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Held on October 31, this celebration commemorates the posting of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany back in October 31, 1517. These were translated and shared all over Germany resulting in the Protestant reformation. This involved a protest against the evils in the Roman Catholic Church at the time and also the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification which assured salvation by Grace and faith in Christ alone.

North Korea's 'biggest' nuclear test sparks global outrage

World leaders have reacted with anger after North Korea carried out its fifth and reportedly biggest nuclear test.

firmly opposed" the test, Japan "protested adamantly" and the US warned of "serious consequences" including "new sanctions". The UN Security Council will meet later behind closed doors to discuss the issue.

or Donald Trump or Ryan Lochte to believe in something, or to express genuine regret, would require some conception of the world outside their enormous egos, and also some conception of a moral code that ought not to be transgressed. Their instrumental and cynical understanding of politics and celebrity and sport and everything else — the worldview behind the fake apology that never addresses the misdeed, or seeks to remedy the harm — is certainly not new, and not yet ubiquitous. How far has it spread, and how much damage has it done?

one-quarter of younger Americans say they believe democracy is either a “fairly bad” or “very bad” political system. You can argue that those people are wrong, but on empirical grounds that’s not an inherently irrational belief. When one of our major political parties nominates someone who transparently doesn’t believe in democracy, or at any rate has no idea how it works — and when at least 40 percent of the public plans to vote for him — we might have a problem.

Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit

The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after a devastating attack on its lorries near Aleppo on Monday.

Russia and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved.

how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences.

Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age

In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

supporters will have prime access to the administration and first families.

donors will get tickets to a luncheon with Cabinet appointees and congressional leadership, dinner with the Vice President-elect and his wife, lunch with the first families, tickets to an "elegant" "candlelight dinner"

All the packages include travel bookings and tickets to various events, with decreasing amounts of tickets and less access.

Gipper's memento: Reagan's signed oath of office goes up for sale

Even Ronald Reagan needed most of January to begin signing the correct year, and the proof is in a one-of-a-kind document inscribed by the Gipper and given to a trusted aide the day the 40th president took the oath of office.  

After giving the 41-word oath to Chief Justice Warren Burger on Jan. 20, 1981, Reagan inscribed and dated the printed version he'd used for practice for a trusted aide. Expand / Contract The written oath was used by Reagan to practice for his swearing-in ceremony in 1981. (Raab Collection) “To Nancy – who ‘brightens the corner where we are,’ Ronald Reagan 1/20/80,” he wrote to Nancy Clark Reynolds, a longtime friend, aide and member of the Reagan transition team.

Days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald J. Trump is engaged in a high-profile feud with some of the country’s most prominent African-American leaders, setting off anger in a constituency already wary of him after a contentious presidential campaign.

“I don’t think we have ever had a president so publicly condescending to what black politics means,” said Mark Anthony Neal, an African and African-American studies professor at Duke University.

Mr. Trump has also not made any public announcement of plans to commemorate Martin Luther King’s Birthday, a tradition observed by most Republican and Democratic politicians

The "alt-right is having a falling out -- in some ways with their President-elect, but in perhaps even more instances with each other. And it comes on the eve of an alt-right inaugural celebration called the DeploraBall -- a play off of Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" campaign remark.

Founding father Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston. Along with serving as one of the architects of American independence, he was also a scientist, inventor, printer, writer, newspaper owner and philosopher who became a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Gamergate

The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect

ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.

The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.

Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what's not for its 1 billion users.

The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.

The answer to the question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been to partition “Palestine” into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land; but that has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible.

The Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own.

Jews have no place in the Islamic world — except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule

NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts

Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural

America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture

described Trump’s ideas as “dangerously incoherent,

she made clear that her pivot to the fall contest is underway, even with a series of final primary contests against Sen. Bernie Sanders still ahead.

doesn’t understand America, or the world,” she said

When Barack Obama goes to Hiroshima on May 27, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site of the world’s first nuclear attack, he will not apologize on behalf of his country for carrying out that strike 71 years ago.

But he will affirm America’s “moral responsibility,” as the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, to prevent their future use. He will recognize the painful past, but he won’t revisit it. When it’s all over, we still won’t know whether or not he thinks there’s something about the atomic bombings to be sorry for.

This is especially true with the Hiroshima bombing, where the competing stories about what happened are so morally complex. Nevertheless, political apologies do occur.

Millions tuned in every week to hear Trump say his signature line, “You’re fired,” and cement his image as a man who played up conflict for the cameras and who never met a self-promotional product placement he didn’t like. He was a quintessential reality star — and a senior Trump campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, said this past week that the mogul is still exactly that: “This is the ultimate reality show. It’s the presidency of the United States.”

Everyone may love to watch the villains and the insult-lobbing ringmasters on reality shows, but no one ever roots for them, which, technically, should not bode well for Trump’s chances. Technically.

The people who stick around longest on competition shows aren’t always the ones with the most “skill” at whatever it is the shows make contestants do. Often, they’re the ones who stir up the most hate-watch rage

When you add up these excuses, what you see is a party full of lawyers and spin doctors defending the indefensible. They’re not rationalizing racism. What they’re rationalizing is holding their party together even if that means supporting a racist.

To protect this man, Republicans have discarded every principle. The party of conservatism celebrates disruption. Absolutists who insist that their presidential nominee treat the unborn as equals require no such commitment to Mexican Americans. Moralists who spent the Clinton administration preaching about character treat persistent race baiting as a matter of communications strategy. Some Republicans discount Trump’s slurs as old news while others discount them because he’s a nice man who otherwise never talks that way.

Party leaders agonize over the nominee’s commitment to entitlement cuts but treat racism as a detail. Politicians who brag about saying “radical Islamic terrorist” get cute about the meaning of “racist.” The chairman of the committee investigating Hillary Clinton becomes a permissive subjectivist. A senator who ran for president opposing his own immigration bill develops a deep commitment to his promise to support Trump. The Senate leader who set out to thwart a newly elected president in 2009 suddenly preaches the primacy of the people’s will.

With exacting detail, the report catalogues a succession of failures.

British intelligence painted a flawed picture of Iraqi military capacity, with agencies never doubting the existence of WMDs. In fact, the report concluded, Iraq posed “no imminent threat” to Britain. In making their case to the public, Blair and other British officials described the case against Hussein “with a certainty that was not justified.”

In their private deliberations, they ignored warnings that the invasion of Iraq could be a boon to Islamist extremists. Groups such as al-Qaeda gained key footholds amid Iraq’s chaos, and militant offshoots later became the foundation for the Islamic State