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Germany occupies a special place in the international imagination. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the difficulties of reunification, the country acquired a reputation as a leader of the free world. Economically prosperous, politically stable and more welcoming to immigrants than most other countries, the Germans — many thought — had really learned their lesson.

The past few months have been a bit of a rude awakening. The economy is stuttering and a constitutional court ruling has upended the government’s spending plans

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, fresh from success in two regional elections, is cementing itself as the country’s second-most-popular party.

Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, one of OpenAI’s independent board members, told Forbes in January that there was “no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies.”

“My hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big,” D’Angelo said in the interview. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Two of the board members who voted Altman out worked for think tanks backed by Open Philanthropy, a tech billionaire-backed foundation that supports projects preventing AI from causing catastrophic risk to humanity

Perplexity AI “unlocks the power of knowledge with information discovery and sharing.” This, it turns out, means “does research.” Type something into it, and it spits out a comprehensive answer, always sourced and sometimes bulleted. You might say this is just Google on steroids — but really, it is Google with a bibliography.

Caleb Jackson, a 22-year-old junior at Ole Miss studying part time, is a fan. This way, he doesn’t have to spend hours between night shifts and online classes trawling the internet for sources. Perplexity can find them, and he can get to writing that much sooner.

What’s most important to Ole Miss faculty members is that students use these tools with integrity. If the university doesn’t have a campuswide AI honor code, and so far it doesn’t, individual classes should. And no matter whether professors permit all applications of AI, as some teachers have tried, or only the narrowest, students should have to disclose just how much help they had from robots.

To understand the moment, one has to understand the extent to which many religious activists believe that free speech itself is responsible for America’s ongoing secularization and alleged moral decline. They believe the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality — that is, the requirement that the government treat private speakers equally in their access to government facilities — is a proxy for “moral relativism.” Moral relativism is a truly poisonous accusation in conservative and Christian communities, in part because it implies a rejection of immutable or universal truth in favor of a subjective, individual standard — a concept alien, for example, to traditional Christianity.

As a free speech advocate, I’ve been fending off the “moral relativism” accusation for years. In 2019, when I wrote in support of the right of drag queens to enjoy the same access to public facilities as anyone else, that was “moral relativism.” When I wrote earlier this month that the right of free speech includes even the right to calls for non-imminent violence — again, this is a matter of settled constitutional law — a scholar named John Grondelski wrote in a Catholic journal that my position was “the offspring of the dictatorship of relativism.”

much of my legal career was dedicated to protecting minority religious expression — including evangelical expression — from censorship on American campuses and in American communities. In the course of that representation, I learned three practical truths of free expression.

In an interview with The Washington Post, McLaughlin (R) said he rushed to Hillcrest Funeral Home about 15 minutes after “the first call” reporting that 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had crashed his pickup truck nearby. He found himself standing near an official he identified only as “the negotiator,” while frightened parents gathered outside the school and police waited well over an hour to storm the classroom.

He said he doesn’t believe the negotiator was aware there were children calling 911 and asking police to save them while the gunman was in the classroom. The mayor said he was not aware of those calls, nor did he hear shots fired from inside the school, across the street.

In the recent Texas primary for governor, he opted not to endorse the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, labeling him a “fraud” over his approach to the border and immigration. And he has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” multiple times to lambaste the Border Patrol’s release of migrants into the streets of Uvalde and lament that he cannot get a call back from the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

A confidential European Union military report calls for continuing a controversial EU program to train and equip Libya’s coast guard and navy despite growing concerns about their treatment of migrants, a mounting death toll at sea, and the continued lack of any central authority in the North African nation.

Europe’s determination to support Libya in the interception and return of tens of thousands of men, women and children to Libya, where they face insufferable abuse.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe have made their way through Libya, where a lucrative trafficking and smuggling business has flourished in a country without a functioning government,

Tech companies like to make two grand pronouncements about the future of artificial intelligence. First, the technology is going to usher in a revolution akin to the advent of fire, nuclear weapons, and the internet.

And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.

Silicon Valley has already triggered tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on AI, and companies only want to spend more.

I criticize Obama's failure to seize the center ground of U.S. politics. This was partly a choice, in my view -- reflecting the fact that (unlike Bill Clinton) he's a progressive and not a centrist by instinct. But it was partly also a reaction to the determination of the GOP in Congress to defeat his every initiative. Ezra Klein says the Republicans' give-no-quarter strategy worked; similarly, E.J. Dionne says Democrats were more willing to compromise than the GOP. I agree with both points: When I criticize Obama, it's not because I think the GOP is blameless, but rather for the reverse: Obama failed to exploit the opportunity that the Republicans' intransigence afforded him. Yes, his opponents were reckless and unreasonable. Yes, they were moving abruptly to the right. Tactically speaking, that was Obama's chance. But to make the most of it, he had to plant his flag in the center the GOP was vacating. Instead, after Scott Brown, even after the midterms, he let Democrats in Congress get on with it and tacked left -- repeatedly casting his disagreement with the Republicans as a contest between his own (not especially popular) progressive vision and their militantly conservative vision, rather than between the commonsense pragmatism the country longs for and the other side's unreasoning extremism. That was the contrast he could and should have underscored. When I say he blew it, that's what I mean.

it really is true that self-identified centrists are sounding crazier and crazier, as they try to reconcile their fanatical devotion to the proposition that both parties are equally at fault with the distressing reality that Obama actually advocates the policies they claim to want

The trial’s focus on quotas and productivity goals has illuminated the labor-management tensions that run deep through the Police Department, with 15,000 rank-and-file officers on the patrol force. “I think we’re charged with trying to get the police officers to work, do the things that they’re getting paid for,” the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for labor relations, John Beirne, testified.

“You have 10 percent that will work as hard as they can, whenever they can, no matter how bad we treat them, how bad the conditions are,” Mr. Esposito said. These officers “love being cops and they’re going to do it no matter what.” On the other extreme, Mr. Esposito said, “You have 10 percent on the other side that are complete malcontents that will do as little as possible no matter how well you treat them.”

In some precincts, Mr. Esposito noted, most enforcement activity, like ticket writing, occurred when officers were paid time-and-a-half overtime, instead of during their regular workweek. “It’s a question as to why they can see activity when they are being paid overtime as opposed to not being able to see activity when they are on straight time,” Mr. Esposito testified.

There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI. This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm

Gun violence also affects more than its victims. In areas where it is prevalent, just the threat of violence makes neighborhoods poorer. It's very difficult to quantify the total harm caused by gun violence, but by asking many people how much they would pay to avoid this threat -- a technique called contingent valuation -- researchers have estimated a cost to American society of $100 billion dollars.

19,392 of 38,264 suicides in 2010 involved a gun (50%), according to the CDC.

By defining income as “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits,” Burkhauser and his co-authors achieved two things: a diminished degree of inequality and, perhaps more important, a conclusion that the condition of the poor and middle class was improving

Burkhauser has come up with statistical findings that not only wipe out inequality trends altogether but also purport to show that over the past 18 years, the poor and middle classes have done better, on a percentage basis, than the rich.

You get different answers depending on whether you measure income before or after taxes and transfers, whether you count fringe benefits (mainly health insurance), and whether you look at families or households, and whether you count the big hitters as the top 20% or the top 1 percent. Counting health care mutes the increase in inequality, but that really means that most of the increase in working class incomes has been siphoned off to medical providers. Looking at households has the same effect.

“This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,” writes Matthew Continetti,

“After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home.”

“what makes this crisis acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it on themselves.”

The Sack of Constantinople, 1453 The Destruction of the Last Vestige of the Roman Empire

For advice on building Mr. Trump’s national security team, his inner circle has been relying on three hawkish current and former American officials: Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; Peter Hoekstra, a former Republican congressman and former chairman of the Intelligence Committee;

Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration and a founder of the Center for Security Policy.

Mr. Gaffney has long advanced baseless conspiracy theories, including that President Obama might be a closet Muslim. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes.”

There is a serious prospect, however, that Democrats will choose No. 1. There would be many reverberations for our politics. But chiefly, the United States would cease to have a center-left party and a center-right party. Both radicalized institutions would exaggerate our national differences, becoming the political equivalent of the hard-left and hard-right media. And the cause of national unity would be damaged even further.

Democrats should not overlearn the lessons of a close election. Option No. 3 is the Democratic future on the presidential level.

But for the foreseeable future, Democrats will also need a dash of No. 2, including a more accommodating attitude toward religion and associational rights.

As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind.

On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital?

The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week?

This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.

In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week.

Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates.