Angela Merkel is traditionally known as Germany’s “safe pair of hands,” but when government-coalition talks unexpectedly collapsed late Sunday night after just four weeks, her future as the country’s chancellor was suddenly in question.

A second option would involve a return of the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s former “grand coalition” partner, to the government. While such a coalition would easily command a parliamentary majority, it’s one the center-left SPD ruled out in September after its poor showing in the country’s general election—which delivered its worst-ever result more than half a century—and one it rejected again Monday, reaffirming that it would rather have new elections altogether.

With Jamaica no longer an option, Germany is faced with three choices: The first is a minority government, formed by Merkel’s CDU/CSU party in coalition with either the FDP (which would leave the government 29 seats short of a majority) or the Greens (short 42 seats). Though that’s not impossible, Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me this option would be alien to both Merkel’s leadership style and the country as a whole. “For historical reasons, Germans are very skeptical of minority governments because it reminds people of the Weimar period,” he said, referring to the post-World War I period between 1918 and 1933 known for its political instability. “For somebody like Angela Merkel, it’s not in her style of governing to run a minority government because she’s not exactly a big gambler.” And a minority government would certainly be a gamble for Merkel—effectively denying her the authority she needs to push through reforms both at home and within the eurozone. “She’s somebody who doesn’t just embody stability, but I think she also likes stability herself.”

Among the paramilitary volunteers are bikers, ex-soldiers, hunters, and stockbreeders. Each group has its own division dedicated to training young men and women in military tactics and patriotism; some volunteers are as young as 12 years old. These groups insist they are apolitical. They seek to defend their borders and train the warriors of tomorrow to prepare for whatever Putin has planned next.

When critics argue that Donald Trump is an exceptionally reckless commander in chief, they tend to highlight how the American president deviates from the norm.

The Trump administration “has handled things in a ... measured and firm way that will prevent North Korea from miscalculating,” Han argued. “I do not know if it is wise to push North Korea to the extent they feel they have to react in a non-peaceful way. But North Korea has shown some degree of restraint as far as deeds are concerned, although their rhetoric has also been quite blustery.”

The American-Russian journalist Masha Gessen has thought a lot about Trump’s rambling and disjointed way of speaking—in part because it reminds her so much of Vladimir Putin’s style. In Russia, Putin uses words yet means their opposites. At times, he seems to render words meaningless.

I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.

Last week, President Trump named North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism, tagging the communist country with the label almost a decade after the Bush administration removed it.

For Washington, the road to a diplomatic solution with North Korea goes through Beijing. But despite public statements to the contrary, the United States and China are quite divided on some key questions, including why North Korea pursues nuclear weapons in the first place, and on the reasons why previous agreements to halt its illicit activities failed. Unless they can bridge these gaps, any lasting resolution of the North Korean crisis is unlikely.

The Trump administration has said that its goal is to isolate North Korea, in the hope that pressure through sanctions will compel it to renounce its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and seek dialogue with the United States.

There are several reasons the Trump administration move to block a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner raised eyebrows. It was without recent precedent, and was contradicted, within just a day, by the cancellation of so-called net-neutrality regulations, undermining the administration’s argument about protecting the little guy.

The relatives merits of allowing the merger—and of blocking it—have been argued extensively by better-versed minds.

This has gotten some worried attention, but not nearly enough. This should be a wake-up call for American journalists.

“THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DONALD TRUMP, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN'S TWITTER VIDEOS,”

Such attention is a major boost for Fransen and her far-right ultranationalist political movement, Britain First—whose official policy platform calls among other things to “reject and deport all ‘asylum seekers’ who do not originate from countries bordering Britain,” and “introduce a comprehensive ban on the religion of ‘Islam’ within the United Kingdom.”

Whatever the ultimate real-world consequences of the tweet, the group for now remains on the margins of British politics.

Not long after North Korea test-fired its longest-range missile yet, the Trump administration settled into its familiar diplomatic routine of putting pressure on China—or blaming the country outright.

But realistically, if there were an economic way to exert more on pressure North Korea, it would have to come from China.

The U.S. wants North Korea to commit to denuclearization before it begins talks, something Pyongyang will not do. But China has another worry: regime collapse in North Korea, which could create a refugee problem on its border and, ultimately, a reunified Korean Peninsula allied with the United States.

The paper aimed to embody objective journalism, and to train a generation of journalists.

he Daily was not progovernment, but neither was it antigovernment.

However high-quality its journalism, The Daily’s offices were run-down to the point of crumbling, with donated Apple IIs and salvaged furniture. In 2001, staff barely got word of the 9/11 attacks, because Krisher hadn’t paid the cable bill. As Ryun Patterson, the night editor, scrambled to update the paper, Krisher called from Washington, D.C., where he could see smoke billowing from the Pentagon. That wasn’t why he was calling. He wanted to check the wording of a brief item about a staffer’s defamation lawsuit.

The vote that Congress took before the United States invaded Iraq proved very important in American democracy.

What’s more, the American presence is open-ended.

Instead, Trump has ceded decisions about war to unaccountable elites in the administrative state, to an even greater degree than his predecessors had done. Whether America will spend untold billions for an unknown number of additional years is even farther removed from whether citizens see that course as the best use of lives and tax dollars. And whether America’s Syria policy is a striking success or failure, many voters will have a hard time figuring out where their representative stood on the matter.Congress is well-aware of its abdication.

Early Thursday afternoon, Martin Schulz, the head of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Germany’s second-largest party, strode onto the stage in Messe Berlin, the city’s trade fair center, as hundreds of delegates crowded in. It was the party’s national convention, and Schulz hoped to be re-elected as its leader. Equally important, however, was his proposal to begin talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives on possibly forming a coalition government together—the same coalition that has governed Germany over the last four years.

Since then, the SPD has wilted in Merkel’s shadow.

For a grand coalition to succeed now, both the Social Democrats and Merkel’s conservatives must assess how much they can achieve together, and how fast, Jan Techau said. Their failure could further embolden the AfD. “It’s the big risk and one of the reasons why some of the SPD are so fundamentally against a grand coalition,” Techau said.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russian hackers attacked the U.S. on two fronts: the psychological and the technical. Hackers used classic propaganda techniques to influence American voters, bought thousands of social media ads to propagate fake news, and broke into Democratic party email servers to steal information. And it won't be the last time. Russian-backed psychological cyber warfare will only get better, and its methods more sophisticated.

Why is it that, in America in 2017, the question of how not to normalize Nazis provokes heated debate? Is there a way to discuss the everyday life of fascists without normalizing? Although there are no quick and easy rules to follow, there are lessons—plenty of them—to be gleaned from history. The most powerful lessons emerge from the press coverage of the Third Reich, especially the soft-focus profiles of Adolf Hitler published in the 1930s. These stories set the journalistic gold standard for how not to write about Nazis.

Above all, Alltagsgeschichte exposes the complexity of human agency. To shed light on the choices people make—why one person might condone or participate in hateful acts, while another resists—historians consider the impact of specific social ties, institutions, and living and working environments.

From 1935 to 1939, The New York Times ran four stories on Hitler’s homes. On August 20, 1939, the paper published a glowing account by British journalist Hedwig Mauer Simpson of Hitler’s private life on the Obersalzberg. Ignoring the German troops massing on the Polish border, Simpson described the Führer’s beautiful rooms and domestic routine as well as providing details about the ripeness of the tomatoes on his table and his love of gooseberry pie. It was all so ordinary.

The good news is that much of the world is fed up with corruption. The bad news is that the way many are fighting corruption is ineffective. Too often, the remedy centers on finding and empowering an honest leader who promises to stamp out the problem. Worldwide, candidates for elected offices are running on highly personalized anti-corruption platforms, offering themselves as the solution. What countries really need, though, are smart laws that reduce the incentives and opportunities for corruption. They also need strong institutions that enforce those laws and deprive corrupt officials, and their private-sector accomplices, of impunity in their efforts to get rich at the public’s expense.

Societies that bet on an honest leader to solve their problems almost always lose out. Such leaders may turn out to have integrity, or they may not. Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chávez all came to power promising to stamp out corruption. And we know how that turned out.

The fight against corruption does not have to be corrupt, however. In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay, for example, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) is supporting “public innovation laboratories” that experiment with new methods of monitoring and controlling government conduct.

I saw fissures widening already when I was in Iraq at the invitation on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees earlier this year: Christian communities are receiving financial assistance from the global faithful and therefore able to rebuild their houses of worship and their communities faster and more opulently than their Muslim neighbors. It is breeding resentment.

The administration’s discomfort with multinational institutions further aggravates the problem.

Dehumanization can take many forms, but its end result is always the same: The extinguishment of all that dignifies an individual. Irregulars, a powerful short film by Fabio Palmieri, is the story of one teenager’s dehumanization. His experience unfolds against the hypnotic backdrop of a mannequin factory.

“What could I show instead of a black screen?” Palmieri told The Atlantic. “When I found the mannequin factory, a metaphor of dehumanization, it became easily the perfect aesthetic for Cyrille's story and, more generally, the refugee migration tragedy.”

It’s become a grim ritual in Washington foreign-policy circles to assess the chances that the United States and North Korea stumble into war. But on Wednesday Lindsey Graham did something different: He estimated the odds that the Trump administration deliberately strikes North Korea first, to stop it from acquiring the capability to target the U.S. mainland with a long-range, nuclear-tipped missile. And the senator’s numbers were remarkably high.

“I would say there’s a three in 10 chance we use the military option,” Graham predicted in an interview. If the North Koreans conduct an additional test of a nuclear bomb—their seventh—“I would say 70 percent.”

“We’re not to the tipping point yet,” he noted, but “if they test another [nuclear] weapon, then all bets are off.”

Donald Trump has assailed the media many times since he became president in January.

Criticism of the media isn’t new—nor is criticism of the media by an American president.

Dystopian novels are a difficult genre: They need to be imaginative, edging on the far-fetched, while being just plausible enough to terrify. Omar El Akkad’s American War, which interprets the American South by way of the Middle East, challenges Americans to imagine what it might be like to die for, but also kill, their fellow citizens.

There are little details that stand out: the stubbornness of symbols; how the simple revving of an engine still running on old fuel, while ultimately meaningless, becomes an act of rebellion, an expression of self-affirmation but a completely futile one in the face of so much killing.

The Founding Fathers do not exist, or at least no one seems interested in mentioning them or calling upon their memory. The Constitution isn’t so much a historical curiosity but an abstraction; there’s only reference, during peace negotiations, to a “Constitutional Defense Officer,” which suggests that there’s a constitution he is trying to defend. Interestingly, in a book that elevates Southern culture, or any cultural nationalism, to its logical conclusion, the racial composition of this new America isn’t made clear. The main character, Sarat, is a person of color. That this is never made entirely explicit adds to the book’s eerie haziness. In unmooring America from its own racial legacy, El Akkad seems to be saying that war could happen here, but it could also happen anywhere.   

In off-the-record conversations with outsiders, the Trump administration’s senior national-security officials all stay in the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy. They recognize the threat from Russia, often with great passion. They reject the notion they are protectionist, instead championing bilateral deals as an alternative to mega trade pacts such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They steadfastly back U.S. allies, especially those in NATO. They even make favorable reference to the much-derided liberal international order.

Trump’s silence followed a remarkable story last week in The Washington Post that said the president cannot stand to be briefed on the Russian political threat to the United States and has refused to do anything to counter it. He was furious at the new sanctions imposed on Russia, blamed Congress for the downturn in relations with Moscow, and has done everything in his power not to implement them. We also know that Russia wasn’t even on the agenda at the NATO summit earlier this year, so nervous were U.S. allies of antagonizing the president.So, we’re left to ponder the question once more: Who to believe? Is the United States serious about countering Russian power? Or is it asleep at the switch? The answers are yes and yes—parts of the administration are actively working to counter Russia, even as one important part is not and prefers to embrace Putin.

The notion that Trump is weak and ineffective is the unstated assumption behind the school of thought—particularly prevalent among conservatives sympathetic to him and some foreign governments—that this is all going to work out okay. Of course, they never say that outright, but it’s what they mean. They always point to the bureaucrats and the “actions” (as if Trump’s actions do not count), and never the president himself.