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Carter had canceled vacation plans and spent more than a week cloistered at Camp David, where he met with a “steady stream of visitors” who shared their hopes and fears about a nation in distress, most immediately thanks to another in a series of energy crises.

Carter, however, discerned a deeper problem. America had a wounded heart. The president believed it suffered from a “crisis of the spirit.”

the best word to describe the speech would have been “pastoral.” A faithful Christian president applied the lessons he’d so plainly learned from years of Bible study and countless hours in church. Don’t look at the surface of a problem. Don’t be afraid to tell hard truths. Be humble, but also call the people to a higher purpose.

The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team.

Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.

The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor administration would be able to prosecute a former president,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.

a growing trend among Generation Z, loosely defined as people born between the years of 1996 and 2012. Equipped with ride-sharing apps and social media, “zoomers,” as they are sometimes called, are getting their driver’s licenses at lower rates than their predecessors. Unlike previous generations, they don’t see cars as a ticket to freedom or a crucial life milestone.

Those phases “are consistently getting later,” said Noreen McDonald, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gen Zers are more likely to live at home for longer, more likely to pursue higher education and less likely to get married in their 20s.

The trend is most pronounced for teens, but even older members of Gen Z are lagging behind their millennial counterparts. In 1997, almost 90 percent of 20- to 25 year-olds had licenses; in 2020, it was only 80 percent.

Macron warned against any policy of regime change, noting just how disastrous this has been in the past. It is certainly hard to imagine anything that would be more likely to unite and galvanise Russians against the West. In the process, it would ruin any chances that this war will actually lead to a different Russia. There is, to be sure, a thick vein of imperialism in Russian culture. Yet there is also a clear lack of enthusiasm for Putin’s latest adventure, and the chance that defeat in Ukraine could help force Russians to come to terms with their new, less exalted place in the world, which would be broadly comparable to the effect of the Suez debacle on the UK.  Left to its own devices, a post-defeat Russia is more likely to generate a new leader who is a pragmatist: not a democrat, but not a militarist imperialist, either. Macron is right that the West could yet derail any hopes of a more positive transition if it is not careful.

Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of “higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines.

, Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip.

Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.

A confidential European Union military report calls for continuing a controversial EU program to train and equip Libya’s coast guard and navy despite growing concerns about their treatment of migrants, a mounting death toll at sea, and the continued lack of any central authority in the North African nation.

Europe’s determination to support Libya in the interception and return of tens of thousands of men, women and children to Libya, where they face insufferable abuse.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe have made their way through Libya, where a lucrative trafficking and smuggling business has flourished in a country without a functioning government,

this is the key message of Tsu’s book: The story of how linguists, activists, librarians, scholars and ordinary citizens adapted Chinese writing to the modern world is the story of how China itself became modern.

Following the history of the script helps explain China’s past, present — and future. “More than a century’s effort at learning how to standardize and transform its language into a modern technology has landed China here,” writes Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale, “at the beginning — not the end — of becoming a standard setter, from artificial intelligence to quantum natural language processing, automation to machine translation.”

With their “ad hoc efforts to retrofit Chinese characters” to typewriters and telegraphs, Chinese inventors sought to resolve the difficulties “that accompanied being late entrants in systems intended for a different kind of written language. But many wondered if the Chinese script itself was the problem.”

Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.

The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.

The Russian attacks are the greatest test yet for an emerging Moscow-Beijing axis, which has recently shown signs of evolving from what many considered a “marriage of convenience” to something resembling a formal alliance

In recent weeks, China has voiced support for Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” but has balanced that with calls for restraint and negotiations, echoing the approach China took during the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Beijing appeared to be repeating that tightrope walk on Thursday, as it called for calm while news of the attacks sent regional markets plunging.

Despite the outward show of mutual support between the two countries, there have been indications that China was caught flat footed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of military action.

Meanwhile on another Russian TV station, this time in Russia, Donald Trump’s former secretary of state and putative Republican candidate Mike Pompeo was shown saying of Putin that he is “very shrewd, very capable. I have enormous respect for him.”

Kaboom! On Monday at 10pm Moscow time Putin himself, following up a bizarre nod-along ceremony, torpedoed their arguments. The problem wasn’t Nato and it wasn’t the EU. It wasn’t Russia’s “security concerns”. It was, as he told it, the terrible errors of Lenin and Stalin in creating an autonomous Ukrainian entity when historically it was all really Russian

For over a decade now left and right populists alike have opposed western policy towards Russia.

Western nations including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada were laying the groundwork for a diplomatic boycott of the Games over China’s human-rights record. The Biden administration was about to kick off a Summit for Democracy in early December that sought to establish a clear alternative to Beijing’s autocratic rule.

Those moves infuriated Beijing and drove its decision-making, say the officials and advisers, who are familiar with the process leading to the Feb. 4 declaration.

One of Mr. Xi’s objectives was to lay out an ideological foundation for the partnership between China and Russia, those people said. To that end, the Chinese ambassador to Washington teamed up with his Russian counterpart in publishing an unusual joint opinion piece in late November in the magazine of the Center for the National Interest

The schools were supposed to reopen this week, and the reversal could threaten aid because international officials had made girls’ education a condition for greater assistance.

Under the Taliban’s first rule, from 1996 to 2001, the group barred women and girls from school and most employment.

The news was crushing to the over one million high school-aged girls who had been raised in an era of opportunity for women before the Taliban seized power in August last year — and who had woken up thrilled to be returning to classes on Wednesday.

George Floyd two years ago, ordering the city to pay a total of $14 million in damages to a group of 12 who sued. The jury of two men and six women, largely white and drawn from around Colorado, returned its verdict after about four hours of deliberations. The verdict followed three weeks of testimony and evidence that included police and protester video of incidents.

The protesters who sued were shot at or hit by everything from pepper spray to a Kevlar-bag filled with lead shot fired from a shotgun. Zach Packard, who was hit in the head by the shotgun blast and ended up in the intensive care unit, received the largest damage amount — $3 million.

One of the protesters’ lawyers, Timothy Macdonald, had urged jurors to send a message to police in Denver and elsewhere by finding the city liable during closing arguments. “Hopefully, what police departments will take from this is a jury of regular citizens takes these rights very seriously,” he said after the verdict.

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.

(CNN)A federal appellate judge considering whether Donald Trump should be forced to turn over his tax returns to Congress suggested on Thursday that he could become president again -- and that could be a factor in the case. "We have a situation that involves a sitting President and a former President. If this drags out, for all we know he could be a sitting president again," Judge Karen Henderson, of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, noted on Thursday.

At times, the case has appeared to be the clearest route for the House to obtain Trump's financial documents. But it has moved slowly, and moved forward only after Trump left office. Meanwhile, Trump and the House have faced off in a handful of other cases where Democratic-led legislative committees have subpoenaed his records.

The lower court judge, Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled the court couldn't block Congress from getting the tax returns, because of the separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislative branches and binding Supreme Court rulings that give Congress broad latitude to pursue its inquiries.

Indian TV anchors have long been critical of U.S. foreign policy

the criticism has also become more pointed since the election of Biden, a Democrat who is seen as more vocal about India’s alleged human rights issues compared with former president Donald Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, has appeared on shows including Shivshankar’s India Upfront, Pande noted, but prominent Democrats are less often seen.

The U.S. government and media, Pande said, “are viewed as outside liberal forces that should mind their own business.”

Some conservatives seem to have decided that winning over a new constituency — one that hates rules and ordinances and loves hot people and cool ideas and sex, sex and ideally more sex — is worth changing what it means to be a conservative in the first place.

A hornier conservative movement might be more electorally successful, but it will run headfirst into a wall of longstanding conservative policy commitments — to end abortion, eliminate pornography and reinforce the “nuclear family.” Goals that are, at the very least, not very horny.

Being a horny bro is not terribly unusual, or even bad. In fact, I’d argue that many men fall in this category — heterosexual men who think that liking sex and sexiness are generally good, uncomplicated things, and think that people who tell them that sex or sexiness is bad or sinful or problematic should be mocked or ignored.

Various books I’ve been reading lately have me thinking about 1966. I have often said that the history of Black America could be divided between what happened before and after that year.

It was a year when the fight for Black equality shifted sharply in mood, ushering in an era in which rhetoric overtook actual game plans for action

The difference between Black America in 1960 and in 1970 appears vaster to me than it was between the start and end of any other decade since the 1860s, after Emancipation

A major reason older people are still at risk is that vaccines can’t entirely compensate for their immune systems. A study recently published in the journal Vaccines showed that for vaccinated adults ages 60 and over, the risk of dying from COVID versus other natural causes jumped from 11 percent to 34 percent within a year of completing their primary shot series

A booster dose brings the risk back down, but other research shows that it wears off too. A booster is a basic precaution, but “not one that everyone is taking,”

Unlike younger people, most of whom fully recover from a bout with COVID, a return to baseline health is less guaranteed for older adults. In one study, 32 percent of adults over 65 were diagnosed with symptoms that lasted well beyond their COVID infection

Economists tried to deal with the twin stresses of inflation and recession in the 1970s without success, and now here we are, 50 years and 50-plus economics Nobel Prizes later, with little ground gained

There’s weirdness yet to come, and a lot more than run-of-the-mill weirdness. We are entering a new epoch of crisis, a slow-motion tidal wave of risks that will wash over our economy in the next decades — namely climate change, demographics, deglobalization and artificial intelligence.

Their effects will range somewhere between economic regime shift and existential threat to civilization.