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Their sustained, invariant agenda has been upward redistribution of income: cutting taxes on the rich while weakening the social safety net. This agenda is unpopular: Only a small minority of Americans wants to see tax cuts for the wealthy, and an even smaller minority wants cuts to major social programs.

Yet Republicans have won elections partly by denying the reality of their policy agenda, but mainly by posing as defenders of traditional social values — above all, that greatest of American traditions, racism.

this sustained reliance on the big con has, over time, exerted a strong selection effect both on the party’s leadership and on its base. G.O.P. politicians tend disproportionately to be con men (and in some cases, con women), because playing the party’s political game requires both a willingness to and a talent for saying one thing while doing another.

President Donald Trump accepted an invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the White House said Thursday, a meeting that would mark the first time a serving U.S. president has sat down with the leadership of the heavily militarized and diplomatically isolated country.

American officials acknowledged that it was unusual for such a face-to-face session to be arranged without an extensive series of preparatory meetings between lower-ranking officials

But a failure by Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim to make headway could lead each side to double down on their demands and perhaps heighten the possibility of conflict.

The fatal crash last week in Tempe, Ariz., involving an Uber autonomous vehicle is bringing new scrutiny to both the quality of Uber’s technology for avoiding collision and the efficacy of its backup system of so-called safety drivers.

The company said the second operator wasn’t officially responsible for maintaining car safety, but some drivers said the two people in the vehicle relied on each other since an accident or traffic violation could cost them their jobs.

One former Uber driver said he couldn’t imagine driving alone because it was “stressful enough” monitoring the road to ensure the car doesn’t perform in dangerous or unexpected ways. Being additionally responsible for logging unusual activity, which Uber drivers may type into a device in their cars, would only increase that, he said.

did not understand how poor my family was until my maternal grandmother told me a story about sackcloth dresses and beans. I was in my 20s, and we were sitting in her kitchen, the tickle of cool air from the window air-conditioning unit barely on us, when she told me that while she was a child, her mother made dresses for her and her siblings from sackcloth, and that she was always disappointed because the sacks with pretty patterns were taken by the time she was given the opportunity to choose. “We ate beans every week when I was little,” my grandmother said.

Perhaps I was blind to my poverty because it was so ubiquitous that it was rendered invisible. As a child, I lived in my grandmother’s house with my parents and siblings and our extended family. Thirteen of us shared five bedrooms (one was a converted dining room). We had no central heat, no central air. My grandmother installed gas heaters in the long hallway bisecting the house and, later, a fat wood-burning stove in the living room. During the summer, box fans hummed in all the windows. My mother says we never starved, and this is true. I had it better than my grandparents and my mother did when they were young, but I remember hunger. I think it was the hunger of childhood, the need for fuel to grow, but it was blinding sometimes

As an adult, this is how I carry the poverty of my Mississippi youth forward with me: by remembering the emptiness inside me. By remembering how that emptiness permeated every bit of me. How I was hungry in my belly and ravenous to fill my brain with something that would one day help ensure that I would not be hungry forever.

for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.

in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.

after spending billions of euros to accommodate the newcomers, Germany is beginning to reap some gains. The number who are either working or participating in a job training program has been growing, and was at more than 400,000 as of the end of 2018. Of those, 44,000 were enrolled in apprenticeships, according to German business groups.

That’s on pace with, or even slightly ahead of, what many experts had predicted. 

we’re on track,”

It’s remarkable: A number of polls suggest that Democratic voters now consider climate change to be a top-tier issue, as important as health care

That revolution’s main objective: achieving a “100% clean energy economy” in the United States by the year 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, both more stringent and longer-sighted than what the previous Democratic White House—which Biden unfailingly calls the “Obama-Biden administration”—pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Today Inslee debuted a plan to reenter the Paris Agreement and enshrine climate at the center of U.S. diplomacy. It runs more than 50 pages single-spaced.

North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met for the first time at a historic summit Friday.The neighbors technically remain at war.

One of the key issues to be addressed is North Korea’s nuclear program, which has been at the center of tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang, as well alarming China and the United States.The inter-Korean meeting precedes an equally high-stakes diplomatic gambit involving President Donald Trump and Kim. However, the date and location for that summit remains uncle

If the current overture bears fruit, it will be one of the ironies of history that Kim Jong Un’s bloody consolidation of power provided him with the impunity to pursue peace with his nation’s mortal enemy, the United States. Believed to have ordered the deaths of anyone viewed as a potential threat to his rule, Kim also personally oversaw the acceleration of North Korea’s nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile programs. The biggest question now is whether he is actually willing to cede ground on what has been North Korea’s long-held ambition to be a nuclear power.

he Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, offered Tehran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for agreeing to curb its nuclear program.The agreement was aimed at ensuring that "Iran's nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful." In return, it lifted U.N. Security Council and other sanctions, including in areas covering trade, technology, finance and energy.

ran signed the agreement with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., Russia, France, China and the United Kingdom — as well as Germany and the European Union.

The process of diplomacy that the United States pursued with Iran could offer some insights on how to begin engagement with an adversary whose leadership is extremely distrustful of the United States and vice versa,” she wrote in a post for the Arms Control Association.

It now seems likely that Trump will end U.S. compliance with the nuclear deal on May 12, when the next deadline for extending sanctions waivers comes up. It is of course still possible that Trump will take advantage of European gestures—like an agreement to sanction ballistic-missile activity, vigorously enforce inspections, and seek a follow-on agreement—to claim to have “improved” the deal thanks to his negotiating prowess, but that remains a long shot. It was always fanciful to imagine that the Europeans were going to agree to make fundamental changes to the nuclear deal (as if it were somehow in their power to unilaterally revise it without the support of the other parties to the agreement, namely Russia, China, and Iran), which is why that approach always seemed to me to be a ploy to kill the deal and blame others for its demise.

There are scenarios being discussed in which Washington abandons the deal in May but it somehow survives.  For example, Trump could refuse to sign the sanctions waivers up for renewal, but agree to go easy on implementation, or give exemptions to firms in European countries who have signaled a willingness to work on a new deal.  I suppose anything is possible, but it’s hard to see how that works. Whatever public or private pledges Trump makes, few European companies are going to invest in Iran or buy Iranian oil if U.S. law requires them to be sanctioned for doing so, and it is hard to see Iran abiding by the deal indefinitely if it accepts all of its constraints but gets none of the benefits.

There’s also the risk that countries like China or India—or even some in the EU—ignore the new sanctions and continue to buy Iranian oil, which would mean that we’d have to risk a major international trade clash to try to enforce them, at a time when potential trade wars are already looming. And even if Trump surprises us and extends sanctions for another few months and the deal survives on life support, we would soon be back in the same place we are today, faced with a binary choice between accepting an unchanged deal and blowing it up. If anyone thinks Iran will just come back to the table to accept a “better deal” after the United States, alone, walks away from the current one, they have more faith in Tehran’s political flexibility than I do.

Days after Donald Trump was accused of using racially charged language during bipartisan immigration talks, charges of bigotry once again threatened the president’s agenda as lawmakers battled Sunday over his choice of words and his intentions.

Meanwhile, lawmakers were still squabbling about what Trump said in the first place. Two Republicans present at the Thursday meeting, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), contradicted the accounts of Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), drawing a rebuke from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for attacking Durbin’s integrity. And after courts last year used the president’s negative comments about Muslims to reject his attempts to implement travel restrictions, a federal judge who temporarily reinstated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program said Friday it was “plausible” that Trump acted for racial reasons when he ended the Obama-era initiative.

The White House has not denied the “shithole” comments — Trump himself said only that he did not disparage Haitians — and there’s recognition internally that fighting over his views on race makes it harder to reach an immigration deal, a senior administration official said. “Democrats are going to have absolutely no incentive to cut a deal on anything,” the official said. Trump’s comments were so toxic, the thinking goes, that Democrats will be loath to hand him anything that looks like a win, such as funding for his proposed border wall. The White House has said it wants border security funding and changes to visa programs to be part of any deal related to the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.

The German government is offering rejected asylum seekers benefits in kind worth up to €1000 if they voluntarily return home. The Federal Ministry of the Interior announced the new program called “Your Country, Your Future, Now!” which will run until February 28, on Saturday. Under it families who agree to leave will be entitled to up to €3000. The funding complements the “Jump-Start Plus” return program, launched last February.

The number of asylum applications has fallen drastically compared to the previous year.

If Mr. Xi stays in office for life, as many now expect, that will only formalize a process he has undertaken for years: stripping power away from China’s institutions and accumulating it for himself.

It helps to mentally divide dictatorships into two categories: institutional and personalist. The first operates through committees, bureaucracies and something like consensus. The second runs through a single charismatic leader.

Domestic politics tend to be more volatile, governing more erratic and foreign policy more aggressive, studies find. But the clearest risk comes with succession.

Asking if the nuclear button at President Trump’s disposal is an actual button, as the president claimed on Twitter Tuesday, or merely a figurative term to describe the means by which a nuclear missile can be deployed is a bit like asking someone if they’d preferred to be shot or stabbed to death—a distinction without a difference. And yet here we are in the first week of the new year asking precisely that question.

Notwithstanding the puerile, schoolyard-like taunt from Trump, his tweet referred to the “nuclear football,” a series of launch codes contained in a briefcase that the president must enter in order to authorize a nuclear strike—one that no country has ordered since President Harry Truman dropped nuclear weapons on Japan to force it to surrender in World War II. (An early plan for nuclear war was codenamed “Dropkick.” According to former defense secretary Robert McNamara, the Kennedy- and Johnson-era defense secretary, you need a “football” for a “dropkick.”)

The term’s use continued through the Cold War. In the U.S., criticism of Senator Barry Goldwater’s apparent openness to using nuclear weapons in Vietnam prompted a New York Times story on September 27, 1964, with the headline: “Controversy Grows On Who Controls Nuclear Button.”

In the year since taking office, has he found ways to address the ethical questions that could taint his foreign policy credibility?

That sort of omission of fact and blurring of ethical lines has characterized his approach to handling his business ties and overseas deals. For example, presidents traditionally have put their holdings into professionally managed blind trusts. Trump too created a trust — but he made his revocable, and put his two older sons in charge. And he named himself sole beneficiary of the profits.

"As the Trump Organization moves forward with some of its major unfinished developments such as those in Indonesia [and] India, they certainly seem to be stretching the spirit of the promise to not undertake any new deals," she says. Kenney says many of these unfinished projects do involve new contracts for infrastructure projects such as sewers and roads.

WASHINGTON — Last summer, President Donald Trump publicly pinned much of the blame for his administration’s woes on its communications efforts.

Trump defends his use of Twitter, saying that it offers him a chance to communicate directly with the American people in an open and honest way. But the president, who often takes his cues from cable news — he frequently tags Fox News to his tweets — or from the last adviser to brief him, has proven that in many cases, his views are flexible and subject to influence.

On Thursday, Trump contradicted himself in a pair of tweets sent nearly three hours apart, initially indicating he had serious concerns with the surveillance program that he claimed “may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration.” With the House about to vote on the reauthorization of the FISA program, his comments set off a flurry of confusion

Senate leaders struck a far-reaching bipartisan agreement on Wednesday that would add hundreds of billions of dollars to military and domestic programs over the next two years while raising the federal debt limit, moving to end the cycle of fiscal showdowns that have roiled the Capitol.

The accord between Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Chuck Schumer of New York, his Democratic counterpart, would raise strict caps on military and domestic spending that were imposed in 2011 as part of a deal with President Barack Obama that was once seen as a key triumph for Republicans in Congress.

The deal would raise the spending caps by about $300 billion over two years.

The resurgence in carbon-credit prices began in mid-2017 when EU policy makers agreed to sharply reduce the number of available credits. That has pushed up prices and allowed the carbon market to help fulfill its purpose of punishing excess polluters.

The idea of a trading program was first enshrined in the 1997 Kyoto Protocols. The EU launched its program in 2005, granting credits to individual countries, who in turn pass out credits or auction them to carbon-producing companies, like steelmakers and power plants, which can either use or trade them. For every ton of carbon the polluters generate, regulators require them to possess a credit.

An excess in credits in recent years caused prices to plunge as industry suffered across the continent during the financial crisis, leaving unused credits in the system for years afterward

Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been

About one-third of the food produced and packaged for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That equals 1.3 billion tons a year, worth nearly $680 billion

The figures represent more than just a disastrous misallocation of need and want, given that 10 percent of people in the world are chronically undernourished.

From 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are related to food lost during harvest and production or wasted by consumers