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these days, Musk sounds worried—about everything from cyclical business jitters to existential global concerns.

his past week he warned during a forum on X about “civilizational risk” stemming from the Israel-Hamas war cascading into a wider conflict that would pit the U.S. against a united China, Russia and Iran. “I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War III,”

over the years, Musk has framed his business endeavors as striving to prevent calamity, a motivating ideal that helps inspire employees, investors and fans while inducing eye rolls among critics and rivals.

ust a few hours after Hamas launched its assault on Israel, India’s prime minister was among the first world leaders to respond. In a strongly worded statement, Narendra Modi condemned the “terrorist attacks” and said India “stands in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”.

it was not a sentiment restricted only to the upper echelons of Indian government. As Azad Essa, a journalist and author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, said: “This messaging gave a clear signal to the whole rightwing internet cell in India.”

In the aftermath, the Indian internet factcheckers AltNews and Boom began to observe a flood of disinformation targeting Palestine pushed out by Indian social media accounts, which included fake stories about atrocities committed by Palestinians and Hamas that were shared sometimes millions of times, and often using the conflict to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power

the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before

I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any time since its War of Independence in 1948.

it’s for three key reasons:

The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.

I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.

Gay interpreted the question not at face value but as pertaining to whether Harvard students who had brandished slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” which many people interpret as tantamount to a call for genocide, could be prosecuted under Harvard’s policies. Though the slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.

“I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said this month. “The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.”

Since it first emerged in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. The organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies, according to political and military specialists

In addition, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader segment of the population, inspiring new recruits.

Only 11 days ago there was Buffalo, with a man driven by racism gunning down 10 people at a supermarket. The next day another angry man walked into a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, Calif., and killed one person and wounded five others. And now, Uvalde, Texas — a repeat of what was once thought unfathomable: the killing of at least 19 elementary school children in second, third and fourth grades.

Above all, we want you to know we are listening. If it helps your students to share their thoughts and feelings publicly, we have a space for that. And if teachers or parents have thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns or suggestions, please post them here.

Because The Learning Network is for students 13 and older, most of the resources in this resource focus on understanding this shooting and its implications. The Times has published this age-by-age guide to talking to children about mass shootings. And for parents and teachers of younger students this advice from The Times Parenting section might be helpful:

visitors watched in disbelief as he began pounding on the glass that shields the painting. Then, Mr. Sundberg said, the man smeared what appeared to be cake all over the glass protecting what is one of the world’s most recognizable pieces of art.

The painting was not damaged,

“He threw a whole bunch of roses at me and then he started yelling,”

Monica Lewinsky weighed in on the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial in an op-ed Tuesday, calling it "courtroom porn and a "pure car wreck."

"We are drenched in the taint of the dirt and aggression of the social media wars," wrote Lewinisky, 48, who is no stranger to scandal. 

"Having been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty, I can tell you the scars never fade," she wrote, noting that the negative online discourse was predominantly directed at Amber Heard, "the woman."

Sandberg, the author of the best-selling 2013 book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” has over 900,000 Instagram followers. Olivan’s Instagram, with 17 followers, is private. Until Wednesday, Olivan hadn’t published a public post to his Facebook profile since 2018.

Olivan’s quiet public persona doesn’t reflect his influence at the company. He’s among a handful of executives reporting to Zuckerberg, climbing near the top of the latter in his almost 15-year stint at the social-media company. He joined the C-suite five months ago, assuming the title of chief growth officer, and is also vice president of cross-Meta products and infrastructure.If Sandberg led the charge in building Facebook’s advertising business, which still represents 97% of Meta’s total revenue, Olivan deserves credit for its global expansion. His first job at the company, from 2007 to 2011, was head of international growth.

In addition to Vy Global, Olivan spent six years on the board of Latin American e-commerce company MercadoLibre, and he invested in geospatial imaging company Satellogic ahead of the SPAC deal it completed in January.But his career has been centered at Facebook. In 2008, Olivan accompanied Zuckerberg for an appearance at the University of Navarra. He later worked on Internet.org, an effort Facebook and other companies launched in 2013 to connect people to internet services in less developed countries.

In an interview with The Washington Post, McLaughlin (R) said he rushed to Hillcrest Funeral Home about 15 minutes after “the first call” reporting that 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had crashed his pickup truck nearby. He found himself standing near an official he identified only as “the negotiator,” while frightened parents gathered outside the school and police waited well over an hour to storm the classroom.

He said he doesn’t believe the negotiator was aware there were children calling 911 and asking police to save them while the gunman was in the classroom. The mayor said he was not aware of those calls, nor did he hear shots fired from inside the school, across the street.

In the recent Texas primary for governor, he opted not to endorse the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, labeling him a “fraud” over his approach to the border and immigration. And he has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” multiple times to lambaste the Border Patrol’s release of migrants into the streets of Uvalde and lament that he cannot get a call back from the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

in the past decade or so, human rights have pretty much disappeared from our politics. Throughout the 9/11 wars, the grotesque contradiction between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of tortured prisoners, civilian casualties, and grinding conflict corrupted the cause beyond remedy

After Iraq and Afghanistan, no president can send young men and women to war by invoking human rights. When Barack Obama refrained from punishing Bashar al-Assad of Syria for murdering thousands of innocent people with poison gas, there was no outcry from the general public.

With the eclipse of U.S. prestige and power, the decay of liberal democracy, and the rising appeal of authoritarian regimes, there’s no longer any mechanism—neither military force nor threat of sanctions and isolation, nor global pressure campaigns by civil-society groups—to make the world’s dictators hesitate before they throw people into concentration camps.

The complaint also cites internal records about the platform’s Climate Science Information Center, a much-touted hub designed to connect people with authoritative climate information. Awareness of the webpage was “very low,” even for people who had visited it.

“Climate change knowledge is generally poor,” one of the internal reports from 2021 said. “Given how many people use Facebook for information about climate change … climate science myths are a problem across all surveyed markets.”

The filings argue that it’s particularly urgent that Facebook tackle climate change misinformation, in part because of the popularity of the site. An internal company document cited in the complaint says Facebook is the second-most common source for news related to climate change, behind only television news and ahead of news aggregators, movies, online climate news sources and other social media platforms.

The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated; the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”; the division of the world into warring camps; the large influx of refugees; the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale; the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies; and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which she described as an “entirely new form of government”—all of these things led Arendt to believe that a darker era was about to begin.

Once again, we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize, a world in which it seems “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives”

it offers us a kind of dual methodology, two different ways of thinking about the phenomenon of autocracy.

Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, clarified Monday that users cannot make posts calling for the assassination of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin or other heads of state.

Meta also said that a previously reported temporary easing of its hate speech policy only applies to allowing posts by users in Ukraine making threats to the attacking forces and “only in the context of speech regarding the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.”

Reuters also reported Thursday that Facebook was allowing calls for violence against Russian soldiers in those three countries and several others in Eastern Europe, the Baltics and western Asia.

Vladimir Efimov, a local politician on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, was charged with “discrediting the army” and ordered to pay a $500 fine three times in recent months over antiwar images that he displayed on social media.

Three months ago, President Vladimir V. Putin signed into law draconian measures designed to silence war critics, putting even use of the word “war” off-limits. They prompted some Russians appalled by the invasion to flee the country, forced independent news outlets to shut down, and created a climate of suspicion in which neighbor turned on neighbor.

At least 50 people face prison sentences of up to either 10 years or five years hard labor, or fines of as much as $77,000, for spreading “false information” about the military.

a growing trend among Generation Z, loosely defined as people born between the years of 1996 and 2012. Equipped with ride-sharing apps and social media, “zoomers,” as they are sometimes called, are getting their driver’s licenses at lower rates than their predecessors. Unlike previous generations, they don’t see cars as a ticket to freedom or a crucial life milestone.

Those phases “are consistently getting later,” said Noreen McDonald, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gen Zers are more likely to live at home for longer, more likely to pursue higher education and less likely to get married in their 20s.

The trend is most pronounced for teens, but even older members of Gen Z are lagging behind their millennial counterparts. In 1997, almost 90 percent of 20- to 25 year-olds had licenses; in 2020, it was only 80 percent.

Nurses don’t dispute that patients deserve compassion and respect, but many feel that their roles are misunderstood and their expertise undervalued; as Duke repeatedly told me, people don’t respect nurses like they do doctors. As a result, nurses are leaving hospitals in droves. And they’re establishing new careers, not just in health care but as creatives and entrepreneurs.

Duke argues that nurses are especially fed up and burned out. And yet, as caretakers, nobody expects them to put their physical and emotional well-being first. But that’s starting to change. Once a lone voice, Duke is now a representative one.

Nurses make up the nation’s largest body of health-care workers, with three times as many RNs as physicians

it wasn’t just the content of the man’s podcast, but that he had one at all. Like many other women, she associates the form with a certain kind of man: one who is endlessly fascinated by his own opinions, loves the sound of his own voice and isn’t the least bit shy about offering unsolicited opinions on masculinity, sexuality and women. Many women have taken to social media to mock just that kind of programming and the men who make it.

With the once-booming podcast industry currently on the back foot and hosts’ reputations for self-important mansplaining having long since caught up with them, is the “podcast bro” officially a persona non grata in today’s dating landscape?

More than a year after Donald J. Trump left office, the QAnon conspiracy theory that thrived during his administration continues to attract more Americans, including many Republicans and far-right news consumers, according to results from a survey released on Thursday from the Public Religion Research Institute.

The nonprofit and nonpartisan group found that 16 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, believed last year in the three key tenets of the conspiracy theory

Those are that Satanist pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation control the government and other major institutions