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Traditionally, magazines have given informed staffers the leeway to share considered judgments of that sort with readers in service of helping them to understand the world. In contrast, newspapers, TV networks, and NPR have shied away from rendering such judgments in deference to longstanding aspirations to “objectivity.”

In the case of the physician’s letter, the norms of some major news organizations caused journalists confronted with obvious bullshit to publish under headlines like these:

Some outlets signaled in the body of their stories that readers should be skeptical. “The full letter is written in true Trumpian fashion, full of hyperbole and boasting of greatness,” NPR noted.

no one seems to know the reality of what happened between Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels, and Michael Cohen. The only thing that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt is that the White House is lying about it.

This particular drama began Wednesday evening, when Rudy Giuliani, a new addition to the president’s legal team, went on Sean Hannity’s TV show and said that Trump had personally repaid Cohen, his lawyer and sometimes-fixer, for the $130,000 Cohen paid to Daniels as hush money about her alleged affair with Trump some years earlier.

Giuliani said. “It’s not campaign money. No campaign-finance violation.”This had the potential to be clever and elegant or else legally suicidal.

The Middle East is a “troubled place,” President Donald Trump said Friday night as he described his decision to use America’s “righteous power” in a retaliatory attack against government targets in Syria following a suspected chemical attack there.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seems to have won the civil war in his country—but that doesn’t mean peace is coming. In fact, the conflict seems to be escalating—fueled by the many outside powers who have joined the Syrian battlefield with interests of their own.

Over the seven years of Syria’s war, it has sucked in numerous other countries, who have attempted to shape the conflict with every tool from bombing to mercenaries to special operators to weapons shipments to money. The war has grown ever more complicated and more deadly over time, and Syria’s future is now largely being determined outside of its borders.

In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, the physicist Louis Slotin stood in front of a low table at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, concentrating intensely on the object in front of him. His left thumb was hooked into a hole on the top of a heavy beryllium dome, fingers bracing the side as he carefully cantilevered it on its leftmost edge. In his right hand he held a flathead screwdriver, its head wedged under the right edge of the dome to keep it from closing completely. Through the gap on the right side you could just barely catch a metallic gleam, a glimpse of the 14-pound plutonium sphere that was slated to become one of the United States’ next nuclear weapons.

Going from plutonium nitrate to a finished bomb core had proven to be a major challenge for the metallurgists at Los Alamos Laboratory. By the time they made the demon core (the third plutonium core, after those in the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs) they had worked out many of the kinks. They first converted the plutonium salt into plutonium metal by reacting it with metallic calcium, a relatively straightforward process. The metallurgists weren’t done, though: Early studies had found that plutonium produced this way is incredibly brittle, cracking with every attempt to make it into the needed shapes. To solve this, the metallurgists tried mixing the plutonium with various other metals to see if they could improve its workability as an alloy, eventually finding gallium to be ideal. The plutonium-gallium alloy of the demon core was hot-pressed into two hemispheres and then coated with a thin layer of nickel to protect the plutonium from rusting; joining these two hemispheres together completed its manufacture.

An opportunity came in the form of Operation Crossroads, a testing program to determine the impact of nuclear weapons on warships. However, now that the wartime pressure was off, the scientists realized that it would be useful to run some more tests on their creation.

The “worst deal ever” will most likely live to see another 120 days.The Associated Press reported Wednesday that President Trump will this week extend relief from nuclear-related economic sanctions on Iran. If it seems like a procedural matter, it is, but it also means in practice that it keeps alive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iran deal is known. Reinstating the sanctions would have put the United States in violation of the agreement. The president must decide every 120 days whether to waive the sanctions.  

Trump faced two separate choices. One was whether to certify or decertify the JCPOA under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which Congress passed in 2015 to give it the right to review the accord and require the president to verify Iran’s compliance with the agreement every 90 days. In October, Trump declined to certify compliance, but did not tear up the deal—in decertifying the deal, he left to Congress the decision of what to do about it. Congress has been focused on other things, however. The other and more consequential choice was whether to waive or reimpose sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities, and it is on this decision that U.S. participation in the deal lives or dies. If AP’s report is correct, Trump has passed up this opportunity to withdraw.  

The new sanctions will almost certainly anger Iranian officials, but are likely to be cautiously welcomed by the other parties to the JCPOA: the European Union, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the U.K., all of which wanted the deal to be preserved because, they said, it had succeeded in freezing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and its uranium-enrichment activity.The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, both signature foreign-policy initiatives of President Obama, bolster fears that the JCPOA could go the same way. Trump’s remarks on the presidential campaign trail, where he called the agreement the “worst deal ever,” further cast its future into doubt. But the JCPOA’s other signatories, especially the EU and the U.K., have been vocal in their support of the agreement and have made their case to the White House and lawmakers. China and Russia, who are also parties to the deal, have also signaled they will stay in it.

The question for Germany ran: where could she achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost.

German policy had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the center of Europe was a thorn in the flesh

Germany's problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risk.

Markets fell after President Donald Trump announced planned tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, an effect that was exacerbated by what the move symbolizes fo

When a key economic input suddenly becomes scarce,  it’s called a supply shock: It pushes costs up and economic activity down.

This helps explain why markets have responded so badly to President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum. Like a geopolitical shock that reduces the supply of oil, it’s bad for both inflation and growth.

Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ

He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.

he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,

When Donald Trump’s press secretary was recently asked to comment on a rogues’ gallery of foreign leaders embracing her boss’s catchphrase of “fake news,” she essentially made the Las Vegas argument: What happens in the United States stays in the United States. “I’m not going to speak to specifics of another country when I don’t know the details,” said Sarah Sanders. “The White House is concerned about false and inaccurate information being pushed out ... to mislead the American people.”

Like many successful branding campaigns, Trump’s is grounded in some truth: The term “fake news” emerged, in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as a reference to the deliberately false stories that Russian government propagandists and assorted troublemakers around the world were spreading on Facebook and other social-media platforms to help or harm a particular candidate, sow chaos, or simply make a quick buck. The weaponization of information and large-scale manufacture of disinformation have become fixtures of contemporary politics.

But in specifically repurposing the term “fake news,” and conflating unfavorable journalism with disinformation, Trump is arguing that journalists maliciously fabricate the sources and substance of their reporting—at least when what they report doesn’t reflect well on him.

From Paleolithic cave paintings to parchment scrolls to printed books, ink has recorded human history for over 100 millennia.

All inks are a means and method of communication – the first and longest-running form of information technology.

ink is anything but simple. Ever since the Pleistocene, inks of all types have been invented and reinvented, with every ink a product of its own unique context.

“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”

How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different

(They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition

The challenges and concerns that have arisen in Germany should not be taken as indicators that the Energiewende is failed policy, or more specifically, to dismiss the importance of renewable energy.

2022, it is expected that Germany will have 220 GW of total capacity, of which 90 GW will be from conventional sources and 130 GW from renewables, with wind and solar accounting for 90 percent of the added renewable power capacity.

German policymakers also point to robust investment in the country’s energy sector, job creation, a burst of renewable energy technology innovation and Germany’s status as a global leader in the renewable energy sector as positive outcomes of the Energiewende.

Does this mean that there is no truth? That any statement can be shown to be untrue by people with a different point of view? Objectivity is impossible, so there is no objective truth

This line of thinking was taken up especially by literary scholars, who argued that every text has multiple, perhaps infinite meanings. There is no true interpretation of a piece of writing

When this was expanded into other disciplines, it became more confusing. Some historians argued that it is impossible to make a true historical statement. Every statement can have multiple, even contradictory meanings. Excellent examples of this would be stat

Eighty years ago, as Americans came together to defeat the fascism that threatened civilization, American factories poured out the weapons needed to crush Germany and the other Axis Powers.

Today America can do it again and create the arsenal that defeats this latest threat to civilization: the coronavirus. From ventilators and N95 masks, to anti-viral drugs and ICU equipment and hospital beds, American companies are being mobilized in the face of the most serious public health crisis in more than a century. But these companies will only be successful if we learn the right lessons from the industrial mobilization that won the world's biggest war.

Have a clear objective and a realistic timeline When war mobilization began in 1940-41, no one said the goal was to defeat fascism — and no one was able to mass produce tanks or bombers from a standing start. From the beginning, Washington set a more purposeful goal of building a modern, well-equipped military in case war came.

U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.

they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.

Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it

n 2018 global health expert Jonathan D Quick, of Duke University in North Carolina, published a book titled The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It. In it he prescribed measures by which the world could protect itself against devastating disease outbreaks of the likes of the 1918 flu, which killed millions and set humanity back decades. He is the former chair of the Global Health Council and a long-term collaborator of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The worst case is that the outbreak goes global and the disease eventually becomes endemic, meaning it circulates permanently in the human population.

If it becomes a pandemic, the questions are, how bad will it get and how long will it last? The case fatality rate – the proportion of cases that are fatal – has been just over 2%, much less than it was for Sars, but 20 times that of seasonal flu.

The point of recounting this episode is twofold. It reminds us that Australia and the world, and the intraday dynamics of political discourse, felt quantifiably different only a nanosecond ago.

This gathering crisis has picked us up and set us down in a different place. At the moment, I’m having have conversations with my friends about whether we are in 1929, 1981 or 1991 – or somewhere we’ve never been at all.

the facts are clear. The treasurer is now working around the clock in pursuit of clear, humanist objectives: keeping people alive and preserving the economic health of Australia. Events have pushed the once risible objective of measuring and attaining wellbeing right to the centre of the national balance sheet.

Top executives at U.S.-traded companies sold a total of roughly $9.2 billion in shares of their own companies between the start of February and the end of last week, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows

The selling saved the executives—including many in the financial industry—potential losses totaling $1.9 billion, according to the analysis, as the S&amp;P 500 stock index plunged about 30% from its peak on Feb. 19 through the close of trading March 20.

By far the largest executive seller was Amazon. AMZN 1.96% com Inc. Chief Executive Jeffrey Bezos, who sold a total of $3.4 billion in Amazon AMZN 1.96% shares in the first week &nbsp;of February, shortly before the stock market peaked, allowing him to avoid paper losses of roughly $317 million if he had held the stock through March 20, according to the Journal analysis.

Many critics have used the incident at Middlebury, as well as violent protests at the University of California Berkeley, to argue that free speech is under assault. To these critics, liberal activists who respond aggressively to ideas they dislike are hypocrites who care little about the liberal values of tolerance and free speech.

the truth is that violent demonstrations on campus are rare, and are not what the critics have primarily been railing against. Instead, they have been complaining about an atmosphere of intense pushback and protest that has made some speakers hesitant to express their views and has subjected others to a range of social pressure and backlash, from shaming and ostracism to boycotts and economic reprisal.

one of the central tenets of modern First Amendment law is that the government cannot suppress speech if those harms can be thwarted by alternative means. And the alternative that judges and scholars invoke most frequently is the mechanism of counter-speech.

Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society.

To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community.

But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere