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All 50 US states and the District of Columbia (DC) are on alert for possible violent protests this weekend, ahead of President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on Wednesday. National Guard troops from across the country are being sent to Washington DC, to discourage any repeat of the deadly riot that unfolded on 6 January.The FBI has warned of possible armed marches by pro-Trump demonstrators at all 50 state capitols.

States across the country are taking precautionary measures, from boarding up capitol windows to refusing to grant permits for rallies.

It follows a week in which Donald Trump became the first US president to be impeached twice. He now faces a Senate trial, on a charge of "incitement of insurrection" linked to the storming of the US Capitol by groups of his supporters on 6 January.

When DC Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone collapsed on the ground after he was repeatedly Tasered by Trump supporters who had stormed the US Capitol on January 6, his attackers started stripping him of his ammunition, police radio and badge.

"Kill him with his own gun." That was one of many, many incriminating comments the insurgent mob shouted for the world to hear that day. Another was: "We were invited here. We were invited by the President of the United States."

Jacob Chansley, the so-called "QAnon Shaman" who was arrested and charged in connection with the riot, later told the FBI, according to a complaint, that "he came as a part of a group effort, with other 'patriots' from Arizona, at the request of the President that all 'patriots' come to D.C. on January 6, 2021."

Today, China is embarked on another campaign to re-educate its young people. The message is more blatantly nationalistic than anything in recent decades, with President Xi Jinping’s image often at the center. And it is far more sophisticated than anything Beijing has attempted in the past.

Pan Borui, a 19-year-old freshman at a Beijing college, got hooked last year on the cartoons, which he said will “shape the thinking of the next generation of Chinese.” He said he knew they were made with party support, but said most Chinese still considered them very accurate and more accessible than traditional news reports.

Beijing’s ambitions are laid out in a document published by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in November 2019, which said “patriotism is the most natural and simple emotion of the Chinese.

While the eyes of the world were focused on the impeachment efforts against President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Gov. Larry Hogan of neighboring Maryland did something extremely important in beginning the long process of unwinding our current political polarization.

The Republican governor announced that via executive order he had created an independent commission he will task with redrawing the state's congressional and legislative lines following the decennial reapportionment later this year.

"This commission is the first of its kind in the long history of our state," Hogan said in making the announcement. "Unlike the partisan, backdoor manner in which our state's political power brokers have conducted the state's redistricting process, we want to make sure that this time the people of Maryland are actually the ones drawing these lines—not the politicians or the party bosses."

Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer

Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.

The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.

More than half of Chinese in their 20s express a desire to start their own business. Others will climb up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party

How they understand their country’s past and what they ask of its future are essential to understand how they might one day lead China.

Youth often stands for trendsetting and rebellion. In China, the young must navigate an authoritarian state and a bruisingly competitive education system. This is when big life decisions are made and adult identities formed.

I’m throwing in the towel: Regarding our national fiscal future, as the man said, you’ve got to know when to fold ’em.

it’s time to face the unpleasant facts. The past decade demonstrates amply that our political process is not capable of the kind of decisions that are necessary

The temptation to savage anyone proposing safety-net reform (the sine qua non of any serious fiscal rescue, really the only issue that matters) remains electorally irresistible and invariably effective.

Rep. Liz Cheney survived to fight another battle but on a raucous and defining day, the appeasement of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene by House Republicans sent their party lurching further down the road to extremism.

The moral crisis in the GOP after Donald Trump's exit from Washington was epitomized by a showdown that saw Cheney, a lifelong ideological conservative, forced to fight off a challenge to her leadership post after she voted to impeach a President who sparked a violent coup attempt.

Greene, a belligerent conspiracy theorist who thinks the GOP's problem is that it lost the presidential election too gracefully

Charlemagne (c.742-814), also known as Karl and Charles the Great, was a medieval emperor who ruled much of Western Europe from 768 to 814. In 771,

He embarked on a mission to unite all Germanic peoples into one kingdom, and convert his subjects to Christianity

Charlemagne’s empire encompassed much of Western Europe, and he had also ensured the survival of Christianity in the West. Today, Charlemagne is referred to by some as the father of Europe.

Four years ago, Argentina shocked the international community by turning its back on Peronism, the divisive political movement that had ruled the South American country of 44 million consistently since 2001

Two decades of economic dysfunction and state intervention made the country a pariah on global capital markets, and, Macri argued, severely limited the country’s growth. Economists around the world rejoiced about the measures he was taking.

But today, with the value of the peso plummeting, inflation soaring and several million Argentines falling into poverty in a single year, many inside the country say Macri’s experiment with economic liberalism has failed.

Still waters and mythology aside, the mirror as object is called “one of mankind’s most consistent civilizers,” bringing a sense of personal reflection and comparative identity. (Passing In Review, 1925, Hart Mirror Plate Company). Mirror is central to every aspect of human history—art, archaeology, medicine, psychology, philosophy, technology­, optics—and of course, style.

The word mirror derives from the French “mirour,” from the Latin “mirari”—to admire. (The Romans themselves, however, used the word “speculum,” from “specere”—to look, or behold.)

Around 500 AD, man began to create somewhat clearer and more reflective glass mirrors using silver-mercury amalgams. Examples of such have been found in China dated as early as c.500AD. But another thousand years would pass before silvery-mercury amalgam processes became more efficient—and less deadly, mercury being one of the most toxic elements on planet Earth.

Red O. GreeneNew Mexico11h ago"Economists—the secular priests of the current age—have developed an elaborate theology in which perpetual growth is necessary, good, and inevitable, and those who acknowledge limits to growth are deemed pessimists who oppose human progress. They justify the rejection of limits by appeal to a view of human nature as greedy and insatiable, and to a definition of freedom that (unlike Kant’s) limits the use of reason to the instrumental pursuit of arbitrary ends, rather than seeing the recognition and pursuit of higher ends as key to real freedom. They have developed a metaphysics in which everything which is 'not us' has value exclusively as a resource for us." - Prof. Philip Cafaro, Colorado State University

BobTaos, NM9h agoThe Green New Deal proposed by Axlexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders has two things that recommend it -- 1) it is the first policy proposal or more accurately set of proposals that appreciates the URGENCY of the climate crisis, and 2) it recognizes the SCOPE of the climate crisis. We have to act NOW and we must review and revamp EVERYTHING -- energy generation and transmission, agriculture, industry, transportation, buildings and their power use. Switching to emission free energy sources and electrifying everything could halt the buildup of greeenhouse gased in the atmosphere. Reforming agriculture holds out the promise of sequestering CO2 in the soil and bringing atmospheric levels back toward 350. But, as AOC and Bernie say it must be done now and on a massive scale. To be fair, there are literally millions of people including most leading scientists, engineers and business people like Elon Musk, and nobodies like me who have been saying this for decades. Now for the first time it is politically feasible. This is truly the test for the generation of humans who are currently alive.

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An agitated President Donald Trump on Tuesday branded the Democratic impeachment process a "lynching" shortly before a crucial new witness is scheduled to give a deposition that could potentially unpeel new layers of the Ukraine scandal that is threatening his presidency.

Trump, who on Monday called on Republicans to be tougher in his defense, warned in a tweet that Democrats were setting a precedent that a president of their own party could be impeached in future without due process.Read More"All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here -- a lynching. But we will WIN!" Trump wrote.

A torrent of disclosures could dash hopes for a swift House vote on articles of impeachment before the Thanksgiving break as members follow fresh paths of inquiry beyond the original scope of questioning. That could in turn also hinder their effort to offer the public a crisp, easily understandable case against a President who habitually defies limits on his power.CNN reported Monday on growing expectations that historic votes on impeachment may now slip towards the end of the year -- even as Democrats also move to begin doing weekend work with a scheduled Saturday deposition for another State Department official. Such a scenario would make it more likely that a subsequent Senate trial of the President could overshadow and infect the Democratic Party's presidential primary votes early next year, a time when party leaders hope voters will focus instead on considering their own candidates for President.

Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts. The Russian trolls who used social media to interfere in the 2016 election employed a similar tactic, going after Hillary Clinton from the right and also trying to spread a perception on the left that Clinton was not liberal enough and that liberals and African Americans especially shouldn't bother voting for her.

Facebook said the accounts combined had more than 250,000 followers, more than half of which were based in the U.S. Facebook did not disclose how many of those followers were real and how many might have been fake or bot accounts designed to make the main accounts look more legitimate. Facebook says it has removed the accounts.

"It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides," Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo, who analyzed the accounts, told CNN Business. In a statement responding to the news, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said, "We applaud Facebook for disclosing the existence of these fake accounts and shutting them down. ... [But] Donald Trump continues to benefit from spreading false information, all the while Facebook profits from amplifying his lies and debunked conspiracy theories on their platform. If Facebook is truly committed to protecting the integrity of our elections, they would immediately take down Trump's ads that attempt to gaslight the American people."

The Byzantine Empire was a vast and powerful civilization with origins that can be traced to 330 A.D., when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a “New Rome” on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium.

The Byzantine Empire finally fell in 1453, after an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople during the reign of Constantine XI.

The citizens of Constantinople and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire identified strongly as Romans and Christians, though many of them spoke Greek and not Latin.

At the center of the exchange was a tussle between Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been pushing for the break-up of tech giants like Facebook and Google, and Sen. Kamala Harris, who pointedly asked whether Warren would join her in demanding that Twitter suspend President Donald Trump's account on the platform.

This is a highly-charged and heavily politicized question, particularly for Democratic candidates. Last month, Facebook formalized a bold new policy that shocked many observers, announcing that the company would not seek to fact-check or censor politicians -- including in the context of paid political advertising, and even during an election season.Over the past few days, this decree has pushed US political advertising into something like the Wild West: President Donald Trump, who will likely face the Democratic candidate in next year's general election, has already taken the opportunity to spread political lies with no accountability.

This new Facebook policy opens a frightening new world for political communication — and for national politics. It is now the case that leading politicians can openly spread political lies without repercussion. Indeed, the Trump campaign was already spreading other falsehoods through online advertising immediately before Facebook made its announcement — and as one might predict, most of those advertisements have not been removed from the platform.

Iraqi protesters took to the streets early Friday to resume antigovernment demonstrations that were suspended two weeks ago, after shootings by the security forces killed nearly 150 protesters nationwide, shocking the country and deepening disappointment with the government.

the government said this week that it would prosecute more than a dozen military and police commanders who ordered or oversaw the shootings

The government announced reforms, as well as the creation of new jobs and housing, but it seemed doubtful that would be enough to quell public anger over the country’s corruption, unemployment and lack of basic public services.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and an influential royal family member, told U.S. lawmakers to get off their “high moralistic horses” as ties between the historical allies remain frayed a year after the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Prince Turki criticized congressional representatives on Wednesday for the “horror” and “disdain” they express for Saudi Arabia, saying U.S. lawmakers are unable to perform their jobs to address “issues of racism and racial inequality” and to reform gun ownership laws.

The murder last year of Khashoggi, a U.S resident and Washington Post columnist, as well as the long-running war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the detention of Saudi female activists have all strained the kingdom’s relations with much of the Washington establishment outside the White House.

Members of the public are paying their respects to the late Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, as his body lies in state outside the House chamber where he served for 23 years. Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is the first African American lawmaker to lie in state at the Capitol and just the third African American to lie in honor there. Civil rights leader Rosa Parks and U.S. Capitol Police Officer Jacob Chestnut Jr. were the first two.

“What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything?” What if rival tribalisms are largely untethered from ideologies?

This is plausible. The angriest conservatives, or at least people brandishing this label, show no interest in what was, until recently, conservatism’s substance: limited government, balanced budgets, free trade, curbs in executive power, entitlement reform, collective security. Conservatives’ anger is eerily unrelated to the comprehensive apostasy from what was, three years ago, conservatism’s catechism.

Of course, this catechism had long been (in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s formulation) avowed but not constraining: The conservative party did not allow professed beliefs to influence its behavior. So, on the right, a politics of passions unrelated to policy flooded into the vacuum of convictions unrelated to behavior.