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China to send nuclear-armed submarines into Pacific amid tensions with US

The Chinese military is poised to send submarines armed with nuclear missiles into the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arguing that new US weapons systems have so undermined Beijing’s existing deterrent force that it has been left with no alternative.

They point to plans unveiled in March to station the US Thaad anti-ballistic system in South Korea, and the development of hypersonic glide missiles potentially capable of hitting China less than an hour after launch, as huge threats to the effectiveness of its land-based deterrent force.

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

Nelson Lichtenstein, who parlayed a career writing about midcentury capitalism and industrial unionism into extraordinarily penetrating accounts of why the economic regime we live under today is so deeply unsatisfying. One abandoned idea documented in his most recent book, “A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor,” haunts me. Powerful people in the Democratic Party, like Senator Robert Wagner of New York, used to insist that the job of liberalism was to penetrate the “black box” of the corporation and turn the workplace into a more democratic institution. They believed that to leave decision-making in the great firms that dominate our lives merely to owners (as opposed to, say, the system of “co-determination” between labor and management under which the German economy now thrives) was no less than a violation of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which outlawed involuntary servitude.

who today are the best writers on American politics? There are two, and they both are bloggers. One, Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, is also a political theorist; his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” provides the most convincing account about what right-wing habits of mind are ultimately all about.

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.

the defense mounted by Trump’s allies made perfect sense to those following live on social media, in groups sealed off from general scrutiny, where facts are established by volume, and confirmation comes from likes.

The echo chambers that take hold on social media reach beyond the effects of media coverage partial to the president, which he promotes to counter fact-based reporting.

The effect of social media is to jack up the tenor of everything,” said Carl Cameron, who spent more than two decades as a reporter for Fox News before leaving in 2017.

Russian security chief says country seeing more cyberattacks

MOSCOW –  The head of the Russian Security Council says the country recently has seen a marked increase in attempted cyberattacks from overseas.

The alleged cyberattacks included penetrations of the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of Hillary Clinton.

How Donald Trump captures the White House

The Republican Party is too badly divided. His rhetoric is too incendiary. Republican voters may be "idiots", but the general public is wiser. The US electoral map, which places a premium on winning key high-population "swing" states, is tilted against the Republican Party.

Those states - which account for 67 electoral votes - all went for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Add them to the states Republican Mitt Romney carried in 2012, and it delivers 273 electoral votes - three more than the 270 necessary to win the presidency.

Flame is the biggest and most high-functioning cyberweapon ever discovered, various cybersecurity experts said. It is comprised of multiple files that are 20 times larger than Stuxnet and carry about 100 times more code than a basic virus, experts said.

The most alarming feature, experts said, is that Flame can be highly versatile, depending on instructions by its controller. The malware can steal data and social-network conversations, take snapshots of computer screens, penetrate across networks, turn on a computer's microphone to record audio and scan for Bluetooth-active devices.

Experts said they believe Flame reports back the information to a central command-and-control network that has constantly changed location. Analysts found servers in Germany, Vietnam, Turkey, Italy and elsewhere, but haven't located the main server.

My theory is that tablet computers aren't the new mobile phone or personal computer, gadgets most American adults have, particularly well-off ones. Rather, iPads are the new bicycle.

in a general sense, the trajectory is clear: With enough time and enough prosperity, sooner or later every consumer-technology product achieves a near-universal level of adoption. 

the National Household Travel Survey found that there were 0.86 bikes per American household.

“Increasingly, democratisation and authoritarianism are going hand in hand, and not just in Turkey.”

Erdogan’s ambition to institute an enhanced presidency with himself as a new “sultan” now looks unlikely to succeed after his imperious response to the protests over the development of Gezi Park

For the first time, Erdogan, who had confidently steered Turkey through choppy waters, seemed at a loss

the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that “came in the first ships,” as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society.

Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary).

cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance.

Its fall was a massive blow to the Iraqi army, to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and to the US, who had encouraged his policy of relying on the official armed force

But Sunni opinion is deeply split and troubled. Many are greatly concerned about the penetration into their areas of the Shia militias

Their action so deep inside the Sunni heartlands would raise fears of sectarian repercussions.

Ripley is offering to show how other nations educate students so much more effectively than we do

In the best tradition of travel writing, however, she gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures, and manages to make our own culture look newly strange..

Why do you guys care so much?” Kim inquires of two Finnish girls. “I mean, what makes you work hard in school?” The students look baffled by her question. “It’s school,” one of them says. “How else will I graduate and go to university and get a good job?” It’s the only sensible answer, of course, but its irrefutable logic still eludes many American student

So far, he’s gone virtually unchallenged. He has said the 2008 financial crisis “was the first time ever that markets were broken and could not fix themselves” (ever hear of the Depression?), and that he “could have caught a number of different crises” during his tenure at the Fed (which begs the question of why he didn’t). Journalists have asked such penetrating questions as, "You were knighted. Does that come with a title or anything?" Even the tough-minded Binyamin Applebaum called Greenspan "one of the nation’s most astute economic observers." Overall, the media has presented Greenspan's book as part of a soul-searching quest for why he missed the greatest economic collapse in decades—a frame that is needlessly obsequious and suggests he was a bystander to the disaster, not a central actor.

One of the great under-reported stories of the end of the 20th century was the enormous penetration of the West’s better political ideas — democracy and individual liberty — into the Muslim consciousness.

The secular intellectuals in exile, however, more forcefully embraced the democratic cause — their newspapers, books, magazines, Web sites and, increasingly, appearances on Al Jazeera — delivered their views back home. Intellectuals of such diverse viewpoints as Kanan Makiya, Edward Said, Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Burhan Ghalioun opened up an ever-increasing liberal, democratic space in foreign and Arabic publications.

In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”

An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation.

Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers

Asked about the president’s backing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into San Bernardino, one of the worst terror attacks in the United States since September 11, 2001, Mr. Obama’s press secretary declared on Wednesday that “the F.B.I. can count on the full support of the White House.”

The decision may have been all but inevitable for Mr. Obama, who every morning receives a classified intelligence briefing about the terrorist threats facing the United States. But he took the position after years of trying to find middle ground on the issue.

After Edward J. Snowden exposed some of the government’s most secret surveillance programs in 2013, the president repeatedly expressed support for the protection of user data on iPhones and other devices. But he also acknowledged the “legitimate need” to penetrate encryption, especially during terror investigations.

It’s become a predictable pattern: One act of violence in the world overshadows a similar, concurrent violent act, inviting a backlash against this imbalance in scrutiny, sympathy, and grief. But that predictability doesn’t make the pattern any less distressing. Each time there’s a major terror attack in an American or European city—New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Paris again—it captures the attention and concern of Americans and Europeans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do. Seldom do events line up so neatly, offering a clear comparison, as the bombings in Beirut and the rampage in Paris.

Onepotential explanation is simple: There were three times more deaths in Paris than in Beirut. Beyond that are a host of other, intertwined reasons. Perhaps chief among them is familiarity. Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than to Beirut—or to Cairo, or to Nairobi, or to any number of cities that have experienced bloody attacks. If they haven’t traveled to the French capital themselves, they’ve likely seen a hundred movies and TV shows that take place there, and can reel off the names of landmarks. Paris in particular is a symbol of a sort of high culture.

There is also a troubling tribal, or racial, component to this familiarity factor as well: People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.

Fifty people have died in an attack at a market bazaar and a school near Kandahar airport that began late Tuesday

38 civilians, 10 Afghan National Army soldiers and two policemen

Nine terrorists were also killed

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.

The AI revolution will have two engines — China and the United States — pushing its progress swiftly forward. It is unlike any previous technological revolution that emerged from a singular cultural setting. Having two engines will further accelerate the pace of technology.

WorldPost: In your book, you talk about the “data gap” between these two engines. What do you mean by that? Lee: Data is the raw material on which AI runs. It is like the role of oil in powering an industrial economy. As an AI algorithm is fed more examples of the phenomenon you want the algorithm to understand, it gains greater and greater accuracy. The more faces you show a facial recognition algorithm, the fewer mistakes it will make in recognizing your face

All data is not the same, however. China and the United States have different strengths when it comes to data. The gap emerges when you consider the breadth, quality and depth of the data. Breadth means the number of users, the population whose actions are captured in data. Quality means how well-structured and well-labeled the data is. Depth means how many different data points are generated about the activities of each user.