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For years, pro-Palestinian activists have demanded that the US make its massive foreign aid to Israel conditional on Tel Aviv’s efforts to make peace with the Palestinians.

ernie Sanders, the American senator from the state of Vermont, put that issue front and center during an appearance at a conference organized by J Street, the moderate pro-Israel political advocacy group that supports a two-state solution and engages in active dialogue with much of Palestine’s leadership.

I also believe is the Palestinian people have a right to live in peace and security as well… And it is not anti-Semitism to say that the (Benjamin) Netanyahu government has been racist. That is a fact.”

between 1992 and 2013, college-educated whites saw the value of their assets soar by 86 percent, while their black counterparts saw theirs fall by 55 percent.

Minority students who graduated college were supposed to enter a less racist America. They have not. Seventeen percent of college-educated blacks say they face discrimination “regularly,” compared with 9 percent of high school-educated blacks. Half of all black Americans with at least some college said they’ve feared for their personal safety because of their race, compared with roughly a third of those with less education.

I’m a moderate guy, but the evidence doesn’t support moderation when it comes to racial equity. Better schooling is essential to creating a fair and equal America. But it is not nearly enough.

moderates had been trying to hold on to a studied neutrality, the arguments for which are twofold: First, in a complicated world, final judgment should be left as an exercise for the reader.

the audience for overt, left-wing activism is much smaller than the audience for mainstream fare with a distinct blue tinge. Abandoning any attempt at objectivity would diminish the work’s reach

as writer Jon Schwarz once noted in his “iron law of institutions,” people often care more about maximizing their power within their institutions than about maximizing the power of the institution

There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in taxes.

There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization. It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.

these documents show that the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources.

Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.

ChatGPT is built atop a so-called large language model—powerful software trained on swaths of text scraped from across the internet to learn the patterns of human language. The vast data supercharges its capabilities, allowing it to act like an autocompletion engine on steroids. The training also creates a hazard. Given the right prompts, a large language model can generate reams of toxic content inspired by the darkest parts of the internet.

ChatGPT’s parent, AI research company OpenAI, has been grappling with these issues for years. Even before it created ChatGPT, it hired workers in Kenya to review and categorize thousands of graphic text passages obtained online and generated by AI itself. Many of the passages contained descriptions of violence, harassment, self-harm, rape, child sexual abuse and bestiality, documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The company used the categorized passages to build an AI safety filter that it would ultimately deploy to constrain ChatGPT from exposing its tens of millions of users to similar content.

For months, I have been documenting the incredible virality of bizarre AI-generated image spam on Facebook, now commonly referred to as “AI slop,” and Meta’s seeming complete apathy toward moderating this type of spam. 

My investigation reveals that the AI images we see on Facebook are an evolution of a Facebook spam economy that has existed for years, driven by social media influencers, guides, services, and businesses in places like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where the payouts generated by this content, which seems marginal by U.S. standards, goes further

The spam comes from a mix of people manually creating images on their phones using off-the-shelf tools like Microsoft’s AI Image Creator to larger operations that use automated software to spam the platform. I also know that their methods work because I used them to flood Facebook with AI slop myself as a test. 

in the Republican Party for the past half century. Over these decades, one pattern has been constant: Wingers fight to take over the party, mainstream Republicans bob and weave to keep their seats.

Republicans on the extreme ferociously attack their fellow party members. Those in the middle backpedal to avoid conflict. Republicans on the extreme are willing to lose elections in order to promote their principles. Those in the mainstream are quick to fudge their principles if it will help them get a short-term win.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the fight was between conservatives and moderates.

A sense of proportion, once the conservative virtue, is considered treasonous on the right today

how large a stake conservatives have in convincing themselves and voters that Reagan failed. Think about it: if they conceded ideological victory they would have to confront the more prosaic reasons that entitlements, deficits and regulations continue to grow in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. They would be forced to devise a new, forward-looking agenda to benefit even their own constituencies, like ensuring that American business can draw on an educated, healthy work force; can rely on modern public infrastructure; and can count on stable, transparent financial markets. And they would have to articulate a conservative vision for those welfare state programs that are likely to remain with us, like disability insurance, food stamps and Head Start.

Conservatives have always been great storytellers; it is their fatal weakness. They love casting their eyes back to the past to avoid seeing what lies right under their noses. The story always involves some expulsion from Eden, whether by the hippies of the 1960s, or the suffragists, or the wretched refuse of the shtetls, or the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or Luther, or Machiavelli or the sack of Rome.

The Obama administration is considering the resumption of nonlethal military aid to Syria’s moderate opposition, senior administration officials said on Thursday, even if some of it ends up going to the Islamist groups that are allied with the moderates.

The United States suspended the shipments last month after warehouses of equipment were seized by the Islamic Fron

some of the Islamists fought alongside the Free Syrian Army in a battle against a major Al Qaeda-affiliated rebel group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

It's a caricature to say that Turkey has chosen the Middle East, or Islam, over the West. Turkey's aspiration for full membership in the club of the West, including the European Union, is still a driving force. But Turkey aspires to many things, and some may contradict each other. The country wants to be a regional power in a region deeply suspicious of the West, of Israel, and of the United States; a Sunni power acting as a broker for Sunnis in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere; a charter member of the new nexus of emerging powers around the world; and a dependable ally of the West. When Turkey is forced to choose among these roles, the neighborhood tends to win out, and that's when you get votes against sanctions on Iran.

From the time of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been committed to its "European vocation." But Ataturk was a modernizer, not a liberal; one of his slogans was "For the people, despite the people." And if Kemalist secularism was not a formula for European-style liberal individualism, it's scarcely clear that the AKP's market-oriented moderate Islamic restoration is, either

Turkey is a success story that the West has every reason to welcome. The image of moderation and tolerant cosmopolitanism that it offers to Middle Eastern audiences contributes not only to Turkish soft power but to global peace and security, at least in the long run.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

On Thursday, a broad coalition called the Climate Leadership Council — backed by leading environmentalists and some of the biggest energy companies and utilities — released a plan for a carbon tax and rebate that would radically cut emissions while also leaving most people better off economically.

To win Republican and business support, the coalition also proposed cutting regulations that a carbon tax would make unnecessary.

As his country experiences the early pangs of a cultural and economic transformation, Saudi Arabia's crown prince vowed Tuesday to destroy "extremist ideologies" in a bid to return to "a more moderate Islam."

"We want to lead normal lives, lives where our religion and our traditions translate into tolerance, so that we coexist with the world and become part of the development of the world," he said.

The tentacles of Wahhabism reached deeply into Saudi life, influencing its courts, politics and foreign policy, as elder kings with tight relations to the religious establishment ruled for the next few decades.

The Pew data, for instance, shows Mr. Trump faring even better among Latino voters than any previous estimate, with Mr. Biden winning the group by a 59 to 38 percent margin — a net 17 point decline from Hillary Clinton’s 66 to 28 percent victory in the same survey four years ago.

Mr. Trump’s breakthrough among Latino voters was the most extreme example of the broader inroads he made among Democratic constituencies. According to the data, Mr. Biden failed to improve his margins among virtually every voting group that backed Mrs. Clinton in 2016, whether it was young voters, women, Black voters, unmarried voters or voters in urban areas.

Many progressives even believed that mobilizing Democratic constituencies alone could oust the president, based in part on the assumption that Mr. Trump had all but maxed-out his support among white, rural voters without a degree.

Joe Biden may be running a safe and centrist campaign, but beneath the methodical calm is a genuinely innovative ideological appeal

The former vice president is updating and bringing back the long-dormant Democratic tradition of labor liberalism.

By addressing the climate crisis through investments in efficiency and new energy sources, Biden turns actions to try to avert environmental catastrophe into an engine of job creation.

The C-SPAN television network has suspended its political editor after he admitted to lying about his Twitter account being hacked last week.

Steve Scully, tapped to moderate this week's presidential debate before it was cancelled, had appeared to solicit advice from a former Trump adviser.

Scully suggested he had been hacked.

Mr. Trump’s bullying behavior had no obvious precedent in presidential debates, even the one that Mr. Wallace previously moderated, to acclaim, in 2016. In the interview, the anchor said that when Mr. Trump initially engaged directly with Mr. Biden, “I thought this was great — this is a debate!”

In the spotlight, Mr. Wallace was keenly aware of the complexity of his task: ensuring an evenhanded debate, avoiding taking sides, allowing candidates to express themselves while keeping the discussion substantive.

And he noted that cutting off the audio feed of a presidential candidate is a more consequential act than some pundits give it credit for. “People have to remember, and too many people forget, both of these candidates have the support of tens of millions of Americans,” he said.