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Why I Cannot Fall in Line Behind Trump

Republicans who disagree with my stance make the following argument: Mr. Trump, while flawed, is preferable to Hillary Clinton. His cabinet appointments, they say, have been reassuring, and it’s true that several of them are. In addition, the nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court is certain to be more of an originalist than a Clinton appointment would be. On top of that, Republicans are in control of Congress, meaning they are likely to drive much of the agenda, particularly given Mr. Trump’s notable lack of interest in policy. Whatever misgivings anti-Trump conservatives might have had about him, he’ll undo much of the agenda of his liberal predecessor while Mrs. Clinton would have built on it.

For Mr. Trump, nothing is sacred. The truth is malleable, instrumental, subjective. It is all about him. It is always about him.

Bill Kristol and other Never-Trump Republicans have done extensive polling and talked to potential candidates and financial backers about how to stop Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with those efforts.

They have searched feverishly in recent weeks for a candidate of stature to make an independent conservative White House bid. But like Kinzinger, no potential candidate has yet bitten.

Kinzinger, previously a prominent surrogate for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, would have undertaken a third party run "literally to save the union," according to a source familiar with his thinking, because both Clinton and Trump scare him.

he preeminent cyber-prophet of the day

The next frontier—devices that can detect an authorized user based solely on the quirks of how they interact with it—is just around the bend.

Will new unlocking methods enjoy the same Fifth Amendment protections that prevent the government from forcing a person to give up their passwords?

Google is announcing that it wants to cut out the middleman—that is to say, other websites—and serve you content within its own lovely little walled garden. That sound you just heard was a bunch of media publishers rushing to book an extra appointment with their shrink.

Back when search, and not social media, ruled the internet, Google was the sun around which the news industry orbited. Getting to the top of Google’s results was the key that unlocked buckets of page views. Outlet after outlet spent countless hours trying to figure out how to game Google’s prized, secretive algorithm. Whole swaths of the industry were killed instantly if Google tweaked the algorithm.

Facebook is now the sun. Facebook is the company keeping everyone up at night. Facebook is the place shaping how stories get chosen, how they get written, how they are packaged and how they show up on its site. And Facebook does all of this with just as much secrecy and just as little accountability as Google did.

a market research firm, looked at online searches for flights into America, comparing the final weeks of the Obama administration with the first weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency. It found that these searches had declined by 17%.

The overwhelming majority of countries studied showed a drop in interest. The most notable exception was Russia

it is “hard to see any other short-term significant events that could be related,” other than Mr Trump’s assumption of the presidency and his travel ban.

The IPO disaster simply creates an incentive to pry even deeper into the lives of users, “the one thing people hate most,” Wadhwa says. Facebook can track people even when they’re not on the site, watching where they go and what they do. That information, sliced and analyzed the right way, could be of great value to advertisers.

Placing ads next to Google search results works well because people using Google are already searching for products. Advertising on Facebook is less effective because people go to the site to talk to their friends, not look for products.

nobody would be complaining if Facebook stock had gone up instead of down, a feat the company could have accomplished so easily, just by selling fewer shares at a lower price. But Facebook didn’t want to leave money on the table. Zuckerberg and his bankers let hubris, self-delusion, and ego get the better of them.

Just as a happy marriage depends on many different factors, so do national wealth and power.

Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work. But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.

A different set of factors involves geography, which embraces many more aspects than the physical characteristics Mr. Romney dismissed. One such geographic factor is latitude

the first animals evolved about 750 million years ago.

But it’s not until around 520 million years ago that many major groups of living animals left behind their first fossils.

For decades, scientists have searched for the trigger that set in motion this riot of diversity in the animal kingdom.

Search for Nefertiti's burial site given green light

Despite relentless looters, the boy king's final resting place continues to be one of Egypt's most prolific discoveries. Uncovered by Howard Carter in 1922, it remains the most intact tomb ever unearthed. And has been a treasure trove for archaeologists, where close to 2,000 objects were recovered.

The academic also surmised that recycled equipment found in the burial chamber predates Tutankhamun's accession.

My co-author, Mindy Marks, and I found a whopping 10-hour decline in time spent studying outside of class for full time students at four-year universities between 1961 and the 2000s.

One theory is that increased market pressures have empowered students, causing colleges to cater more to students’ desires for leisure. Students do appear to prefer leisure and easier classes. A given instructor in a given course tends to receive lower ratings from students during terms when he or she grades less generously or requires more.

The Delta Study finding that spending for non-academic and recreation facilities has been increasing relative to spending on academic instruction also seems consistent with this explanation.

Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.

The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days

The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.

While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged.

to some scholars, the project also comes as a timely if implicit rebuke to the Hindu nationalists of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with its promotion of a unitary Indian identity based on selected Sanskrit religious classics.

The five officers involved in the CIA monitoring of computers Senate staffers used while probing the intelligence agency's torture program acted in good faith and committed no wrongdoing. That's according to a Wednesday report from an "accountability board" in which three of its five members are CIA officials.

The review board concluded there was simply a misunderstanding, that the CIA believed it could search the computers being used by staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. National security was at stake, too.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) chaired the intelligence committee last year when the breaches occurred, and the politician said she was "disappointed that no one at the CIA will be held accountable."

Secret official documents about the searching of three trucks belonging to Turkey's national intelligence service (MIT) have been leaked online, once again corroborating suspicions that Ankara has not been playing a clean game in Syria.

According to the authenticated documents, the trucks were found to be transporting missiles, mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition.

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was prime minister, he had said, “You cannot stop the MIT truck. You cannot search it. You don’t have the authority. These trucks were taking humanitarian assistance to Turkmens.”

Sweden spent the past week trying, unsuccessfully, to find a foreign submarine thought to be lurking in its waters. But on Friday, having scoured the coast, the Swedish military called off the search. So what's going on in the Baltic?

What it means is that they've been searching among the islands and skerries off Stockholm for a submarine that shouldn't be there, bringing back dormant memories of the Cold War. Back in the 1970s and 80s Sweden regularly scoured its territorial waters for Soviet subs, almost always without success.

Once a a nuclear-armed whiskey-class submarine ran aground near a Swedish naval base, causing a diplomatic incident that became known inevitably as Whiskey on the Rocks. Fast forward to today, and a time when countries around the Baltic Sea are casting nervous glances towards a newly assertive Russia

Of her approach to her new job, she added: “Consumers depend on us to make sure that competition is fair and open, and it’s my responsibility to make that happen.”

The overarching issue is whether Google abused its market dominance. In some countries in Europe, Google has a 90 percent or larger market share, giving it greater dominance than in the United States.

Ms. Vestager’s predecessor, Joaquín Almunia, had pursued a wide-ranging investigation into the company’s practices. But he tried and failed three times to reach a settlement with Google.

French authorities were racing Sunday to hunt down any potential accomplices to the wave of terror attacks unleashed in Paris as the investigation widened beyond this nation's borders.

A French man believed to be directly involved in Friday's massacre in Paris is on the run and the subject of an international manhunt, French security officials said Sunday evening.

Investigators said the man rented a Belgian-registered black Volkswagen Polo, which was allegedly used and abandoned by the hostage-takers who killed at least 89 people inside a Paris concert hall. advertisement He was identified by officials as Salah Abdeslam, 26, from Brussels.

The problem for Republicans is that they haven’t found a candidate who can appeal to Trump’s politically-disaffected supporters — whether they’re worried about immigration, jobs, terrorism or an overreaching social liberalism — without trafficking in slurs and empty bluster.

But that’s roughly what Nixon did in 1968 and 1972, when he addressed (liberal historians would say exploited, but we can have that debate another time) widespread anxieties over social change and disorder without ever repudiating racial equality or civil rights.

they’ve struggled, in part, because they lack a second Nixonian gift: An instinct for the non-ideological character of many American voters, primary voters included.