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Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse isn't running for president -- yet -- but he has a harsh message for his party: It's time to stop humoring Donald Trump and those within in the GOP who support him.

"In the 2016 presidential campaign, you had two candidates with wildly different solutions, but their fundamental diagnosis was the same: 'The system is rigged; you're getting screwed; you're a victim; this country is going down the tubes.'

Make no mistake what Sasse is up to: He is telling his party that to continue to follow Trump -- and the Trump-inspired members of the GOP -- is to ensure long-term defeat.

extreme tension between the newsroom and the much larger opinion operation came up in alm

ost every interview I conducted for Hoax, my book about the disturbing relationship between Fox and Trump.

Other sources at Fox told me to think of it not as a network per se, but as a profit machine. They feared doing anything that would disrupt the machine. “I feel like Fox is being held hostage by its audience,” a veteran staffer told me, perhaps justifying his own participation by portraying himself as a victim.

I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.

“In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”

This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.

A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.

“In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”

The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.

A confidential European Union military report calls for continuing a controversial EU program to train and equip Libya’s coast guard and navy despite growing concerns about their treatment of migrants, a mounting death toll at sea, and the continued lack of any central authority in the North African nation.

Europe’s determination to support Libya in the interception and return of tens of thousands of men, women and children to Libya, where they face insufferable abuse.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe have made their way through Libya, where a lucrative trafficking and smuggling business has flourished in a country without a functioning government,

On Monday, Ukraine published a video of a captured soldier in his unit, apologizing for taking part in the invasion.

Everyone is in a state of shock.

While casualty figures in wartime are notoriously unreliable — and Ukraine has put the total of Russian dead in the thousands — the 498 Moscow acknowledged in the seven days of fighting is the largest in any of its military operations since the war in Chechnya, which marked the beginning of President Vladimir V. Putin’s tenure in 1999.

The announcement by an official of the Civil Aviation Administration of China at a late-night news conference was followed by a brief moment of silence. Investigators have identified 120 of the victims through DNA analysis, state media reported.

The flight from the city of Kunming in southwestern China was flying at 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) on Monday when it suddenly nosedived into a mountainous area, shortly before it would have started its descent to the airport in Guangzhou, a provincial capital and export manufacturing hub near Hong Kong on China’s southeastern coast.

Workers wearing knee-high rubber boots used shovels and other hand tools to sift through the earthen slopes in a 20-meter- (65-foot-) deep pit left by the plane. Debris and other items were collected in dozens of rectangular, mud-stained plastic containers.Pumps were used to drain water as muddy conditions in the rainy Guangxi region hampered the search. One excavator stopped working after getting partially stuck, state broadcaster CCTV said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up tensions with the West for the better part of the last decade -- he annexed Crimea, meddled in US elections, poisoned an ex-spy on British soil, and more. Nearly every step of the way, former President Donald Trump parroted Kremlin talking points, excused Russian aggression and sometimes even embraced it outright.

The GOP is the party of the Russia hawks. For a half-century, one of their central organizing principles was opposing the Soviet threat," Graff said, adding that Trump upended that history and made some Republicans go soft on Putin. "But in this last month, a lot of Republicans who became wishy-washy on Russia have come back to their natural position as Russia hawks."

Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort -- who had spent a decade advising Yanukovych in Ukraine -- collaborated in 2016 with a Russian spy on a secret plan for Trump to help Russia control eastern Ukraine, according to special counsel Robert Mueller's report. The proposal envisioned that Yanukovych would return to lead a Russian puppet state in eastern Ukraine. This pro-Russian rhetoric didn't always translate into policy for the Trump White House. For instance, his administration said sanctions would continue until Russia returned Crimea. But the rhetoric gave Putin an unexpected cheerleader in DC and created tensions within NATO.

A deadly tornado ripped through New Orleans.The twister was part of a severe weather outbreak across the South.Homes were ripped apart and cars flipped from Texas to Alabama.Damage assessments and surveys continued across the South Wednesday as residents began the long cleanup after homes were ripped apart, cars flipped over and at least two people killed in an outbreak of severe weather that included multiple tornadoes.

Authorities said the person killed Tuesday night in St. Bernard Parish was Connor Lambert, 25, the Associated Press reported.A neighbor told nola.com that Lambert had returned home in his truck just as the storm was starting to hit. After the tornado passed, the neighbor saw the destruction and ran over and started calling for Lambert.A news release from St. Bernard Parish Sheriff James Pohmann said Lambert died of "multiple blunt force injuries."

New Orleans Area Damage Consistent With At Least EF-3 Tornado, NWS SaysInitial surveys by the National Weather Service show the damage in Arabi was caused by at least an EF-3 tornado, which has winds between 158 mph and 206.

Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University, traces Wallace’s repressive creed to his birthplace, Barbour County, in Alabama’s southeastern corner, where the cry of “freedom” was heard from successive generations of settlers, slaveholders, secessionists and lynch mobs through the 19th and 20th centuries. The same cry echoes today in the rallies and online invective of the right

though Cowie keeps his focus on the past, his book sheds stark light on the present. It is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government.

“Freedom’s Dominion” is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest.

a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.

as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.

First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.

Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.

Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities

Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.

What I really think has happened here is that memory culture has produced two warring phenomena.

It produced a society that is paralyzed by guilt and discomfort. Germany doesn’t have emotional space and energy for any other historical responsibility other than the reality that it perpetrated the Holocaust.

at the same time, official memory culture created an unchecked arena for politicians to abuse that history. These politicians don’t reflect the views of society, but they don’t feel the need to, because they’ve created a culture in which society doesn’t have a say in this issue. And it is so sad that the Jewish people have such diverse cultural, ethnic and religious identities, but in Germany they have to subsume it into the identity of the Holocaust victim.

The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964

To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives.”

That’s a principle the vast majority of Americans, black and white and everything else, support. It was the core principle for Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bayard Rustin.

Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.

It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman

Since the first AVN “expo” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate.

Now, a new shift is on the horizon: Artificial intelligence models that spin up photorealistic images and videos that put viewers in the director’s chair, letting them create whatever porn they like.

Some site owners think it’s a privilege people will pay for, and they are racing to build custom AI models that — unlike the sanitized content on OpenAI’s video engine Sora — draw on a vast repository of porn images and videos.

The key difference between the liberation of Auschwitz and Ohrdruf lies not in the reactions of the first liberators on the scenes but in what came after. The accounts of Red Army soldiers and American GIs are actually remarkably similar: they both speak of survivors as “walking skeletons;” they both describe the squalor the camp’s inmates lived in; they both mention the smell of death that lingered in the air and permeated far beyond the confines of the camp—which led to similar observations when locals living near the camps claimed to know nothing of what happened there to be deemed as nothing less than lies or willful ignorance

This impression was reinforced when the mayor of Gotha, the nearest town to Ohrdruf, wrote in his suicide note following his forced visit of the camp: “We did not know, but we knew.”

The difference was that Eisenhower was determined that the world should never forget what he saw. His Red Army counterparts were also quick to document what they found, but their leader Joseph Stalin was uninterested in the Holocaust as a reality. In the hierarchy of Nazi victims that Stalin created, no other group could surpass the suffering of the Soviet Union.