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She owns that car, and has every right to protect it.

the response was very different—the weary, way-of-the-world instruction: That’s how it is.

I am reminded of the ancient words that washed over me in the churches of my childhood and the college chapels of my late adolescence, in the cathedrals and outdoor masses of my early life on my own: This is my body, which is given up for you.

Women face their own horrors. While sexual violence by the Tatmadaw often goes unreported, rape was systematic and widespread during the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, Human Rights Watch found. The same fate befalls women of other ethnic groups in conflict areas.

“The central paradox at the heart of U-Va. is also the central paradox of the nation, the unresolved paradox of American liberty,” McInnis said. “How is it that the nation that defined the natural rights of humankind did so within a system that denied those same rights to millions of people?”

efferson insisted, the up-and-coming generation should fix the problem by “emancipating the enslaved and deporting them to Africa,” Taylor said

Instead, early U-Va. graduates became “leading voices in the pro-slavery movement, soldiers in the Confederate Army, and political leaders in the Confederate States of America,” McInnis wrote in “Educated in Tyranny.”

The vast majority of the student body — numbering between 100 and 150 people each year — hailed from wealthy, Southern slaveholding families. Plantation-owning parents clamored to send their sons to U-Va., lauded as a prestigious alternative to the Northern schools they feared as dangerous hotbeds of anti-slavery sentiment, according to Taylor.

Ultrarich Southerners were also some of the only Americans able to afford tuition at U-Va., then “the most expensive college” in the country, Taylor said.

“Jefferson physically designed a campus that internalized everything he had learned living on plantations,” McInnis said. “It is architecturally set up to be a landscape of slavery.”

Enslaved people also catered to students’ daily whims. “Every afternoon, an enslaved servant called on his assigned student,” Taylor wrote in “Thomas Jefferson’s Education.” The enslaved person then “[took] orders for errands on the grounds or in town.”

At U-Va. — as at every Southern university in America during this era — bullying the enslaved formed “part of daily existence,” McInnis said. It was also performance art, Taylor added: a way for rich young men to prove their mettle to their peers.

“The episodes we do know of, other students are watching and applauding,” Taylor said. “This was a whole generation of men who just behaved monstrously.”

There’s a broad understanding that 'slavery is bad, people got whipped,’ but there’s also an urge to compartmentalize it: ‘That was bad, but it’s over with, and we should focus on the good stuff like U-Va.’s cutting-edge education and science,’ ” he said.“We’re not trying to ruin people’s day — but if you want to understand society, you’ve got to understand how everything is woven together, the good with the bad.”

we knew the trip would reveal more of what we already knew — that Africans, including children, were sometimes kept for months in dungeons, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a slave ship. That some of the captured Africans died in confinement while others died during the Middle Passage, the longest leg of the triangular journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas.

In its efforts to bring the African diaspora together, Ghana’s leaders are also hoping to make amends for the complicity of Africans in selling their own people into what would become the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

“the door of no return” at Ghana’s oldest European structure, Elmina Castle. The drive from Ghana’s capital to the town of Elmina took about three hours.The massive stone castle, built in 1482 by the Portuguese and captured by the Dutch in 1637, is among dozens of colonial slave forts that remain along the Ghanaian coast. While many forts have been turned into prisons, government offices, guesthouses, or simply left abandoned, Elmina Castle and another infamous fortress, Cape Coast Castle, see thousands of tourists annually.

we listened somberly while our guide broke down our ancestors’ harrowing journey — the hundreds of captured people packed into these small, still fetid spaces. The shackled women brought out into the courtyards so the Dutch governor from his balcony could choose the woman he wanted to rape that day. The chosen woman getting washed and brought to him. We heard the stories of resisters being shackled in the courtyard for days beneath a brutal sun, sent to solitary confinement or killed. Above them in the opulent quarters of the castle, which housed a sanctuary for white missionaries and a church, Dutch officers enjoyed lavish meals and ocean views.

AS TRUE AS AN UNDERTOW, I feel the water pulling me back across it, taking me to where it took my ancestors centuries ago. To a land as foreign to them as the African chiefs who offered brown bodies over for weapons, brass and cotton. As foreign as the white captors who raped, brutalized and enslaved those same bodies. I feel the pull of the history that brought me here. And the history that took me away.

The goal is to put the offense on a higher level than one of just lying. That way, if the Sanders campaign decides to point to all of the lies Warren has told throughout her career – that her father was a janitor, that she is Native American – her lies won’t matter as much because she’s just electioneering while his lies are rooted in misogyny. It’s a trick that still works for Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly complained about the lack of support Sanders gave to her campaign, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. (Clinton, after losing the primary to Obama in 2008, appeared at two rallies with Obama and did 10 solo campaign appearances to help him get elected. Sanders, after losing the primary to Clinton in 2016, did three events with Clinton and 37 solo events.)

Early accusers of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were deemed golddiggers, looking for an easy settlement to shut them up. Even when there’s some form of evidence, such as when photographs show Donald Trump with E Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape, even while he insists he doesn’t know her, supporters are still willing to take his word for it.

It marked a major victory in the eyes of human rights advocates in the country who have been fighting to hold American service members accountable for violence against Filipina women — which they see as a byproduct of the U.S. military’s 120-year presence

With the Pemberton conviction, it seemed that justice was finally moving in the right direction.

But on Sept. 13, Pemberton was put aboard a U.S. military cargo plane and flown out of the Philippines, a free man. A week earlier, President Rodrigo Duterte made the bombshell announcement that he had granted Pemberton an absolute pardon, nullifying the Marine’s sentence after less than six years served.

After the guilty verdict was announced, the judge ordered Pemberton to start serving his sentence at New Bilibid Prison, the largest detention facility in the Philippines, where more than 26,000 convicted men sleep in crowded cell blocks, disease festers and temperatures can reach over 100 degrees in the summer. But that detention order was revised just hours later

the presidential pardon came just hours after Duterte’s own administration filed a motion to block a court order that would have freed the Marine on other grounds.

the recent developments have seen the case deteriorate into an apparent tool for political leverage rather than justice

“This should give us a lesson that the U.S. has no respect for our sovereignty,” Virginia Lacsa Suarez, the attorney for the Laude family, told The New York Times in response to the court order to release Pemberton that was issued even before the pardon. “It shows that the U.S. looks down on us, that the U.S. does not even respect our laws.

From the beginning, the United States maintained an influence over the Pemberton case, despite the Philippines’ jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. service members. In 2014, Pemberton was first questioned by the United States Naval Criminal Investigative Service instead of Philippine police, and he was initially held onboard his ship, the U.S.S. Peleliu, anchored in Subic Bay, and then under U.S. guard at a Philippine military base, instead of in a Philippine jail. After he was arrested, the Marine Corps hired an attorney to represent him and paid all his legal fees, which had exceeded $550,000 by this fall

The pardon is the final chapter of a polarizing, high-profile case that has cost the U.S. Marine Corps more than half a million dollars and provoked debate over decades-old defense treaties between the two countries.

brought back bitter memories for Filipinos of another case in which a U.S. Marine was accused of rape. In 2006, Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith received a 40-year prison sentence for raping Suzette Nicolas

The agreement grants the United States considerable privileges toward determining where convicted American personnel will be detained, and Pemberton remained in a private air-conditioned cell fashioned from a shipping container at Camp Aguinaldo, a Philippine military base where he was monitored by two guards from the Philippine Bureau of Corrections and a steady rotation of U.S. service members. Pemberton’s rank remained unchanged and he continued receiving his monthly salary of about $2,300, totaling more than $160,000 since the killing.

Smith was held briefly in a Philippine jail, but after the United States canceled a joint military exercise in the Philippines, he was handed over to the U.S. Embassy. Smith remained at the embassy for more than two years, until Nicolas unexpectedly recanted her accusation and Smith was acquitted and returned home.

Duterte was always likely to take a pragmatic approach to Pemberton’s release. “He’s willing to engage with us, but it’s not his first preference in most situations,” Schaus says. “But when an opportunity presents itself to advance his priorities in a way that is palatable to him, he’s willing to entertain it

From the get-go, it was fishy,

Garcia-Flores had submitted a motion under the Philippines’ Good Conduct Time Allowance law, and Judge Roline Ginez-Jabalde, the same official who convicted Pemberton in 2015, ruled that the Marine was free to go, on the grounds that he had already served almost six years and had earned four years off his sentence for good behavior while in custody.

“A crime happened, and Pemberton paid for it under the Philippine law without any special privileges,” Garcia-Flores says. “If people think that he’s being given some special treatment, they are wrong.”

Suarez immediately moved to oppose Pemberton’s release, and so did the Department of Justice, arguing that only the Bureau of Corrections, not the Philippine courts, had the authority to determine whether Pemberton deserved time off his sentence for good conduct

Duterte met with Secretary of Justice Menardo Guevarra to discuss his constitutional right to grant an absolute pardon. At 4:51 p.m. the same day, Duterte’s secretary of foreign affairs, Teodoro Locsin Jr., announced the pardon in a tweet. “If there is a time when you are called upon to be fair, be fair,” Dutuerte said later in a televised address.

The news drew protests as the president’s critics took to social media and the streets, organizing demonstrations in Manila to voice their anger at Duterte’s decision. Many members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community thought the president was sending a signal that the Philippine government doesn’t believe that the lives of transgender women are important.

Beyond the question of whether the pardon was an anti-trans reaction by Duterte, it may have also been a strategic move to gain an advantage in relations with the United States

In February, Duterte gave notice that he was terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement, a move that many interpreted as a response to the U.S. State Department revoking the visa of Senator Ronald dela Rosa, the former National Police chief widely regarded as the architect of the administration’s notoriously violent war on drugs. Then in June, Duterte confirmed that he wouldn’t be canceling the agreement for at least another six months, and in July, dela Rosa announced that the United States would be reinstating his visa.

Despite Duterte’s outwardly critical stance toward the United States, relations between the two countries remain strong.

It’s the latest in more than $1.5 billion in arms that Duterte’s administration has moved to purchase from the United States this year, despite calls from Human Rights Watch for Congress to block the sales, citing the Philippine armed forces’ lengthy history of military and human rights abuses

“In both cases, there are many forces trying to undermine the testimonies of the victims, or the witnesses or their families,

necessary precautions in countries where the United States wants to maintain a strategic presence — including the Philippines, a key player in responding to China’s rising power in the western Pacific.

The Visiting Forces Agreement ensures that the two countries have a predetermined process to be followed if a service member is arrested and charged with a crime, when tensions are likely to be high.

Upon leaving the Philippines on Sunday, Pemberton was brought to Camp Smith in Hawaii. “The Marine Corps is taking appropriate administrative action,” Perrine said. He was unable to indicate whether Pemberton will be demoted, or if he will be given a less-than-honorable discharge.

“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay to the 1619 Project, said on Friday that Cotton’s bill “speaks to the power of journalism more than anything I’ve ever done in my career”.

On Sunday, she tweeted: “If chattel slavery – heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit – were a ‘necessary evil’ as Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.

“Imagine thinking a non-divisive curriculum is one that tells black children the buying and selling of their ancestors, the rape, torture, and forced labor of their ancestors for PROFIT, was just a ‘necessary evil’ for the creation of the ‘noblest’ country the world has ever seen.

“So, was slavery foundational to the Union on which it was built, or nah? You heard it from Tom Cotton himself.”

Cotton responded: “More lies from the debunked 1619 Project. Describing the views of the Founders and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery. No surprise that the 1619 Project can’t get facts right.”

They also need to hear about the semi-genocidal nature of the Russian attack on Ukraine—not just the extensive torture, murder, and rape of the civilian population, but the kidnapping of thousands of children, and the attempt to wipe out Ukrainian language and culture.

They need to hear how staunchness now, even in the face of nuclear threats, is infinitely better than a large-scale, possibly global war in a decade

Americans and Europeans need to hear about the consequences if Russia were to crush Ukraine; about the invasions and depredations that would surely come next in the Baltic states, and quite likely beyond; about the conclusions a no less ruthless Chinese government would draw; and about how a failure to take a stand here would mean something much bigger and more dangerous in a few years’ time

Americans also need to hear a celebration not only of Ukrainian courage and tenacity, but of their skill.

Modern politicians very rarely speak this way, but they need to try

The opposition to aid to Ukraine is still divided, hampered by its own crankiness and embittered introversion, and undermined daily by Russian barbarity, and no less, the astonishing Julius Streicher–like candor with which its propagandists howl for the blood of innocents.

Ukraine’s struggle for freedom and for its very existence is the struggle of a much larger order, not just in Europe but globally, and indeed of the human spirit.

The situation calls for sound policy, no doubt; it also calls for eloquence that soars. There is an epic speech to be delivered here; let us hope that there is someone who can deliver it.

lynchings and mass shootings are almost photo negatives of each other. An individual doing to an anonymous crowd what an anonymous crowd does to an individual....

1) Clean the air: We need "responsible" gun owners to help police the

Legislators and courts and law enforcement had clear and major roles -- once they decided to play them -- in suppressing the mob. It's much less clear, obviously, what will work on mass shootings.

I have some thoughts:

From the time that serious pieces of the establishment began to condemn and try to systematically stop lynchings (around World War I) to the time that real progress was made -- after World War II -- was 30 years. This is a long-term project.

bullshit bravado that dominates right wing gun culture. All of that bravado, like almost all bravado, is based on an irrational fear. The government is going to take my gun. Bullshit. And we all need to attack it as bullshit. It is the same level of bullshit as That negro is gonna rape my daughter. It's the exact same irrational fear of the other.

While the angry gun culture may not carry out most shootings, they are willing to tolerate them, just as much of America was long willing to tolerate lynchings, because of this primal/tribal fear. The NRA, like the Klan before it, is kind of a shiny object. It's hugely important, but it's the wider bullying gun culture that is the core of the problem.

If we can reduce the gun rhetoric pollution in the air somewhat through shaming, that may make these explosions less common.

2) Licensing v. Bans: Along those lines, your gun safety vs. gun control distinction is precisely correct. This is about meaningful licensing measures. Ways to assess the intersection of people and guns. Use the gun culture's own language. If you think people kill people, not guns, why do you object to closer monitoring of people? And I'd suggest working through concealed carry expansion. I would absolutely trade concealed carry expansion for stricter licensing and background measures

3) The Drug War: So much of our gun culture and violence organizes itself around drug prohibition -- both through tools of business and means of enforcement -- that any act of violence, especially gun violence, is inseparable from it

We'll never fully clean the air today without ratcheting down the drug war and moving toward as much legalization as possible

4) Seize this moment: One place where I think this moment is different than others is the growing sense in the country -- even among conservatives -- that right wing cultural nihilism is the greatest short and long-term challenge we face

The resistance to any effort to combat gun violence with something other than guns needs to be understood -- the NRA needs to be understood -- as a subsidiary of right-wing nihilism.

Over and over again, we ask what constructive suggestion do you offer to help govern your country to the benefit of all its people? And we get, fuck you, 47 percent. Arm yourself.

Despite History’s mantle of preserving and purveying an accurate picture of the past, hewing to the letter of historical accuracy wasn’t possible in the case of a dramatic series based on fragmented documentation, hence a large degree of dramatic license was employed.

“I especially had to take liberties with ‘Vikings’ because no one knows for sure what happened in the Dark Ages,” Mr. Hirst said. “Very little was written then.” The bottom line, he explained, was: “We want people to watch it. A historical account of the Vikings would reach hundreds, occasionally thousands, of people. Here we’ve got to reach millions.”

he was hard put to replicate authentic fabrics and woods. One of the biggest challenges he faced, he added, was improvising lighting sources for Viking homes and halls, which had no windows, making engaging photography of a strictly realistic interior setting impossible.

The report seeks to quantify one of the most chilling elements of Boko Haram, an Islamist extremist group that has assaulted the Lake Chad region of Africa for years with thievery, beheadings, kidnappings and the torching of entire villages.

According to Unicef, the overall number of suicide bombings increased from 32 in 2014 to 151 last year. In 2015, 89 attacks were carried out in Nigeria, 39 in Cameroon, 16 in Chad and seven in Niger.

Cameroon has had the highest number of attacks involving children, Unicef said.

In its report, Unicef said it needed $97 million to provide vaccinations, schooling, drinking water, mental health aid and other assistance to families affected by Boko Haram

It said that between 2009 and 2015, attacks by the group destroyed more than 910 schools and forced at least 1,500 more to close.

As a conservative, I am not one to deny the challenges of modern, liberal societies — the fragility of families, the brittleness of institutions, the economic struggles that result from globalization, the pulverization of community in some sad and dangerous places.

I fully expect the next generation to be a source of renewal, because I am confident that certain core ideals and institutions best fit human beings and allow them to flourish. I believe that our children and grandchildren will be brave, free and daring in pursuit of ageless ideals — and that teaching them to despair would be the true source of national ruin.

For a certain kind of right-wing nationalist, it always comes down to this. “Our people” must be preserved from invasion, rape and machete attacks by other people whose arrival would cause “a country, a people, a civilization” to die.

Trump has achieved one good thing in our politics. He has revealed motives that used to be hidden by “political correctness.” They were also hidden by human decency. In terms Decius would understand: This is playing with fire!

Enter Elkins. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. Her book cut against an abiding belief that the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the French or the Belgians.

Some academics shared her enthusiasm. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. Richard Drayton of King’s College London, another imperial historian, judged it an “extraordinary” book whose implications went beyond Kenya. It set the stage for a rethinking of British imperial violence, he says, demanding that scholars reckon with colonial brutality in territories such as Cyprus, Malaya, and Aden (now part of Yemen).

But many other scholars slammed the book. No review was more devastating than the one that Bethwell A Ogot, a senior Kenyan historian, published in the Journal of African History. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. In compiling “a kind of case for the prosecution”, he argued, she had glossed over the litany of Mau Mau atrocities: “decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women”. Ogot also suggested that Elkins might have made up quotes and fallen for the bogus stories of financially motivated interviewees. Pascal James Imperato picked up the same theme in African Studies Review. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the “largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and women interested in financial reparations”.

In this very long book, she really doesn’t bring out any more evidence than that for talking about the possibility of hundreds of thousands killed, and talking in terms almost of genocide as a policy,” says Philip Murphy, a University of London historian who directs the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and co-edits the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. This marred what was otherwise an “incredibly valuable” study, he says. “If you make a really radical claim about history, you really need to back it up solidly.

“Who is controlling the production of the history of Kenya? That was white men from Oxbridge, not a young American girl from Harvard,” she says.

During the Mau Mau war, journalists, missionaries and colonial whistleblowers had exposed abuses. The broad strokes of British misbehaviour were known by the late 60s, Berman argued. Memoirs and studies had added to the picture. Britain’s Gulag had broken important new ground, providing the most comprehensive chronicle yet of the detention camps and prison villages.

among Kenyanists, Berman wrote, the reaction had generally been no more than: “It was as bad as or worse than I had imagined from more fragmentary accounts.”

If, at that late date,” he wrote, “she still believed in the official British line about its so-called civilising mission in the empire, then she was perhaps the only scholar or graduate student in the English-speaking world who did.”

she believes there was more going on than the usual academic disagreement. Kenyan history, she says, was “an old boys’ club”.

Critics didn’t just find the substance overstated. They also rolled their eyes at the narrative Elkins told about her work. Particularly irksome, to some Africanists, was her claim to have discovered an unknown story

for years clues had existed that Britain had also expatriated colonial records that were considered too sensitive to be left in the hands of successor governments. Kenyan officials had sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. In 1967, they wrote to Britain’s Foreign Office asking for the return of the “stolen papers”. The response? Blatant dishonesty, writes David M Anderson, a University of Warwick historian and author of Histories of the Hanged, a highly regarded book about the Mau Mau war.

Internally, British officials acknowledged that more than 1,500 files, encompassing over 100 linear feet of storage, had been flown from Kenya to London in 1963, according to documents reviewed by Anderson. Yet they conveyed none of this in their official reply to the Kenyans

The turning point came in 2010, when Anderson, now serving as an expert witness in the Mau Mau case, submitted a statement to the court that referred directly to the 1,500 files spirited out of Kenya. Under legal pressure, the government finally acknowledged that the records had been stashed at a high-security storage facility that the Foreign Office shared with the intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6. It also revealed a bigger secret. This same repository, Hanslope Park, held files removed from a total of 37 former colonies.

A careful combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three years. Elkins had about nine months. Working with five students at Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees

The British government, defeated repeatedly in court, moved to settle the Mau Mau case. On 6 June 2013, the foreign secretary, William Hague, read a statement in parliament announcing an unprecedented agreement to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the insurrection. Each would receive about £3,800. “The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,” Hague said. Britain “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place.” The settlement, in Anderson’s view, marked a “profound” rewriting of history. It was the first time Britain had admitted carrying out torture anywhere in its former empire.

some scholars find aspects of Elkins’s vindication story unconvincing. Philip Murphy, who specialises in the history of British decolonisation, attended some of the Mau Mau hearings. He thinks Elkins and other historians did “hugely important” work on the case. Still, he does not believe that the Hanslope files justify the notion that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Kenya, or that those deaths were systematic. “Probably most of the historical criticisms of the book still stand,” he says. “I don’t think the trial really changes that.

second debate triggered by the Mau Mau case concerns not just Elkins but the future of British imperial history. At its heart is a series of documents that now sits in the National Archives as a result of Britain’s decision to make public the Hanslope files. They describe, in extensive detail, how the government went about retaining and destroying colonial records in the waning days of empire. Elkins considers them to be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure.

One record, a 1961 dispatch from the British colonial secretary to authorities in Kenya and elsewhere, states that no documents should be handed over to a successor regime that might, among other things, “embarrass” Her Majesty’s Government. Another details the system that would be used to carry out that order. All Kenyan files were to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. The Legacy files could be passed on to Kenya. The Watch files would be flown back to Britain or destroyed. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every document destroyed – in duplicate. The files indicate that roughly 3.5 tons of Kenyan documents were bound for the incinerator.

. Broadly speaking, she thinks end-of-empire historians have largely failed to show scepticism about the archives. She thinks that the fact that those records were manipulated puts a cloud over many studies that have been based on their contents. And she thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which historians must rethink their field.

Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which the archive is constructed”. They’ve been far more sceptical than that, he says. Historians, he adds, have always dealt with the absence of documents. What’s more, history constantly changes, with new evidence and new paradigms. To say that a discovery about document destruction will change the whole field is “simply not true”, he says. “That’s not how history works.”

Some historians who have read the document-destruction materials come away with a picture of events that seems less Orwellian than Elkins’s. Anderson’s review of the evidence shows how the purging process evolved from colony to colony and allowed substantial latitude to local officials. Tony Badger, a University of Cambridge professor emeritus who monitored the Hanslope files’ release, writes that there was “no systematic process dictated from London”

Badger sees a different lesson in the Hanslope disclosure: a “profound sense of contingency”. Over the decades, archivists and Foreign Office officials puzzled over what to do with the Hanslope papers. The National Archives essentially said they should either be destroyed or returned to the countries from which they had been taken. The files could easily have been trashed on at least three occasions, he says, probably without publicity. For a variety of reasons, they weren’t. Maybe it was the squirrel-like tendency of archivists. Maybe it was luck. In retrospect, he says, what is remarkable is not that the documents were kept secret for so many years. What is remarkable is that they survived at all.

this reporter has heard the cheers when Mr Trump roars that America has every right to fight back, even if that involves rough justice or being “so tough”, as he puts it.

Critics were missing the point when they chided the Republican for policies that sound like appeals to bigotry, sexism or other forms of prejudice

Party grandees appalled by their nominee’s success should ponder how they have spent years denouncing Washington as corrupt, and accusing Democrats of threatening the country’s future. Not many months ago Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who came second in the Republican primaries, went around wooing Christian conservatives by beseeching God to “awaken the body of Christ, that we might pull back from the abyss.” As the primary contest began in the new year his supposedly less doctrinaire rival, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, made his pitch to the hard right by asserting that Barack Obama had “deliberately weakened America”, accusing the president of gutting the armed forces and betraying allies because he saw America as “an arrogant country that needs to be cut down to size”.

During the campaign Mr Trump has explicitly encouraged such thinking

his talk of jobs, lives and values under assault unites conservatives.

if a vote for Mr Trump feels like an act of self-defence, his supporters no more want him to be fact-checked or nagged than they themselves would care to be second-guessed after blasting away at a shadowy figure on a darkened porch. What counts is their sense that when respectable people are protecting their own, they should be afforded the benefit of the doubt.

Having painted the established order as an assault on all that America cherishes, however, Mr Trump’s rivals offered only a reshuffling of political leaders in Washington as their solution.

Supporters hear a presidential candidate talking of the need for desperate measures in the name of self-defence, and that resonates. As a result, they judge him as they would judge themselves, should they hear window-glass shattering in the dead of night.

alt-right websites will continue to spew misinformation that undermines tolerance and democracy. I find them particularly loathsome because they do their best to magnify prejudice against blacks, Muslims and Latinos, tearing our social fabric.

A BuzzFeed investigation found that of the Facebook posts it examined from three major right-wing websites, 38 percent were either false or a mixture of truth and falsehood.

More discouraging, it was the lies that readers were particularly eager to share and thus profitable to publish.

Freedom Daily had the most inaccurate Facebook page reviewed, and also produced the right-wing content most likely to go viral.

Alt-right and fake news sites for some reason have emerged in particular in Macedonia, in the former Yugoslavia. BuzzFeed found more than 100 sites about U.S. politics from a single town, Veles, population 45,000, in Macedonia. “I started the site for a easy way to make money,” a 17-year-old Macedonian who runs DailyNewsPolitics.com told BuzzFeed.

Facebook has been a powerful platform to disseminate these lies. If people see many articles on their Facebook feed, shared by numerous conservative friends, all indicating that Hillary Clinton is about to be indicted for crimes she committed, they may believe it.

These sites were dubbed “alt-right” because they originally were an alternative to mainstream conservatism. Today they have morphed into the mainstream: After all, Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart, one of these sites full of misinformation, ran Trump’s campaign.

alt-right sites agitate for racial hatred. Freedom Daily lately has had “trending now” headlines like “Black Lives Thug Rapes/Kills 69 y/o White Woman.

There are also hyperpartisan left-wing websites with inaccuracies, but they are less prone to fabrication than the right-wing sites. Indeed, the Macedonian entrepreneurs originally came up with leftist websites targeting Bernie Sanders supporters but didn’t find much reader interest in them.

The landscape ahead looks grim to me. While the business model for mainstream journalism is in crisis, these alt-right websites expand as they monetize false “news” that promotes racism and undermines democracy

In Germany, Russia’s message is often similar to that of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, which is fiercely critical of Ms. Merkel and wants closer ties with Mr. Putin. The party has denied getting any support from Russia.

However, relying on a simple trade deal, as favored by some proponents of Brexit in the U.K., would leave the country worse off, he said.

What may be most critical to understand is how these rumors get fed at multiple levels.

Jones is a complete lunatic, but he is also a favorite of the President-elect of the United States. Trump has appeared on his show and praised him effusively.

The notion quickly moved to other social-media platforms, including 4chan and Reddit, mostly through anonymous or pseudonymous posts

“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on Nov. 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”

First, you have the denizens of forum websites who trade information and speculation, whipping each other into a frenzy and coordinating their efforts to push these insane tales as widely as possible. They’re then promoted by people with larger platforms like the conspiratorial radio host Alex Jones:

Jones’ ravings and similar conspiracy theories are routinely passed along by people around the President-elect, including his sons and his choice for national security adviser.

This three-level structure is what enables the most ridiculous false stories to spread: an internet network for individual citizens to devise the story and communicate; media figures like Jones who widen the reach of the story; and then influential people like Michael Flynn or even Donald Trump himself to validate it.

With a president who will be regularly propagating crazed conspiracy theories and singling out individual citizens as targets of his displeasure, it’s only a matter of time before another of his well-armed supporters decides to take matters into their own hands, and this time finishes the job.