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The Obama administration had sought to persuade the Russians to correct the violation while the missile was still in the test phase. Instead, the Russians have moved ahead with the system, deploying a fully operational unit.

Some opposition figures speculated darkly that the president was removing himself from the scene in preparation for declaring a state of emergency, a last-ditch measure that the protesters have been warning against for weeks, saying it could ignite an all-out civil war.

Other opposition leaders took a less alarmist view. Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, a leader of the Fatherland party, who was offered the position of prime minister over the weekend but declined, said Thursday in an interview that the government seemed to have adopted a policy of dragging its feet, hoping the momentum on the streets would wane.

The president, though, is facing pressure from Russia to take a harder line with protesters, rather than continue negotiations. The loans were suspended, the Kremlin said, until it became clear what sort of government would emerge from the current negotiations.

On Wednesday, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, opened a speech to Parliament with a renewed appeal to Ukrainians to stick to peaceful resolutions and demanded that the Ukrainian government not ignore the “many people who have shown in courageous demonstrations that they are not willing to turn away from Europe.”

Under the Constitution, if the president is incapacitated or dies, the prime minister serves as acting head of state. After Mr. Azarov resigned, Serhei Arbuzov became acting prime minister; both men are allies of Mr. Yanukovych

The police advance followed hours of street battles that destroyed hopes of an early political settlement, stirred in recent days by an amnesty deal. The resumption of violence underscored the volatility of a political crisis that has not only aroused fear of civil war in Ukraine but has also dragged Russia and the West into a geopolitical struggle redolent of the Cold War.

News agencies quoted antigovernment activists as saying three protesters had been killed, but there was no immediate confirmation of casualties. Olga Bogomolets, a doctor, told the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper that three activists had died at a medical unit in the Officers’ House on Kriposniy Lane. She said that they had died from gunshot wounds to the head and heart and that tens of other people had suffered injuries.

Protesters reported that the police were using live ammunition, but this could not be confirmed. Cartridges scattered on the street suggested that most, if not all, of the firing from police lines involved rubber bullets.

“Kiev stand up! Kiev stand up!,” screamed a speaker on a stage in the square that, since late November, has been occupied by protesters.

“Extremists from opposition have crossed the line” and bought chaos to the center of Kiev, said the statement. “We warn hot irresponsible heads of the opposition — the government has forces to restore order.”

The 6 p.m. deadline passed with no sign of a push into Independence Square by Ukraine’s feared anti-riot force, known as Berkut. With the night sky darkened further by clouds of black smoke from burning rubber tires, police officers hammered their shields for several minutes as if Roman centurions preparing for battle. But they did not move forward.

“There should have been a resolution,” he said. “But they did not even put it up for a vote.”

The Russian aid signaled confidence from the Kremlin that important votes in Parliament expected this week to amend the Constitution and form a new cabinet will go in Russia’s favor. It also highlighted the absence of any clear promise of financial aid from the European Union or the United States, which have supported the opposition in Ukraine.

Mr. Yanukovych negotiated a $15 billion loan with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in December, and Ukraine received a first segment of this soon afterward when Russia purchased Ukrainian bonds worth $3 billion. But Russia suspended further payments last month after violent clashes broke out in Kiev and the pro-Russian prime minister resigned.Germany, which on Monday hosted a visit to Berlin by two of President Yanuvoych’s most ardent opponents, called for all sides to seek a peaceful solution to the explosive political confrontation.

“We call on the Foreign States and International Organizations to be objective and unbiased in assessing the internal developments in Ukraine,” the statement said. “We also expect that they will strongly condemn the unlawful activities of the radical forces.”

In one indication of a possible window for negotiations, the Ukrainian Finance Ministry formally canceled plans to issue the latest tranche of below-market-rate Eurobonds to the Russian government, the form of financial aid that the Kremlin had been providing.

The reported political agreement that could end the violence came after the bloodiest day in the three-month-old confrontation. On Thursday, security forces fired on masses of antigovernment demonstrators in the capital, Kiev, in a drastic escalation that left dozens dead and Ukraine reeling from the most lethal day of violence since Soviet times.

Many observers noted that Mr. Yanukovych’s office had announced an agreement but there was no immediate corroboration from the opposition.

The shootings followed a quickly shattered truce, with enraged protesters parading dozens of captured police officers through Kiev’s central square. Despite a frenzy of East-West diplomacy and negotiations, there was little sign that tensions were easing.

There were signs late Thursday that Mr. Yanukovych might be moving closer to compromise, apparently expressing willingness to hold presidential and parliamentary elections this year, as the opposition has demanded. But given the hostility and mistrust on both sides, aggravated by the deadly mayhem that has engulfed central Kiev, the prospects of any agreement seemed remote — particularly now that many of the president’s adversaries say they will settle for nothing less than his resignation.

Opposition leaders convened a session of Parliament late Thursday, and together with defectors from the pro-government party they passed a resolution obliging Interior Ministry troops to return to their barracks and the police to their usual posts, and prohibiting the use of firearms against protesters. It also asserted that only lawmakers, rather than the president, could declare a state of emergency. Perhaps more than these assertions, the vote was significant for signaling that Mr. Yanukovych had lost control of a majority in Parliament.

“A state of emergency means the beginning of war,” she said. “We cannot let that happen.”

By noon, 11 corpses had been laid out in a makeshift outdoor morgue under a Coca-Cola umbrella at the end of Independence Square. Other bodies were taken elsewhere.

The demonstrators captured more than 60 police officers, who were marched, dazed and bloodied, toward the center of the square through a crowd of men who heckled and shoved them.

With Mr. Yanukovych’s allies in Parliament still resisting changes to the Constitution demanded by the opposition that would reduce the powers of the president, there were intense talks underway in Kiev in hopes of ending the violence.

“What European leaders understand now is they are dealing with a person who cheats them and who lies,” Evgenia Tymoshenko said in an interview on Thursday. “There can be no negotiation with a person who cheats and lies.”

In her remarks, Ms. Nuland did not rule out the calls by some Ukrainian officials, including the speaker of Parliament, Volodymyr Rybak, for so-called round-table talks —the same phrase for negotiations that helped resolve the Orange Revolution nine years ago.

At the same time, participants in the meeting said they understood her message to mean protest leaders might have to accept the prospect of Mr. Yanukovich remaining in power, unless he should decide to resign voluntarily

The possibility that he would quit is regarded as extremely unlikely, and from a practical standpoint there seem to be few legal ways to oust him, as the protesters have demanded.

“The highly corrupt political class is more interested in its own pockets than in the public interest,” said Thomas Gomart of the French Institute of International Relations. “And it cannot give a political answer to the demonstrations. The real issue is not deciding to go to Brussels or Moscow, but popular exasperation with this political system.”

“There should be no doubt about where the United States stands on this,” she said. “We stand with the people of Ukraine who see their future in Europe and want to bring their country back to economic health and unity.”

Calls were made for the bishop to resign after he was accused of lying under oath about his spending.

He was criticised for a first-class flight to India to visit the poor.

It was in Germany that Martin Luther launched the Reformation five centuries ago in response to what he said were excesses and abuses within the Church.

Pope Francis has also signalled his intention to clean up the Vatican's finances, appointing a commission to advise him on reforms.

Flashes of violence by hard-line Islamists have vexed Tunisia since the ouster of the former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.

Ali Larayedh, of the moderate Islamic party Ennahda, as a condition of the dialogue. Tunisia’s main labor union group and secular political leaders have insisted that Mr. Larayedh step down within three weeks, almost as soon as the factions can agree on a caretaker government of nonpartisan experts.

Mr. Larayedh reiterated his party’s position that he would resign only upon the ratification of a new constitution and the beginning of a new electoral process, not at the start of the talks or by the end of a three-week deadline.

Warner doesn't hide his hubris and says the world's perception of him is nowhere near the reality.

Warner said Wednesday night he has compiled reams of documents to expose wrongdoing, adding that when he heard FIFA President Sepp Blatter was planning to resign, he wrote him and urged his immediate departure.

Spending a night in jail after his arrest last week was a good thing, he said, because he got to tell other Trinidadian leaders they should clean up the prisons.

"Sometimes I deliberately break my rear-view mirror, because it is not always pleasant to look back," said Raymond Tim Kee, the mayor of Port-of-Spain who also leads the soccer association that Warner once controlled financially. "Since I assumed office two years ago, one of the first things I pursued was rebranding because what I realized was the football federation at the time had lost credibility and there were a lot of questions and fears because of all that was going on that time."

"Gandhi once said that all through history, there have been tyrants," Warner said. "But in the end, they fall."

It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from the foreigners.

The motivations underlying each of the three phenomena — the fear of immigrants, attraction to charismatic nonpoliticians and the grass-roots rebellion in Stuttgart — are different. But they meet in the cumulative effect of a growing uneasiness when faced with a self-enclosed and ever more helpless political system.

The more the scope for action by national governments shrinks and the more meekly politics submits to what appear to be inevitable economic imperatives, the more people’s trust in a resigned political class diminishes.

Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.” Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

emphasizing the religious aspects of violence can easily devolve into cultural essentialism: the belief that “ancient hatreds” drive modern conflicts. It’s a view most commonly associated with Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts

“Here men have been doomed to hate,” he writes. The word “doomed” suggests the kind of resigned pessimism that, two decades later, characterizes Washington hand-wringing in response to the manifest failures of the Arab Spring. According to this view, we can never hope to understand the Middle East, with all of its sectarian complexity and sheer religious passion

this is what makes Egypt’s conflict so frightening: It is not between sects but within one sect. In Syria or Lebanon, the lines are clear for those who insist on seeing them: Sunnis are Sunnis and Shiites are Shiites. In Egypt, however, it’s never entirely clear who is “Islamist” and who is “secular,” to say nothing of the many shades in between. Because their numbers can’t be defined, each side claims the vast majority of Egyptians as their own. The conflict, then, isn’t between fixed identities but rather fluid ideas of what the state is and what it should be.

The word “Islamists,” or Islamiyoun in Arabic, did not exist centuries ago, not because Muslims didn’t believe that Islamic law should play a central role in politics, but because it went without saying.

slamism, as a distinctive construct, only made sense in opposition to something else—and that something else was secularism, which grew in influence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Islam was no longer just a way of being; in the face of Western dominance, it became a political theology of authenticity and resistance and a spiritual alternative to liberal-secular democracy.

The default to inaction in the face of a complex region we cannot hope to understand, and when our “vital” interests do not seem to be engaged, is one response. Implicit here, and explicit in Bacevich’s account, is the notion that military action is distinctly unsuited for conflicts in which primeval divides predominate, and that America’s reliance on the use of force has only made matters worse.

“To Ferguson residents, business owners and to the entire country, the City of Ferguson looks to become an example of how a community can move forward in the face of adversity,”

Chief Jackson, 58, will receive a year’s pay — about $96,000 — and a year of health insurance as severance, the mayor said.

the A.A.P.’s startling victory is a turning point because it marks the advent of a new kind of politics in India.

This is the pattern that has produced terrorism in the Arab world. Repressive, secular regimes — backed by the West — become illegitimate. Over time they become more repressive to survive and the opposition becomes more extreme and violent. The space for compromise, pluralism and democracy vanishes. The insurgents and jihadists have mostly local grievances but, because Washington supports the dictator, their goals become increasingly anti-American.

Since we have learned little from this history, we are now repeating it. The Obama administration praises Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, who arguably rules in a more repressive manner than did Hosni Mubarak. Sissi’s regime has killed hundreds of protesters and jailed tens of thousands, mostly members of the political opposition, according to Human Rights Watch. It has censored the media and imprisoned journalists.

And it is not just the Obama administration. Intellectuals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali praise the general for wanting a moderate version of Islam. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) praises Sissi for his courage in calling out Islamists, contrasting him with President Obama. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) compares the general to George Washington for his singular determination.

But it is hardly unusual for an Arab military dictator to want a moderate form of Islam. In fact, that was the norm.

The fact that Bush’s administration so botched its remedy — regime change and occupation of Iraq — should not blind us to the fact that it accurately diagnosed the problem. The Arab world provides no easy answers, trapped as it is between repressive dictators and illiberal democrats. But that does not mean that blindly supporting the autocrats is the right answer.

As we ally ever more closely with Yemen’s and Egypt’s dictators and engage in joint military actions with the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia, we should be wondering what is going on in the shadows, mosques and jails of these countries.

Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.

"Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."

Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.

"I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."

The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.

Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.

Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.

Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.

Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.

Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.

Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.

Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.

The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.

"So far, I cannot believe how civil it's been up here," Mr Trump observed at one point.

"Islam hates us, there's a tremendous hatred", and railed against political correctness.

But Mr Rubio said: "I'm not interested in being politically correct. I'm interested in being correct."

In early debates the top-tier candidates largely ignored the New York billionaire, hoping he'd self-destruct on his own. In the past few showdowns, they've gone after him relentlessly.

"I can't believe how civil it's been up here," Mr Trump said at one point.

Mr Cruz, in particular, launched most of his barbs with sighs and head-shaking resignation, rather than ferocity.

"We've never targeted innocent civilians and we're not going to start now" Mr Cruz said.

"We have to obey the laws, but we have to expand those laws", he said.