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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may at last leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for three and a half years.

But even though he may leave with the support of a United Nations working group, he is still likely to be arrested in Britain on sex crime charges for alleged crimes in Sweden that date back several years.

Assange had said he would surrender to British police for arrest Friday if the U.N. group ruled he had not been unlawfully detained. However, any judgment by the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention would be only a "moral recommendation" and would not be legally binding.

Across the country, religious leaders whose politics fall to the left of center, and who used to shun the political arena, are getting involved — and even recruiting political candidates — to fight back against President Trump’s policies on immigration, health care, poverty and the environment.

Across the country, religious leaders whose politics fall to the left of center, and who used to shun the political arena, are getting involved — and even recruiting political candidates — to fight back against President Trump’s policies on immigration, health care, poverty and the environment.

Frustrated by Christian conservatives’ focus on reversing liberal successes in legalizing abortion and same-sex marriage, those on the religious left want to turn instead to what they see as truly fundamental biblical imperatives — caring for the poor, welcoming strangers and protecting the earth — and maybe even change some minds about what it means to be a believer

Candidate Kennedy’s purpose was simply to express sympathy to Coretta Scott King over her husband’s plight. Many of his aides opposed the call as likely to lose votes in the South. But King was released from jail shortly afterwards, and reports of Kennedy’s concern energized African-Americans. Many historians feel it shifted crucial votes in Northern states away from Richard Nixon to give JFK his razor-thin victory.

They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences.Early in his administration, President Kennedy did not want to be seen as too eager to press for such moves as equal housing and voting protection for minorities, even though he saw such changes as inevitable. King was not invited to his inauguration or to an initial meeting of civil rights figures in the Oval Office

In June 1963, Kennedy unveiled sweeping civil rights legislation. Among other things, it promised the right to vote to all citizens with a grade-school education, and eliminated legal discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants.Kennedy remained hesitant to embrace the nation’s most prominent civil rights figure, however. In part this was due to allegations that a key King aide had communist ties, as well as the FBI’s notorious surveillance of King, which produced evidence of womanizing.The FBI’s file on King’s sex life was dauntingly thick, Berl L. Bernhard, staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights from 1958 to 1963, said in an oral history at the Kennedy Library.“I do think the president was aware of it, and I know [darn] well some people in the administration were aware of it,” Mr. Bernhard said.Kennedy himself had numerous affairs, of course. It’s unknown how he felt about the juxtaposition of his own recklessness with the King allegations.In the summer of 1963 the administration was worried about the upcoming March on Washington to highlight civil rights. Unable to stop the planning, the White House recruited white union and labor groups to participate, to counter criticism that whites were not interested in sweeping civil rights changes.

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

t was a startling omission, even according to the peculiar moral norms of the Trump era. When Wendy Vitter, one of the US president’s judicial nominees, was asked whether she supported the supreme court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision to end racial segregation in schools – a near sacred pillar of progress for civil rights in the 20th century – she did not say yes.

With just over a year in office, Donald Trump has already appointed 21 of America’s 167 current circuit judges and intends to fill an additional 20 or more vacancies by the end of the year. He is far outpacing Barack Obama, whose 21st circuit court nominee was approved 33 months into his presidency amid gridlock in Congress. Seventeen of Trump’s nominees for district courts, most of whom replaced Democratic appointees, have also been approved by the Republican-controlled Senate.

“This is stunning,” said Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to Barack Obama, who for more than four years was in charge of the selection, vetting and confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees. “Conservatives are using the courts to bring us back to a time when ‘religious liberty’ allowed discrimination. We’re seeing legal arguments we had hoped were consigned to the dustbin of history being dusted off and used again in the hope of turning back the clock on the way we treat all Americans.” Four cases relating to Trump’s ban on transgender personnel in the military are working their way through the courts. Employment and housing protections for LGBT individuals could be at risk. Battles over reproductive rights are also under way at state level. Last month a federal appeals court blocked an Ohio law that would cut taxpayer funding to 28 Planned Parenthood clinics, holding that conditions it imposed that denied funds to abortion providers were unconstitutional. But campaigners against abortion rights are unlikely to be deterred.

During his campaign, Buttigieg spoke about what he called “rules of the road,” values that he wanted to make hallmarks of his candidacy and that included respect, responsibility, discipline, excellence, joy, and truth. This is what the Buttigieg campaign said about the latter: Honesty is in our nature, and it is one of our greatest means of restoring faith in our democracy among everyday Americans and building a national movement rooted in trust and faith in our country and our beliefs. Internally and externally, our effort will be characterized by fidelity to the truth.

That is the kind of language and ethos that once would have appealed to Republicans, who now, under the spell of a president of corruptions without borders, have given up on virtue as a touchstone of political life. Politicians and presidents attempting to foster a climate of trust and mutual respect are snowflakes—or so many in the modern GOP and right-wing-media complex would have you think.

One could see his commitment to these principles in his temperament. One example: Buttigieg, when he engaged with people who disagreed with him, was able to acknowledge why they held views different from his on opposing same-sex marriage. He stressed that how you vote doesn’t determine whether you’re a good or a bad person. That was once fairly widely assumed; in our current political climate, where contempt and antipathy toward others is fashionable, it’s something that needs to be said, and said again.

There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.Take the last Republican president before Donald Trump, George W. Bush.

To appeal to moderate suburban voters, Bush would make education a priority and promise a “compassionate conservatism.” To strengthen the party’s hold on white evangelicals, Bush emphasized his Christianity and worked to polarize the country over abortion, same-sex marriage and other questions of sexual ethics and morality.

He also made it a point to have a diverse cabinet, elevating figures like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales.

the strange condition of American conservatism, in which two crises, one normal and one existential, are happening at once.

The normal crisis is a party crisis, the sort that afflicts all political coalitions. The Republican Party 40 years ago coalesced around a set of appeals that enabled its leaders to win large presidential majorities and set the national agenda.

beneath this party crisis there is the deeper one, having to do with what conservatism under a liberal order exists to actually conserve.

I remembered that fan as I watched mourners arrive at Buckingham Palace to lay flowers for Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, whose death was announced Friday. My thoughts were also with the new widow whose quiet sorrow already dominated global news. The grief that attaches to public figures is no less real for distance. Public lives provide markers and milestones for others, and few more so than the Queen and her consort, who have spent more than seven decades in the public eye.

The Queen has always modeled one response to this situation -- seen, but rarely heard, her feelings and opinions jealously guarded. Shortly she is to face TV cameras to talk about the worst thing that has ever happened to her. There is a poignancy to this most reserved of women being forced to grieve in public. There might also be, in sharply polarized responses to the unfurling pageantry, an intimation of mortality for the constitutional monarchy she has headed for 69 years.

The monarchy is the ultimate exclusive club, the sovereign born to reign over subjects, not citizens, hardly the most obvious of qualifications for performing the key role of a head of state: to unify. The Queen has nevertheless largely succeeded in this function, popular and, in decade after decade and poll after poll, trusted, rarely faltering but for a few famous missteps, her delays in leading public mourning for the dead after a mining disaster in Aberfan, Wales and, later, for her daughter-in-law Diana.

Though on one level it was about (of course) the next iteration of pinup culture as defined by, and catering to, men, the success of Victoria’s Secret, once a mere catalog company, was also the product of a host of cultural phenomena as fashion, entertainment, branding, sex and kitsch all began to merge at the turn of the millennium.

the Victoria’s Secret Angels were part of the commercialization of the high/low moment that defined the cultural tenor of the late 20th century and is still going strong in collaborations everywhere.

First captured by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1990 (and an accompanying book), it was later appropriated by fashion designers including Tom Ford, whose 1996 breakthrough Gucci show married the irony of kitsch to luxury materials (remember the GG clogs?) and an unabashed embrace of Studio 54 decadence

In 2017, after a meeting with then president-elect Mr. Trump in New York, Mr. Kennedy Jr. announced that he had been asked to chair a commission to review vaccine safety. The move alarmed doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts, who pointed out that Mr. Trump had previously raised concerns that vaccines cause autism.

Even though the commission never materialized, to Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s bitter disappointment, the fact that the meeting took place at all signals how closely conspiracy theories and misinformation have been interwoven in everyday politics.

“To some extent, conspiracy theories rule the day,” Prof. Offit told us.

The divorce between Democrats and the working class just continues to grow. Despite a slight improvement, Democrats still lost white working class (noncollege) voters in 2020 by 26 points (Catalist two party vote). Since 2012, nonwhite working class voters have shifted away from the Democrats by 18 points, with a particularly sharp shift in the last election and particularly among Hispanics.

In the recent Virginia gubernatorial election, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe lost working class voters overall by 7 points, with large swings against the Democrats among the overwhelmingly working class Hispanic population (the same basic pattern can be seen in the New Jersey election results).

Recent generic Congressional ballot results show Democrats’ working class support as the mirror image of their college graduate support—strongly negative among working class voters, strongly positive among college graduate voters. But there are way more working class voters than college graduate voters.

Sexual desire and frustration, familiar feelings for the outcast teenage nerd, pervade the social internet. S3xy-ness is everywhere. Posts by women are dismayingly likely to produce advances, or threats, from creepers on all platforms; at the same time, sex appeal is a pillar for the influencer economy, or else a viable and even noble way to win financial independence. The internet is for porn, as the song goes.

In all these ways, online life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it. They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power.

Musk’s obsession with X as a brand, and his childish desire to broadcast that obsession from the rooftops in hoggish, bright pulsations, calls attention to this baggage. It reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.

He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”

Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, known as a great seducer, has been accused by more than 20 women of rape, sexual assault and harassment in France’s belated #MeToo reckoning.

France’s most trusted anchorman for decades, he used to draw millions in an evening news program that some likened to a religious communion. In an earlier time, he embodied an ideal of the French male — at ease with himself, a TV journalist and man of letters, a husband and a father who was also, unabashedly, a great seducer of women.

Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, nicknamed the Sun King of French TV,

The rise of the influencer Andrew Tate has vindicated the decision to show Eton College pupils a controversial video on masculinity, according to the master who was sacked for doing so.

It also stated that “male aggression is a biological fact” and aired concerns about women competing in sports against transgender women.

“I think Tate is a symptom of what’s currently going wrong regarding the teaching of boys in schools,” Knowland said from his home in Stowmarket, Suffolk.