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As online life expands, neighborhood life and social trust decline. As the social fabric decays, social isolation rises and online viciousness and swindling accumulate, you tell people that the state has to step in to restore trust. By a series of small ratcheted steps, you’ve been given permission to completely regulate their online life.

This, too, is essentially what is happening in China.As George Orwell and Aldous Huxley understood, if you want to be a good totalitarian, it isn’t enough to control behavior. To have total power you have to be able to control people’s minds. With modern information technology, the state can shape the intimate information pond in which we swim

Human history is a series of struggles for power. Every few generations, just for fun, the gods give us a new set of equipment that radically alters the game. We thought the new tools would democratize power, but they seem to have centralized it. It’s springtime for dictators

A viral tweet claims that impeaching President Donald Trump for a second time would mean he would lose the ability to run for president in 2024. That's not true. Nor are other claims in the tweet.

The tweet was posted on Friday, two days after a Capitol insurrection by a mob of Trump supporters sparked a new impeachment push from House Democrats.

It says the following: "For those wondering if it's worth impeaching him this time, it means he: 1) loses his 200k+ pension for the rest of his life2) loses his 1 million dollar/year travel allowanceRead More3) loses lifetime full secret service detail

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday that all air passengers entering the United States will need to provide a negative COVID-19 test before boarding their flight. The new rule will go into effect Jan. 26.

"With the US already in surge status, the testing requirement for air passengers will help slow the spread of the virus as we work to vaccinate the American public," the CDC said.

Airlines won't let passengers board if they fail to comply.

State officials are skeptical that President-elect Joe Biden can meet his goal of 100 million coronavirus shots in his first 100 days, with a week to go before his start date and a slew of unanswered questions still swirling around his plan.

Multiple state officials and sources familiar with the Biden transition team's outreach told CNN in recent interviews that they are unclear on major details of the Biden team's plans -- including those for mass vaccination sites, vaccine supply issues and funding for local governments.

But states have questions, too, starting with a critical one: Will there even be enough vaccines to pull off 100 million shots in the first 100 days?

Anthime Joseph Gionet, a far-right media personality nicknamed “Baked Alaska” who is known for livestreaming himself participating in illegal activity, was arrested by the F.B.I. on Friday and accused of illegally storming the Capitol during the attack on the building by President Trump’s supporters last week.

He posted a video that showed supporters of Mr. Trump taking selfies with officers in the Capitol who calmly asked them to leave the premises. The video showed the Trump supporters talking among themselves, laughing, and telling the officers and each other: “This is only the beginning.”

charged with two federal crimes

Russian security forces detained opposition leader Alexei Navalny on his return to the country, heightening a confrontation between the Kremlin and its most vocal critic after he recovered in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning attack last summer.

His followers, who had congregated at a different airport west of Moscow, were barred from entering the arrival area by dozens of security officials, many in riot gear, who swarmed the area.

Russia’s federal prison service said in a statement that Mr. Navalny, who has been on the agency’s “wanted list” since Dec. 29, was detained for repeated violations of his probation. Further measures would be determined by a court, the agency said. Until then, Mr. Navalny would remain in custody, officials said.

In the two weeks since a raging mob stormed the Capitol, President Trump has shown no sign that he believes he shares responsibility for the worst incursion on the halls of Congress in more than two centuries. Shielding him further, his loyalists have started shifting blame for the attack to an array of distracting bogeymen: far-left anti-fascists, Black Lives Matter activists, even vague conspiracies of a setup involving Vice President Mike Pence.

“Does our president bear responsibility?” the lawyer, Al Watkins, told The New York Times. “Hell, yes, he does.”

the accounts they give about Mr. Trump could end up not only as fodder in criminal proceedings but also at an impeachment trial to bolster charges that the president incited the assault.

Yoshi's shooting became a global news story overnight. It shocked people in Japan, where handguns are banned. Masa and Mieko took immediate action, launching a campaign in Japan calling for an end to easy access to firearms in the US.

"We began the petition drive from the wake," they said. "Mieko wrote the draft for the campaign in the air plane coming back from Louisiana to Japan."

The Hattoris' petition drive gathered pace. In the end, some 1.7 million Japanese people signed. Yoshi's story dominated the country's front pages and news broadcasts for weeks. Dick Haymaker also decided to gather signatures in the US, to help out the Hattoris. In the end, about 150,000 written signatures turned up by post.

After the Stuart Restoration, Charles II sought to loosen his dependence on Parliament by among other things receiving subsidies (large cash payments) from Louis XIV, King of France. The ability to supply tax revenue for impoverished Kings is basically the root of all parliamentary power in what is now the United Kingdom. At the time the King being in the pay of a foreign King wasn’t without controversy. But it didn’t seem absurd on its face, as it would to us today, because in many ways the theory was that the King owned the country.

But the King owned his power. His sovereignty and the bundle of powers he used to enforce it were his. Any sense of what was in the public interest or his personal interest was an irrelevancy or not even entirely comprehensible because again, he was King. He didn’t just have the powers. He owned them. In a sense he owned the whole country.

This is a critical backdrop to all those provisions in the US Constitution about foreign subversion and subsidies. Seen through this perspective, which is the proper one, there are numerous provisions in the Constitution meant to ensure that the President remains beholden to the Constitution and the Congress. He doesn’t own his powers.

When the European war began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania. It numbered 190,000 soldiers. (It would grow to 8.3 million in 1945, a 44-fold increase.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing.

Obviously a lot happened to get from an army of 190,000 to an army of almost 8.5 million. A total of 16 million Americans served in uniform in WWII; virtually every family had someone in harm’s way, virtually every American had an emotional investment in our Army.

General Suleimani, who was considered the most important person in Iran after Ayatollah Khamenei, was a commanding general of a sovereign government. The last time the United States killed a major military leader in a foreign country was during World War II, when the American military shot down the plane carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

Mr. Trump’s two predecessors — Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — had rejected killing General Suleimani as too provocative.

. The Pentagon also tacked on the choice of targeting General Suleimani, mainly to make other options seem reasonable.

Global leaders are parsing the consequences of last week's plane crash caused by an Iranian missile attack.

House Democrats have released a stash of new text messages and hand-written notes from indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas that could affect the upcoming impeachment trial.

Has all the talk of impeachment and elections made you forget about the border wall? The White House hasn't forgotten. The administration is considering diverting another $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding to build the wall. That's five times the amount Congress initially authorized in February. About $3.7 billion of this money would come from military construction projects and $3.5 billion from counterdrug program funding, according to internal figures first obtained by the Washington Post. With the money, the government could complete about 885 miles of new fencing by the spring of 2022.

Iran’s president warned Wednesday that European soldiers in the Mideast “could be in danger” after three nations challenged Tehran over breaking the limits of its nuclear deal. Tehran’s top diplomat meanwhile acknowledged that Iranians “were lied to” for days following the Islamic Republic’s accidental shoot down of a Ukrainian jetliner that killed 176 people.

President Hassan Rouhani‘s remarks in a televised Cabinet meeting represent the first direct threat he’s made to Europe as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington over President Donald Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the deal in May 2018.

Britain, France and Germany launched the so-called “dispute mechanism” pertaining to Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Speaking before his Cabinet, Rouhani showed a rarely seen level of anger in his wide-ranging remarks Wednesday.

But as Mr. Pompeo and other Trump administration officials know full well, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the generals who guard his power in Tehran will never shape their foreign policy to the United States’ liking. What Mr. Pompeo implied was less a change in Iran’s behavior than a change in its leadership.

“We support the Iranian people and their courageous struggle for freedom,” Mr. Trump said at a rally Tuesday night in Milwaukee, referring to recent antigovernment protests in the country.His approach is a contrast to the one pursued for years by the United States during the Obama administration, which, along with Europe, tested the possibility that Iran could be coaxed, not pressured, into a new era.

Conservatives called Mr. Obama’s vision doomed from the start, and have argued that the relief from economic sanctions Iran won in exchange for limits on its nuclear program only funded more Iranian aggression in the Middle East and beyond. Nor did Iranian politics show much sign of moderating, despite conciliatory talk from Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani and its American-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Now the Trump administration is testing an alternate approach, having abandoned the nuclear deal and adopted its “maximum pressure” posture.

Striking a defiant tone, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Donald Trump was a “clown” who pretended to support the Iranian people but would push a poisonous dagger into their backs.

The “cowardly” killing of Suleimani had taken out the most effective commander in the battle against the Islamic State group, he said.

He also lashed out at western countries, saying they were too weak to bring Iranians to their knees.

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.

Addressing Republican donors at his Florida resort on Friday night, Donald Trump said Qassem Suleimani was “saying bad things about our country” before the US president authorised the drone strike which killed the Iranian general and pitched the Middle East to the brink of war.

The speech was not open to reporters but CNN obtained a recording of Trump’s remarks at Mar-a-Lago, which it said undermined official explanations for the decision to kill Suleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January.

Congress was not informed of the strike in advance, its eventual notification was heavily classified and a congressional briefing prompted bipartisan protest. Democrats have proposed legislation to rein the president in.

It's so cold that the ground is frozen in Toksook Bay.

And for the census workers who are about to descend on this remote Alaskan fishing village, that's a good thing.

"I'm still trying to grasp how I can explain it," he says. "It's special."

In 2015, after a failed attempt to shutter almost every polling location in a county three times the area of Atlanta, the Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration tried to remove 174 voters, almost all of them African American, ahead of a Sparta city election. The board even sent deputies to homes, summonsing voters to prove eligibility.

The city's roll at the time included only 988 voters, so it meant about one in five potential ballots.

many county residents could have been disenfranchised, he said last month.

With Covid-19 hospitalizations surpassing 100,000 for 40 days in a row, officials are trying to ramp up the pace of vaccinations across the United States.

On Sunday, 129,229 people were in US hospitals with coronavirus, but the day marked only the sixth highest in pandemic history, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

more than 4,000 new Covid-19 deaths in a single day on Thursday. Since the pandemic began, more than 374,000 people have died in the US and more than 22.4 million people have been infected, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.