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Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered an inquiry into the activities in Britain of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most prominent Islamic organizations, to determine in part whether it is using London as a base for planning extremist attacks following the military crackdown in Egypt, officials and media reports said on Tuesday.

“Given the concerns now being expressed about the group and its alleged links to violent extremism, it’s absolutely right and prudent that we get a better handle of what the Brotherhood stands for, how they intend to achieve their aims and what that means for Britain,”

Word of the inquiry first emerged in The Times of London, which said leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood met in London last year to plan their response to Mr. Morsi’s overthrow.

I learned that the Air Quality Index, which is used all over the world, goes from 1 to 500, with 1 being Vermont and 500 being Hades.

Here’s how Deb characterized the AQI rankings, in layman’s terms:Advertisement 1 to 50: “Good,” according to the AQI. On such days in Beijing, you look at the sky with an appreciation you’ve never had before. Life is good. 51 to 100: “Moderate.” The sky still looks OK, but stepping outside makes your eyes water. Something is a little off.

101 to 150: “Unhealthy for sensitive groups.” There’s a faint smell in the air. You find yourself sneezing more than usual. There’s gunk in your nose. You get ticked off easily. 151 to 200: “Unhealthy.” You step outside and find a metallic taste in your mouth. Buildings 50 feet away appear in a haze. You clear your throat a lot, as if you’ve been laughing. You’re not laughing.

“As a general proposition, when we’re in these offices, we have to be more sensitive and stay as far away from the line as possible when it comes to how we handle information, how we handle our own personal data,” Mr. Obama said. “And, you know, she made a mistake. She has acknowledged it.”

On Syria, Mr. Obama acknowledged the failure of his $500 million mission to “train and equip” as many as 5,000 fighters in the battle against the Islamic State. The president said he had long been skeptical that the program could create an effective “proxy army,” but tried it anyway in an effort to confront what he called a “difficult problem for the entire world community.”

Mr. Kroft repeatedly challenged the president on his policy in Syria and at one point complained that Mr. Obama was “filibustering” with long answers. Mr. Obama at times appeared exasperated by Mr. Kroft’s questions, once responding: “If you ask me big, open-ended questions, expect big, open-ended answers.”

Caldwell suggests that European elites have been so guilt-ridden about their past crimes, and so intent on avoiding anything that even resembled chauvinism or bigotry, that for decades they failed to put any sustained pressure on their steadily-growing immigrant populations to eschew religious extremism or phase out illiberal cultural practices. And worse, their efforts to marginalize what they considered (and still consider) the bigoted attitudes of their countrymen didn’t actually do away with anti-immigration anxieties: They just denied them a place in the political mainstream, which meant that they’ve manifested themselves instead in extreme and counterproductive outbursts (minaret bans, the political careers of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders, etc.).

It is notable that Europe's integration problem is worst not in first generation immigrants, but in their European born children, and I think one reason they are less successfully assimilated than their counterparts in the United States is the lack of a constitutional creed that successfully inculcates the idea that they're just as French or German or Spanish as anyone else. It's also true that American culture, disseminated largely through media, is many times more powerful than what a tiny country like Denmark can marshal to informally assimilate its immigrant population, and that the heterogeneity of our country means that no single minority group feels isolated in a land that a homogeneous majority dominates. Obviously this is a rough sketch of a diverse continent that inevitably glosses over nuances, but insofar as it holds true, it helps to explain my vexation with Mr. Douthat's reluctance to declare the constitutional understanding of American citizenship superior to the cultural understanding, even if there is some wisdom to be taken from the latter

The invocation of the European experience seems inapt to me.

Why, then, have our two sprawling yet similar Western cultures responded so differently to Internet privacy?

"It's almost absurd to say we have the right to disappear from public domain," said Martin Abrams, a policy director with leading global privacy think tank Hunton & Williams. "We're really talking about the right not to be observed in the first place.... We've been focused on symptoms rather than the underlying issues."

Yale law professor James Whitman sees the differing concepts of privacy as a battle between liberty and dignity

to some of Suu Kyi’s admirers in the West, and ethnic and religious minorities here in Burma, the last few months have been disconcerting.

Suu Kyi, however, is making no apologies for sounding less like a human rights icon and more like a politician playing to the country’s Buddhist majority.

“Please don’t forget that I started out as the leader of a political party. I cannot think of anything more political than that,” Suu Kyi said at a Dec. 6 news conference in Rangoon. “Icon was a depiction that was imposed on me by other people.”

Syria is likely to miss its year-end deadline for getting its most deadly chemical weapons out of the country despite an international effort to mobilize the resources needed to do so

They said that volatile security in Syria had “constrained planned movements” and that logistical problems and bad weather had contributed to the delay.

Once movement of the chemicals gets underway, the mission can be conducted quite quickly, but it appears that Syria has not yet started transporting any chemicals, according to observers familiar with the mission, who spoke on the condition they not be identified publicly because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The killing of a dozen people in Wednesday’s attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted an outpouring of tributes from cartoonists around the world, who have flooded the Internet with images ranging from the elegiac to the scabrously rude.

But amid all the “I Am Charlie” marches and declarations on social media, some in the cartooning world are also debating a delicate question: Were the victims free-speech martyrs, full stop, or provocateurs whose aggressive mockery of Islam sometimes amounted to xenophobia and racism?

uch debates unfold differently in different countries. But the conversation could be especially acute in the United States, where sensitivities to racially tinged caricatures may run higher than in places like France, where historically tighter restrictions on speech have given rise to a strong desire to flout the rules.

PARIS — Confronting a nation in shock from last week’s terrorist attacks, the French authorities on Monday began to unveil a broad array of measures to send thousands of soldiers and police officers to guard Jewish schools and other sites, reinforce electronic surveillance and reach into schools and prisons that have a reputation as crucibles of jihadist recruitment.

Seeking to reassure jittery citizens, the French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said Monday that 10,000 soldiers would be deployed by Tuesday evening, in what he called “the first mobilization on this scale on our territory.”

Currently, assisted suicide is legal in only four states, but D.C. could soon join that list.

Under the proposed “Death with Dignity Act of 2015,” a mentally competent patient suffering from a terminal illness that's "likely to result in death within six months" can request medication that would allow them to choose the time, place, and circumstances of his/her death."

Should Cheh's bill make it through the Council and signed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, D.C. would be one of the few places in the country to legalize assisted suicide.

For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.

The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

The council, in a meeting that took place on Feb. 10, voted first to reject Ms. Beyda’s nomination, with four members against her. Then, at the prodding of a faculty adviser there who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students revisited the question and unanimously put her on the board.

The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it's illegal, there's no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters.

The British police have arrested a 15-year-old boy in Northern Ireland in connection with a recent hacking attack on the telecommunications operator TalkTalk.

The teenager was taken into custody Monday afternoon, and the police were searching his residence as part of a criminal investigation, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police. On Tuesday, the police said the boy had been released on bail.

the third cyberattack on the company in 12 months. It became aware of the breach late on Wednesday.

The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the city of Ferguson, Mo., for unjust policing that violates the civil and constitutional rights of citizens, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Wednesday.

The lawsuit came one day after the Ferguson City Council voted to change a proposed consent decree to reform the police and courts. The council said the package, which had been negotiated between the DOJ and city officials, cost too much.

In a news conference, Lynch said the DOJ was sensitive to the city's cost concerns throughout the months-long negotiation. She also said, "There is no price for constitutional policing."

U.S. stocks dropped on Monday as concern over global growth hit banks and other economically sensitive shares, although a late rally in energy shares left the market well above its lows of the day.

European banks led a global selloff in financial stocks as signs of stress in the sector mounted. Uncertainty over whether the Federal Reserve would raise rates this year also dragged down U.S. bank stocks, pushing the S&P financial index .SPSY down 2.6 percent.

"Investors' attitudes seem to be worsening relative to the likelihood of a global recession. I think that's what financials are reflecting – that their net interest margins are going to be further compressed under collapsing bond yields," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.

South Dakota is on the cusp of becoming the first state in the nation to require public school students to use facilities like bathrooms based on their “chromosomes and anatomy” at birth.

The so-called “bathroom bill,” which passed the state House in early February and is being debated by the state Senate Tuesday, marks a revival of the charged fights that played out in states across the country in 2015.

At least five other states have considered similar “bathroom bills” this session, and scores of other measures that LGBT rights advocates consider discriminatory are pending in legislatures around the U.S.

France's Fabius leaves office, wider reshuffle due

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced on Wednesday he was leaving the government ahead of a wider reshuffle that President Francois Hollande hopes can help bolster his chances for the 2017 presidential elections.

Fabius, 69, who played a prominent role in sealing an international deal with Iran limiting its nuclear programme and helped broker a global climate change deal, told reporters Wednesday's cabinet meeting would be his last before he took up a new post as head of the constitutional court.