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His is just one of many complaints against BNN, a site based in Hong Kong that published numerous falsehoods during its short time online as a result of what appeared to be generative A.I. errors.

During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of “seasoned” journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune’s self-reported audience. Prominent news organizations like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian linked to BNN’s stories

Google News often surfaced them, too

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive.

Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends

Putin’s chief ideologue and grey cardinal, Vladislav Surkov, the ‘Kremlin demiurge’. Known also as the ‘puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system’, Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.

He trained as a theatre director then became a PR man; now his official role is ‘vice-head of the presidential administration’, but his influence over Russian politics is unsurpassed. He is the man behind the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms, the man who has turned television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine and launched pro-Kremlin youth groups happy to compare themselves to the Hitler Youth, to beat up foreigners and opposition journalists, and burn ‘unpatriotic’ books on Red Square. But this is only half the story.

Newly translated postmodernist texts give philosophical weight to the Surkovian power model. François Lyotard, the French theoretician of postmodernism, began to be translated in Russia only towards the end of the 1990s, at exactly the time Surkov joined the government. The author of Almost Zero loves to invoke such Lyotardian concepts as the breakdown of grand cultural narratives and the fragmentation of truth: ideas that still sound quite fresh in Russia. One blogger has noted that ‘the number of references to Derrida in political discourse is growing beyond all reasonable bounds. At a recent conference the Duma deputy Ivanov quoted Derrida three times and Lacan twice.’ In an echo of socialism’s fate in the early 20th century, Russia has adopted a fashionable, supposedly liberational Western intellectual movement and transformed it into an instrument of oppression.

At the United Nations, the desire to impose ever harsher sanctions on North Korea to try to curb its development of nuclear arms and ballistic missiles has long stalled in the face of Chinese opposition

They include banning specific, high-tech items used in the nuclear program, like epoxy paste for centrifuges; limiting or outlawing some banking transactions; and a far more stringent inspection of ships bound to and from North Korea.

“If we had the kind of product listing and focus on financial flows and interdiction on North Korea that we placed on Iran, we would not be in this spot,”

Propelled by the tale of the legendary Norse adventurer Ragnar Lothbrok, his family and his band of followers, the lushly produced, effects-enhanced series dazzles with evocative scenery and dynamic displays of superherolike derring-do and physical stamina.

Mr. Hirst immersed himself in what had been written about Viking culture — basically documentation by outside observers since theirs was an illiterate society. He found the material limited and biased.

“They’re always the guys who break in through the door, slash up your house and rape and pillage for no good reason, except that they enjoy the violence,” he said. “I wanted to tell the story from the Vikings’ point of view, because their history was written by Christian monks, basically, whose job it was to exaggerate their violence.”

North Korea on Saturday warned the top American military commander in South Korea that if the United States pressed ahead with joint military exercises with South Korea scheduled to begin next month, it could set off a war

North Korea warns of war and threatens to deliver a devastating blow to American and South Korean troops.

The United States military uses the Panmunjom channel to inform North Korea of its planned annual military drills with South Korea, which it says are for defensive purposes.

he US announced Monday it is "suspending its participation in bilateral channels with Russia" that had come about as part of the short-lived cessation of hostilities in Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who spent months negotiating with his Russian counterpart in order to bring about a ceasefire in Syria, spoke Tuesday about the end of bilateral talks and emphasized that the US was not giving up on peace or the Syrian people.

"Together, the Syrian regime and Russia, seem to have rejected diplomacy in furtherance of trying to pursue a military victory over the broken bodies, the bombed-out hospitals, the traumatized children of a long-suffering land," he said.

We believe Anglican doctrine is best expressed in The Book of Common Prayer that was basically written by Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury in the 1500s.

Ben Carson Says He Has No Memory of Running for President

Appearing on the Fox News Channel, Dr. Carson responded to host Sean Hannity’s question about his ten-month-long candidacy by saying, “I do not recall any of that occurring.”

“Someone is trying to mess with my mind,” he said. “And when I find out who is doing that I will make them pay dearly.”

Also at the congress, which got underway Friday, Kim said North Korea would not use its nuclear weapons unless its sovereignty was violated,

aid the plan is a “big deal” because Kim is taking public responsibility for economic development, something his father never did.

“The announcement of a five-year economic plan slightly proves the hypothesis that Kim Jong Un is ruling like his grandfather — he even appropriated a Kim Il Sung policy direction here — with more formal lines of contro

The details of the discussions on “The McLaughlin Group” weren’t nearly as important as the chemistry and the pacing. Unlike it gray competitors, “The Group” was as much about the speed of the discussion as the intensity. Under McLaughlin’s lash, the panel churned through multiple topics in minutes, establishing the modern standard.

McLaughlin taunted the panelists to elicit counter-opinions, and he demanded predictions — creating, in short, the kind of speculative, subjective conversations that political junkies and sports fans adore. Who cared whether all the guessing and opinion-mongering probably influenced no one and ultimately meant nothing but a good show?

Some critics, including Germond, were appalled by what the show had wrought. They thought it trafficked in superficiality and oversimplification, reducing complicated policy questions to a point-scoring exercise. No less a critic than President Reagan said “The Group” had turned the traditional Sunday morning talk show into “a political version of ‘Animal House.’ ”

Much has been written about the effects of the Internet on our minds and culture, including Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” Not only are we forging new neural pathways in the brain, but we’re also losing the capacity to absorb and retain complex information.

Computers and the Internet may make us smarter in some ways, as neuroscience finds, but baby boomers who grew up with three channels and rabbit ears are the last generation to have been formed primarily by books requiring lengthy, focused attention, as well as the experiential learning that comes from engaging one’s imagination rather than navigating someone else’s often-bizarre, interactive digital fictions.

One of the company’s goals now is “managing out dead wood,” aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards. Turnover is now about twice as high it was a decade ago, with approximately 10% of U.S. employees leaving annually, voluntarily or not, the company said.

Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. “People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past,” said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm.

Coca-Cola Co. KO -0.41 % in June approved pushing its new performance-management process from the pilot stage to a global rollout. The new system encourages managers to conduct a monthly “reflection” on every direct report, answering five questions that include “Given his/her performance, would you assign this associate to increased scale, scope, and responsibilities?” and “Is this associate at risk for low performance?”

Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book

It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.

the United States government is still responding at an analog pace to a low-grade, though escalating, digital conflict.

to anyone who reads between the lines and knows a bit of the back story not included in the report, the long lag times between detection and reaction are stunning.

The delays reveal fundamental problems with American cyberdefenses and deterrence that President-elect Donald J. Trump will begin to confront in two weeks

Egypt drops case against mob that attacked Christian woman

Egyptian prosecutors have thrown out a case brought by an elderly Christian woman against several members of a Muslim mob who stripped off her clothes and paraded her naked through the streets, her lawyer said Sunday.

Saturday's decision by the prosecutors cited lack of sufficient evidence, according to the lawyer, Eihab Ramzy. Another case against the alleged perpetrators of the violence, which also targeted Christian homes, remains ongoing.

The Law and Justice Party rode to power on a pledge to drain the swamp of Polish politics and roll back the legacy of the previous administration. One year later, its patriotic revolution, the party proclaims, has cleaned house and brought God and country back to Poland

Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.

In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.

t I have to admit that the campaign has made my decision easier. The conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised.

Before this year, I thought I had a relatively solid grasp on what conservatism stood for and where it was going

I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign.

s Five states expected to help Trump and Clinton widen their leads

For Republicans, the race for delegates remains a key focus, with Trump hoping to secure the 1,237 delegates needed before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.

On the Democratic side, polls in recent days suggest that Clinton could win all but one or two of the five states up for grabs —Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware — or potentially sweep the table.