Working-class Republicans see Donald Trump as a white businessman who made a lot of money. The investigations only strengthen their kinship with him.

As the impeachment inquiry marches on, several polls show more American support for impeachment than not. Of course, we learned in 2016 that polls can sometimes mislead, and in this particular case, digging a little shows a deeply partisan divide.

While nearly 50 percent of people polled now support impeachment, including 85 percent of Democrats, just 12 percent of Republicans do and upward of 70 percent of Republicans believe the president’s dealings with Ukraine are within typical presidential limits. Most Republicans think he meant to stop corruption and protect American interests, according to a CBS News poll.

A July 25 call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine is the basis for an impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Trump withheld American military aid until Ukrainian officials investigated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter.

“Many countries are rivals of ours and of our democratic system,” Mr. Potter said. He listed as two chief examples China and Russia, countries that Mr. Trump has publicly suggested could help him achieve his political aims. “In some cases, they’re going to want policies that help them and therefore hurt us. In other cases, though, they just want us to fail.”

Are protections against this kind of thing in place? Yes. The ability of a foreign nation to gain access and influence over America’s democratic process has been a concern since the early days of the republic.

American forces and their Kurdish-led partners in Syria had been conducting as many as a dozen counterterrorism missions a day against Islamic State militants, officials said. That has stopped.

And across Syria’s porous border with Iraq, Islamic State fighters are conducting a campaign of assassination against local village headmen, in part to intimidate government informants.

“There is no question that ISIS is one of the big winners in what is happening in Syria,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a research center in London.

President Trump was forced to abandon his decision to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his private golf club after it became clear the move had alienated Republicans and swiftly become part of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to defend the decision during a news conference but caused a new controversy when he was asked about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president that sparked the impeachment inquiry. Mulvaney told reporters that Trump had held up nearly $400 million in aid to push the foreign government to investigate Democrats, comments that undercut Trump’s central defense in the inquiry. When a journalist followed up, saying that Mulvaney seemed to be describing a quid pro quo, Mulvaney said “we do that all the time with foreign policy.”

Trump blamed his G-7 reversal on critics, saying on Twitter that his decision to scrap plans for a summit at the Doral club was “based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility.”AD

“The plague” conjures up images of the Black Death of Europe in the fourteenth century. This apocalyptic pestilence became known as the “black death” because infected people often developed buboes, swollen lymph nodes in the groin and neck, that turned black. Europe’s population was halved in four years. But that doesn’t cover the half of it. The pandemic also swept through Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Some estimates of mortality go as high as two hundred million.

The third outbreak in China and India in the 1890s was the last major plague pandemic, claiming twelve million lives, mostly in India. The disease, which develops quickly and can kill within days, was fatal in the majority of cases.

Butler notes that the plague is still alive and well amongst certain wild mammals.

The word “socialism” is all over the media following the recent surprise primary victory in New York of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is a member of the Democratic Socialist party. There have been mixed reactions to the resurgence of the word, and presumably the ideas it signifies, in mainstream American discourse.

First some background. The first socialist in the U.S. Congress was Victor L. Berger, who was elected in 1910 to represent Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The second was Meyer London of New York City, elected in 1915. Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party of America ran for President in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. In the 1912 election, his best showing, he got 6% of the vote. His 1920 run was from prison, where he was serving a sentence for sedition; this sentence would be commuted by Warren G. Harding in 1921.

Pre-Russian Revolution, socialism in the United States wasn’t a dirty word in many quarters. There was a countervailing anti-socialism force, true, but it wasn’t as strong as it would become. And it did become strong: from the 1920s to the 1960s, the specter of communism abroad was used to attack dissenters at home. Socialists of all stripes, as well as union members, civil rights campaigners, even centrist liberals, were tarred as the “red menace.”

Performing the Hajj pilgrimage is compulsory for every Muslim who is physically able and can afford the trip. It consists of five days of ritual worship, practical formalities underscored by layers of meaning and symbolism. The symbolic themes of traveling toward the Beloved and of journeying between life and death are made real in the various and specific proceedings. Many of the rituals of Hajj, taught to Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad, are drawn from the life of the Prophet Abraham and his family (known to Muslims as the Prophet Ibrahim).

The Hajj pilgrimage contains symbols of Abraham’s actions, including throwing stones at the spots where the devil taunted Abraham, the sacrifice of a sheep, and worship around the Kaaba. Enduring the sometimes-difficult journey to Saudi Arabia, and then the journey between various points around Makkah during the five days of Hajj, is also reminiscent of Abraham’s wandering nature

This strong woman, a slave and a woman of color, practically a single mother, had the strength to survive. Her memory is kept alive every day because her running between the hills of Safa and Marwa is a crucial part of the Hajj rites. Pilgrims re-enact Haajar’s search for help by walking between the two hills seven times while absorbed in prayer. Enter the holy mosque at any time of the year and you will see thousands of pilgrims walking in Haajar’s footsteps, because the walk between Safa and Marwa is also an obligatory part of the other Muslim pilgrimage (known as Umrah, which can be performed at any time of the year).

"Just as we have our own networks of 'friends' and 'followers' on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, societies that existed in North America between 1,200 and 350 years ago had their own information sharing networks,"

"Our analysis shows how these networks laid the groundwork for Native American political systems that began developing as far back as 600 A.D."

The ceramics database includes 276,626 sherds from 43 sites across eastern Tennessee, and 88,705 sherds from 41 sites across northern Georgia.

China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

The banquet hall was painted black from ceiling to floor. By the pale flicker of grave lamps, the invited senators were able to make out a row of tombstones set before the dining couches—each inscribed with one of their names. Slave boys dressed as phantoms brought in courses on gleaming black dishes. They were piled with food, but not the lavish delicacies of an emperor’s table. Rather, Domitian served his guests the plain offerings traditionally given to the dead. The senators began to wonder if soon they would be dead themselves.

After the dinner ended, the guests spent the whole night expecting summons for an execution to appear at any moment. Finally, in the morning, Domitian sent messengers to inform them that the gravestones (now revealed to be made of solid silver), the costly dishware, and the slave boys were being given to them as gifts.

At least on the surface, it was all a harmless prank. The fact was, Domitian could easily have had his guests killed. Anyone could fall from imperial grace; Domitian had even executed his nephew and exiled his niece. Even after Domitian revealed that the gravestones were solid-silver treasures, their unspoken threat lingered in the air.

Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president on the oft-repeated pledge to “drain the swamp,” initially favored charismatic former politicians with a flair for the dramatic, like Mr. Perry; or former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a former member of the Navy SEALs who arrived to work on horseback; his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, a bellicose Oklahoma attorney general; or his first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, a former Marine Corps general whom Mr. Trump introduced as “Mad Dog.”

A ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis this week found Mr. Trump brought in 281 former lobbyists since the start of the administration. His cabinet now includes a former coal lobbyist running the Environmental Protection Agency, a former oil and gas lobbyist in charge of the Department of Interior, a top lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon leading the Defense Department — and, if he is confirmed, an automobile lobbyist at the Energy Department.

That might seem like business as usual for Americans who accepted candidate Trump’s description of Washington as rife with influence peddlers and profiteers. But it might actually be worse than usual. Because of the extraordinarily high rate of turnover that is a hallmark of the Trump administration, the White House’s human resources professionals have had little time to come up with outside-the-Beltway replacements for the constant stream of openings, Mr. LaPira said.

Our hearing was just fine, our construing was just right and our sole arguable failure was that we didn’t instantly grasp and immediately communicate the overarching import of his remarks: He was telling us that in the minds of the president and his unscrupulous minions, he from now on possessed and planned to revel in carte blanche. And the White House has a new public relations strategy, much evolved since the days of Robert Mueller.

Get over it, media. Get over it, America. This is Trump’s country. You’re just squatting in it.

How low will Trump go? Leagues lower than you ever imagined, and probably several hundred feet below your current nightmares. Officials with Trump’s re-election campaign apparently plan to use “get over it” as a slogan on merchandise, but I think that the White House’s real new motto comes from Tacitus, a celebrated historian in ancient Rome: “Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”

In another study in the Netherlands, primary school children who took part in physically active lessons three times a week over two years made significantly better progress in spelling and mathematics than their peers -- equating to four months of extra learning gains.

In one of the 42 studies analysed, eight- and nine-year-olds simulated travelling the world by running on the spot in between answering questions relating to different countries. The research team, also led by Dr Norris at UCL, concluded that the children were more active and more focused on the task than peers in a control group, following teachers' instructions more closely.

"These improvements in physical activity levels and educational outcomes are the result of quite basic physical exercises. Teachers can easily incorporate these physical active lessons in the existing curriculum to improve the learning experience of students."

At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.

“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”

t was a day when he announced without any evident embarrassment that officials of the federal government that answers to him had scoured the country for a site for next year’s Group of 7 summit meeting and determined that the perfect location, the very best site in all the United States, just happened to be a property he owned in Florida.