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The separate remarks, made on Sunday morning news programs, came before a video was released online showing two young men who said they were behind suicide bombings in the central Russian city Volgograd last month that claimed 34 lives. In the video, the men threaten to carry out more attacks. In a statement posted with the video on its website, the militant group Vilayat Dagestan claimed responsibility for the Volgograd bombings, The Associated Press reported.

“They’re not giving us the full story about, what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups — the terrorist groups who have had some success — are they still plotting?”

“If necessary, all those tools will be activated.” He added that if foreign athletes wanted to provide their own additional security, “there is nothing wrong with that,” as long as they coordinated with the Russian authorities.

In an assertion reminiscent of the many denials over the years by the officers and their lawyers, Mr. Erdogan’s office released a statement saying that the recordings released on Monday were “a product of an immoral montage that is completely false.”

Many of the prosecutors and investigators in both cases — the corruption inquiry and the old military trials — are followers of Fethullah Gulen,

Recently, under pressure from the government, Turkish lawmakers voted to abolish the special courts in which the officers were tried, a significant step toward new trials. Variations of these courts, set up under antiterrorism laws, have been in place in Turkey since the 1970s. They operate under special rules that allow secret witnesses and wiretaps that would not be admissible in regular courts.

There is much nonsense being written about how Vladimir Putin showed how he is “tougher” than Barack Obama and how Obama now needs to demonstrate his manhood.

This is how great powers get drawn into the politics of small tribes and end up in great wars that end badly for everyone.

We vastly exaggerate Putin’s strength — so does he — and we vastly underestimate our own strength, and ability to weaken him through nonmilitary means.

Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 403 pages

She believes she has exposed “the Communist-agent-occupation of the U.S. government” during the Roosevelt and Truman eras, and that her discoveries add up to a Soviet-controlled American government that conspired to strengthen Russia throughout World War II at the expense of American interests, marginalize anti-Communist Germans, and deliver the crucial material for the Atomic Bomb to Stalin and his henchmen. It also conspired to cover up the betrayal.

But Ms. West writes without an understanding of historical context and lacks awareness of much of the scholarly literature on the subjects she writes about.

If the end-result is that Putin effectively gains responsibility and control over the civil war in Syria, then we should be willing to praise him to the skies. Praise him, just as the far right praises him, for his mastery of power politics – compared with that ninny weakling Obama.

All this apparent national humiliation is worth it. The price Russia will pay for this triumph is ownership of the problem. At some point, it may dawn on him that he hasn’t played Obama. Obama has played him.

Most pundits use the term “Machiavellian” to mean whoever in the arena seems more successful at scheming, plotting, double-crossing, intimidating, and maneuvering. But Machiavelli himself had a different idea of what a true Machiavellian looks like: a kind, simple, virtuous naif.

Investigators had been watching Usaamah Abdullah Rahim long enough to know about his avid interest in Islamic State militants, but when they overheard him talking on a cellphone about beheading Massachusetts police officers, they moved in, leading to a confrontation Tuesday morning outside a CVS here that left Mr. Rahim dead, and once again raised alarms about the influence of foreign extremists on homegrown radicals.

Mr. Rahim was a religious mentor to his nephew David Wright, who was also known as Dawud Wright, Mr. Rivero said.

the case has also renewed concerns in Washington about the long reach of the Islamic State and other radical groups that have seized on Internet recruitment.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan fears he may have misread electorate’s mood as polls show strong support for opposition parties

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s long-running feud with Turkey’s feisty opposition media has descended into open warfare ahead of Sunday’s general election, amid claims that his ruling neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) is plotting to fix the results and shrill threats to lock up journalists and editors en masse.

But Erdogan’s livid fury with the press may be rooted in a deeper, personal unease

new details about the suspect, Usaama Rahim, and an alleged plot to attack conservative activist and Muhammad cartoon contest sponsor Pamela Geller are emerging.

“It’s chilling. It is chilling,” Geller told ABC News’ Tom Llamas in a phone interview Wednesday night. “When you consider that they want to cut my head off and leave it on my chest the way they did Foley and the other aid workers in the Middle East because of a cartoon, this is the state of freedom in this country.”

saying she feared for her safety.

South Carolina was unique in early America for its black majority. No other Southern colony or state had a white minority until 1855, when Mississippi also earned that particular status. In 1822, Charleston housed 24,780 people, only 10,653 of whom were white. Free people of color were a tiny percentage, at 623, and most of them were the mixed-race offspring of white fathers and

Vesey’s early life was so unusual that if it were the plot of a novel or film, most would regard the saga as an absurd fiction.

Charleston is crammed with countless monuments and markers dedicated to white Carolinians, most of them slaveholders, but until last year, there was nothing to adequately mark the black struggle for freedom and equality. Pinckney was instrumental in funding the statue of Vesey that was finally erected in February 2014. Many white Charlestonians opposed the monument.

fewer literary authors will be able to support themselves as e-books win acceptance, publishers and agents say. "In terms of making a living as a writer, you better have another source of income,"

"We aren't seeing a generation of readers coming along that supports writers today the way that young people supported J. D. Salinger and Philip Roth when they were starting out,

From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

Six months ago, police in California pulled over a truck that turned out to contain a rifle, a handgun, a shotgun and body armor. Police learned from the driver — sometime after he opened fire on them — that he was heading for San Francisco, where he planned to kill people at the Tides Foundation. You’ve probably never heard of the Tides Foundation — unless you watch Glenn Beck, who had mentioned it more than two dozen times in the preceding six months, depicting it as part of a communist plot to “infiltrate” our society and seize control of big business.

The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.

calls to violence, explicit or implicit, can have effect. But the more incendiary theme in current discourse is the consignment of Americans to the category of alien, of insidious other. Once Glenn Beck had sufficiently demonized people at the Tides Foundation, actually advocating the violence wasn’t necessary.

He posed the cultivation of virtue as a superior alternative to the manipulation or coercion of behavior through policy.

I'll highlight three virtues from Confucius's thought that I believe are the basic building blocks for all other virtues: One is rén (仁), benevolence or compassion. Another is self-control, which Confucius believed was enforced and nurtured by adhering to proper forms of behavior, or lǐ (礼). And, the third is wise judgment about how to turn benevolent intention into action of a kind that avoids the proverbial road to hell.

public discourse about virtue is muted. To abuse a recent parlour game, below is a graph of the rate of occurrence of the words "virtue" and "technology" in Google's Ngram Viewer, which plots frequency of words occurring in books over time. We see a rapid rise of technology in the last forty years against a two-century slide in virtue. (Is it a coincidence that the crossover happens around 1970, the same year I called out in yesterday's graph? Somewhat similar results are had with "virtue" against "institutions," "policies," and "systems.")

fear recognition and the fight-or-flight reflex embedded in our neurochemistry is part of what has enabled our survival and evolution from chest-pounding primates to iPad-wielding bipeds

major catastrophes spark widespread anxiety in the countries where they hit. A great example of this is how incredibly overinflated Americans' fears about terrorism grew after 9/11. In one poll that was conducted in the aftermath of the attacks, respondents said that the average American had a 48 percent chance of being injured in a terrorist plot over the next year. As it turned out, the odds were more like 0 percent.

Americans have become extremely vulnerable to the pressures of the 21st century. For the past 50 years, we've been getting progressively more anxious in good economic times and bad, so we can't even blame it on the recession. As I was conducting research for the book, psychologists pointed to three basic reasons why our psychic state is deteriorating. The first is a simple matter of social disconnection. As we spend more time with our electronic devices than we do with our neighbors, we lose our physical sense of community. Social isolation flies in the face of our evolutionary history. The second major cause is the information overload that we're experiencing with the Internet and the 24-hour media cycle. We're all aware of it, but I'm not sure we realize how big an impact it's having on our brains. The third explanation can be attributed to what one psychologist refers to as a culture of "feel goodism" -- the idea that we shouldn't ever have to be upset and that all our negative emotions can be neutralized with a pill. This to me feels like a distinctly American phenomenon.

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.

compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework. Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.

In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.

In Turkey, the president is technically second to the prime minister. But in practice, when Mr. Erdogan was elected president in August, he absorbed the power and privilege of the prime minister’s post into his new position. And like Mr. Putin, who also shifted between the presidency and prime minister’s office, the stronger Mr. Erdogan has grown, the tenser relations have become with the United States.

he has used his conflict with Washington and his political enemies as a force to help consolidate power, as he continues to carry out the duties associated with the prime minister. He has rallied his conservative base behind his religiously infused agenda, clashing with United States policy for confronting Islamic State militants, while also blaming foreign interference for the growing catalog of crises he faces. As Turkey’s challenges have magnified — fighting on its border with Syria, strained relations with its NATO allies, pressure on the economy — Mr. Erdogan’s authority has grown only stronger.

Turkey’s continued refusal to allow the United States to use its bases for airstrikes against the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq — and insistence that the coalition target the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — has laid bare deep divisions between the two countries that have prompted analysts to question Turkey’s reliability as an ally, and some have even suggested that Turkey be expelled from NATO.

“Eichmann in Jerusalem” in many ways mirrored Eichmann’s own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, nonideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt’s insights — that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder — remain pertinent.

as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist.

Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the “little man” portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”

(CNN)Two terror suspects killed in a shootout in eastern Belgium this week were among more than a dozen people rounded up in across-the-country raids designed to stop a group's allegedly imminent attack -- a plot to kill Belgian police in streets and stations -- the nation's federal prosecutor said Friday.

The alleged plotters -- including two people killed Thursday night in a battle with police in Verviers -- were confronted in 12 raids across Belgium from Thursday into Friday, federal prosecutor Eric van der Sypt said.

a number of companies are latching on to a broader advertising notion of “the writer,” either as a conceptual, disembodied mascot or, in the case of Chipotle, by gathering literary luminaries to form a collective “spokescribe.”

As serious literature becomes further marginalized, cloistered from the cultural Kardashians at the gate, brands may be tapping into a quality associated with it that historically seduces aspirational consumers: elitism.

And, to the cynical marketplace, a novel conceived in a prestigious Midwestern graduate workshop, polished for years in a Brooklyn brownstone and edited in a Manhattan publishing house carries a whiff of artisanal craftsmanship not so far off from that of medicinal cocktails and locally sourced furniture.