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North Korea gave a positive spin Saturday to the visit of its special envoy to China but made no mention of China’s push for the North to resume negotiations

Vice Marshal Choe Ryong-hae, was at odds with portrayals in China’s state-run media,

Kim Jong-un, whose belligerent behavior has annoyed China, sent a personal letter to Mr. Xi that referred to the deep friendship between the two allies that “cannot be exchanged for anything.”

South Koreans have been riveted for weeks by a scandal involving the president and a shadowy adviser accused of being a “shaman fortuneteller” by opposition politicians.

“Ms. Choi effectively told the president to do this and do that,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Lee as saying. “There was nothing the president could decide alone.” Ms. Park’s office did not comment on the report.

On the face of it, the affinity seems improbable. Why would religious-right voters with an interest in biblical values support a vulgar, twice-divorced, thrice-married billionaire with no understanding of the sacraments, who discerns no need for confession and who says he’s a Presbyterian but claims membership at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, a congregation affiliated with the Reformed Church in America?

The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion

Evangelicals in the 19th century marched in the vanguard of social-reform movements aimed at improving the lot of those on the margins of society.

It is only with effort that the leaders of Europe have managed to compose themselves after the U.S. election, torn between pure shock over the result and the necessity of preserving what can be preserved of the West and the Atlantic relationship.

this is the end of the West as we know it.

For more than half a century, this story of phenomenal success has been built on a commitment to freedom and democracy, free trade, solid alliances and reliable friendships.

The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker

The Senate hasn’t formally rejected a Cabinet pick since it voted down President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower for defense secretary in 1989

Trump may have more luck with the Senate than his immediate predecessors, and he has Democrats to thank. When they held the majority in 2013, they changed the rules so that executive-branch nominations are no longer subject to the 60-vote threshold for filibusters. That means Trump could conceivably win Senate approval of his entire Cabinet without a single Democratic vote.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with Russia?"

President Obama's feckless handling of Russia has been so embarrassing that it may have emboldened Putin to annex Crimea, and terrified NATO allies along Russia's border.

When Trump takes office on January 20, he will have to contend with a slew of issues that demonstrate the extent to which Russia and America are strategically interdependent

There is a law that governs the relations between the Jews and the rest of the world.

That law was articulated in one form at the time of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when the great Jewish thinker Gershom Scholem faulted Hannah Arendt for falling short of “ahavat Israel” — for showing insufficient “love of the Jewish people.”

The essential thing is that President Trump thinks they did, that he seems to see Jews as the caricature of the New York establishment that, for decades, took him for an agreeable but vulgar showman.

A couple of days ago I found myself pleading with my demographic of younger voters to choose remain, for the sakes of our futures, for it is we who will live the longest with the consequences of this referendum.

“The younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of its predecessors.”

Three-quarters of young people – a massive mandate – are predicted to have voted remain, according to a YouGov poll, while those older than us made the decision to vote in favour of an uncertain vision of a future Britain that the young emphatically did not and do not want.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site has always struck me as one of the most noxious, dependent for its success on the darker aspects of online life: the zeal for constant self-fashioning and self-promotion, the pursuit of virtual forms of “community” and “friendship” that bear only a passing resemblance to the genuine article, and the relentless diminution of the private sphere in the quest for advertising dollars.

the problem is not that Facebook doesn’t make money. It’s that it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because (like so many online concerns) it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users.

This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole

Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.

Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere

Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.

to denounce Wikipedia is like denouncing the Enlightenment. Nay more: Wikipedia is the Enlightenment realized, for better or worse.

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated loom seem frivolous. Looms and cotton gins and similar apparatuses each only did one thing; the Internet does everything. 

Sometimes as I’m walking down the street hitting ‘refresh’, I am made abruptly aware of the intrusion of physical reality, of midsized physical objects in motion, and I wish my body were better protected from them. I wish they would go away. They belong to a sputtering, wheezing world of rusty old buggies and abandoned factories. They have no place in 2011. Of course, their world is not the world, and it never was all that was meant by ‘reality’. Theirs is only the human social world, the world we’ve built up by art and artifice, the world of nature transformed for our vain and largely illusory purposes. If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

All three researchers concluded that one of the biggest factors in both a happy life and a long life was having strong and healthy social connections. Beyond that, the people who tended to have "happy-well" outcomes were conscientious, emotionally healthy individuals who set and actively pursued goals; who incorporated strong social networks, exercise and "healthy" eating/drinking habits organically into their everyday lives; who were optimistic but not to the point of being careless or reckless; social enough to form strong networks, but not so social as to pursue unhealthy habits for peer approval; and who felt engaged and satisfied in their careers, marriages, and friendships.

the happiness of children in a household (aged 10 to 21, living at home) is significantly affected by the happiness of their mother--or, at least her happiness in terms of her marriage. Only 55 percent of children whose mothers reported that they were unhappy in their marriages said they were completely happy at home, versus 73 percent of those whose mothers reported being very happy in their marriages. The happiness of the fathers was less significant. 

there is what you might call Blue Inequality. This is the kind experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia. In these places, you see the top 1 percent of earners zooming upward, amassing more income and wealth.

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school grads. In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures. Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock. Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home. Some research suggests that college grads have much bigger friendship networks than high school grads. The social divide is even starker than the income divide.

“The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer,” said Gina Bianchini, the woman who had appeared on the cover of Fortune. “So why hasn’t our generation of women moved the needle?”

identity politics pushed many people into homogeneous groups; Scott Walker, one of the only African-Americans in the class to try founding a start-up, said in an interview that he regretted spending so much time at his all-black fraternity, which took him away from the white friends from freshman year who went on to found and then invest in technology companies.

But there were still many hoops women had greater trouble jumping through — components that had to be custom-built, capital that needed to be secured from a small number of mostly male-run venture firms.

The friendship and mutual respect that had marked Jefferson’s first days as Washington’s secretary of state in 1790 had slowly vanished as the two men realized the depth and intensity of their disagreements. The Revolution of 1800 was Jefferson’s way of announcing that he had no intention of changing his mind about any of the issues that had led to their mutual alienation.

He seemed to be saying: So you’re famous for winning the American Revolution – eight wearisome years of living dangerously? I intend to be even more famous for a revolution that does not shed any blood, that settles once and for all the spiritual and political superiority of my Republican party to the mean-spirited arrogant secret king worshippers who flaunted the name Federalist with your secret approval. That is the real meaning of the Revolution of 1800.

It was – or seemed to be – a call for political peace. Listening to these words was a Jefferson cousin who knew they were nonsense -- Chief Justice John Marshall, who had administered the oath of office. He described Jefferson’s political party as an uneasy compound of “speculative theorists” and “absolute terrorists” who wanted revenge for the years of political defeats under Presidents Washington and Adams. Jefferson would have to satisfy both branches of the party or he would soon be in trouble, Marshall predicted.

Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.

Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.

there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking.

Activist Israel Kaunatjike journeyed from Namibia to Germany, only to discover a forgotten past that has connections to his own family tree

Black and white people shared a country, yet they weren't allowed to live in the same neighborhoods or patronize the same businesses. That, says Kaunatjike, was verboten.

A few decades after German immigrants staked their claim over South-West Africa in the late 19th century, the region came under the administration of the South African government, thanks to a provision of the League of Nations charter.

Islamist extremism: Why young people are being drawn to it

She was speaking after a 15-year-old boy was charged with conspiracy in connection with an alleged terror plot in Australia.

Last month, reports said one of two girls who ran away from their home in Austria to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria had been beaten to death while trying to escape. She was 17.