — causing harm that no amount of technological innovation can make right. “There is no reverse gear for natural systems,” Harvey says. “If they go, they go. If we defrost the tundra, it’s game over.” The same might be said for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, or our coral reefs. Such resources have an asymmetry in their natural architectures: They can take thousands or millions of years to form, but could reach conditions of catastrophic decline in just a few decades.

To have a shot at maintaining a climate suitable for humans, the world’s nations most likely have to reduce CO₂ emissions drastically from the current level — to perhaps 15 billion or 20 billion metric tons per year by 2030; then, through some kind of unprecedented political and industrial effort, we need to bring carbon emissions to zero by around 2050

To preserve a livable environment we may also need to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. As Wurzbacher put it, “if you take all these numbers from the I.P.C.C., you end up with something like eight to 10 billion tons — gigatons — of CO₂ that need to be removed from the air every year, if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees.

Through photosynthesis, our forests take extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and if we were to magnify efforts to reforest clear-cut areas — or plant new groves, a process known as afforestation — we could absorb billions more metric tons of carbon in future years.

we could grow crops specifically to absorb CO₂ and then burn them for power generation, with the intention of capturing the power-plant emissions and pumping them underground, a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have produced an excess of CO₂, by taking carbon stores from deep inside the earth — in the form of coal, oil and gas — and from stores aboveground (mostly wood), then putting it into the atmosphere by burning it. It has become imperative to reverse the process — that is, take CO₂ out of the air and either restore it deep inside the earth or contain it within new surface ecosystems.

“It’s not about saying, ‘I want to plant a tree.’ It’s about saying, ‘We want to plant a billion trees.’

“We have to come to grips with the fact that we waited too long and that we took some options off the table,” Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton scientist who studies climate and policy, told me. As a result, NETs no longer seem to be just interesting ideas; they look like necessities. And as it happens, the Climeworks machines on the rooftop do the work each year of about 36,000 trees.

air capture could likewise help counter the impact of several vital industries. “There are process emissions that come from producing iron and steel, cement and glass,” she says, “and any time you make these materials, there’s a chemical reaction that emits CO₂.” Direct air capture could even lessen the impacts of the Haber-Bosch processes for making fertilizer; by some estimates, that industry now accounts for 3 percent of all CO₂ emissions.

Wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy in the right locations,” Pacala says. “The return on those investments, if you calculated it, would blow the doors off anything in your portfolio. It’s like investing in early Apple. So it’s a spectacular story of success. And direct air capture is precisely the same kind of problem, in which the only barrier is that it’s too costly.”

what all the founders have in common is a belief that the cost of capturing a ton of carbon will soon drop sharply.

M.I.T.’s Howard Herzog, for instance, an engineer who has spent years looking at the potential for these machines, told me that he thinks the costs will remain between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton

He points out that because direct-air-capture machines have to move tremendous amounts of air through a filter or solution to glean a ton of CO₂ — the gas, for all its global impact, makes up only about 0.04 percent of our atmosphere — the process necessitates large expenditures for energy and big equipment. What he has likewise observed, in analyzing similar industries that separate gases, suggests that translating spreadsheet projections for capturing CO₂ into real-world applications will reveal hidden costs. “I think there has been a lot of hype about this, and it’s not going to revolutionize anything,

Climeworks’s current goal is to remove 1 percent of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions by the mid 2020s.

“Basically, we have a road map — $600, down to $400, down to $300 and $200 a ton,” Wurzbacher said. “This is over the next five years. Down to $200 we know quite well what we’re doing.” And beyond $200, Wurzbacher suggested, things get murkier.

To actually capture 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025 would, by Gebald’s calculations, require that Climeworks build 250,000 carbon-capture plants like the ones on the roof at Hinwil. That adds up to about 4.5 million carbon collectors

The Climeworks founders therefore try to think of their product as the automotive industry might — a piece of mass-produced technology and metal, not the carbon they hope to sequester.

“Every CO₂ collector has about the same weight and dimensions of a car — roughly two tons, and roughly 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters,” Gebald said. “And all the methods used to produce the CO₂ collectors could be well automated. So we have the automotive industry as a model for how to produce things in large quantities for low cost.

n 1954, the economist Paul Samuelson put forward a theory that made a distinction between “private-consumption goods” — bread, cars, houses and the like — and commodities that existed apart from the usual laws of supply and demand.

the other type of commodity Samuelson was describing is something now known as a “public good,” which benefits everyone but is not bought, sold or consumed the same way

direct air capture’s success would be limited to the size of the market for private goods — soda fizz, greenhouse gas — unless governments decided to intervene and help fund the equivalent of several million (or more) lighthouses.

An intervention could take a variety of forms. It could be large grants for research to find better sorbent materials, for instance, which would be similar to government investments that long ago helped nurture the solar- and wind-power industries. But help could also come by expanding regulations that already exist.

The Climeworks founders told me they don’t believe their company will succeed on what they call “climate impact” scales unless the world puts significant prices on emissions, in the form of a carbon tax or carbon fee.

“Our goal is to make it possible to capture CO₂ from the air for below $100 per ton,” Wurzbacher says. “No one owns a crystal ball, but we think — and we’re quite confident — that by something like 2030 we’ll have a global average price on carbon in the range of $100 to $150 a ton.” There is optimism in this thinking

A company that sells a product or uses a process that creates high emissions — an airline, for instance, or a steel maker — could be required to pay carbon-removal companies $100 per metric ton or more to offset their CO₂ output. Or a government might use carbon-tax proceeds to directly pay businesses to collect and bury CO₂.

“It doesn’t cost too much to pump CO₂ underground,” Stanford’s Sally Benson says. Companies already sequester about 34 million metric tons of CO₂ in the ground every year, at a number of sites around the world, usually to enhance the oil-drilling process. “The costs range from $2 to $15 per ton. So the bigger cost in all of this is the cost of carbon capture.”

The weekend before, Gutknecht told me, he received 900 unsolicited inquiries by email. Many were from potential customers who wanted to know how soon Climeworks could bury their CO₂ emissions, or how much a machine might cost them.

A Climeworks app could be installed on my smartphone, he explained. It could then be activated by my handset’s location services. “You fly over here to Europe,” he explained, “and the app tells you that you have just burned 1.7 tons of CO₂. Do you want to remove that? Well, Climeworks can remove it for you. Click here. We’ll charge your credit card.

The vast and constant market demand for fuel is why Carbon Engineering has staked its future on synthetics. The world currently burns about 100 million barrels of oil a day.

“So let’s say you’d have to supply something like 50 million barrels a day in 2050 of fuels,” he said. “That’s still a monster market.”

Carbon Engineering’s chief executive, added that direct-air-capture synthetics have an advantage over traditional fossil fuels: They won’t have to spend a dime on exploration

our plants, you can build it right in the middle of California, wherever you have air and water.” He told me that the company’s first large-scale facility should be up and running by 2022, and will turn out at least 500 barrels a day of fuel feedstock — the raw material sent to refineries.

Climeworks recently joined a consortium of European countries to produce synthetic methane that will be used by a local trucking fleet. With different tweaks and refinements, the process could be adapted for diesel, gasoline, jet fuel — or it could be piped directly to local neighborhoods as fuel for home furnaces.

the new fuels are not necessarily cheaper. Carbon Engineering aspires to deliver its product at an ultimate retail price of about $1 per liter, or $3.75 per gallon. What would make the product competitive are regulations in California that now require fuel sellers to produce fuels of lower “carbon intensity.” To date this has meant blending gas and diesel with biofuels like ethanol, but it could soon mean carbon-capture synthetics too.

Since they’re made from airborne CO₂ and hydrogen and could be manufactured just about anywhere, they could rearrange the geopolitical order — tempering the power of a handful of countries that now control natural-gas and oil markets.

From an environmental standpoint, air-capture fuels are not a utopian solution. Such fuels are carbon neutral, not carbon negative. They can’t take CO₂ from our industrial past and put it back into the earth

Even so, these fuels could present an enormous improvement. Transportation — currently the most significant source of emissions by sector in the United States — could cease to be a net emitter of CO₂

“If you can do one carbon-capture facility, where Carbon Engineering or Climeworks can build a big plant, great. You need to do that 5,000 times. And to capture a million tons of CO₂ with direct air capture, you need a small power plant just to run that facility. So if you’re going to build one direct-air-capture facility every day for the next 30 years to get to some of these scenarios, then in addition, we have to build a new mini power plant every day as well.

It’s also the case that you have to address two extraordinary problems at the same time, Peters added. “To reach 1.5 degrees, we need to halve emissions every decade,” he said. That would mean persuading entire nations, like China and the United States, to switch from burning coal to using renewables at precisely the same time that we make immense investments in negative-emission technologies.

this would need to be done even as governments choose among competing priorities:

“The idea of bringing direct air capture up to 10 billion tons by the middle or later part of the century is such a herculean task it would require an industrial scale-up the likes of which the world has never seen,”

Pacala wasn’t pessimistic about making a start. He seemed to think it was necessary for the federal government to begin with significant research and investments in the technology — to see how far and fast it could move forward, so that it’s ready as soon as possible

Gebald and Wurzbacher seemed to regard the climate challenge in mathematical terms. How many gigatons needed to be removed? How much would it cost per ton? How many Climeworks machines were required? Even if the figures were enormous, even if they appeared impossible, to see the future their way was to redefine the problem, to move away from the narrative of loss, to forget the multiplying stories of dying reefs and threatened coastlines — and to begin to imagine other possibilities.

It’s easier to appreciate the simmering pot when you’re looking at it from the outside

India conducted airstrikes against Pakistan. After I learned about them, I tried to follow the currents of misinformation in the unfolding conflict between two nuclear-armed nations on the brink of hot war.

What I found was alarming; it should terrify the world, not just Indians and Pakistanis. Whether you got your news from outlets based in India or Pakistan during the conflict, you would have struggled to find your way through a miasma of lies. The lies flitted across all media: there was lying on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp; there was lying on TV; there were lies from politicians; there were lies from citizens.

just about everyone, including many journalists, played fast and loose with facts. Many discussions were tinged with rumor and supposition. Pictures were doctored, doctored pictures were shared and aired, and real pictures were dismissed as doctored.

Many of the lies were directed and weren’t innocent slip-ups in the fog of war but efforts to discredit the enemy, to boost nationalistic pride, to shame anyone who failed to toe a jingoistic line. The lies fit a pattern, clamoring for war, and on both sides they suggested a society that had slipped the bonds of rationality and fallen completely to the post-fact order.

If you dive into the tireless fact-checking sites policing the region, you’ll find scores more lies from last week, some that flow across both sides of the conflict and many so intricate they defy easy explanation.

And you will be filled with a sense of despair.

The Indian government recently introduced a set of draconian digital restrictions meant, it says, to reduce misinformation. But when mendacity crosses all media and all social institutions, when it becomes embedded in the culture, focusing on digital platforms misses the point.

In India, Pakistan and everywhere else, addressing digital mendacity will require a complete social overhaul. “The battle is going to be long and difficult,” Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist who runs the Indian fact-checking site Boom, told me. The information war is a forever war. We’re just getting started.