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The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.''

What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?

That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

Clinton's remarks on Monday provide the latest evidence that she remains prone to military interventions of choice even when the likely outcome of intervening is unclear. 

it's hard to think of any instance where humility caused her to take a dovish position. As president, she would likely be a reflexive hawk.

What would I have her say instead? The Iraq War taught me my own limits, and the limits of all foreign-policy decision-makers, to accurately foresee the future. Even after studying decisions about war and peace from inside the White House during my husband's two terms, I didn't even come close to correctly forecasting the Iraq War. I underestimated the costs of the war in Iraq. I overestimated the benefits. I cannot promise that will be the last mistake that I'll make, but I've learned from it. I'll never make the same mistake. I've learned that a war of choice gone wrong does more damage to the United States than any other mistaken policy. So while the United States may well be forced to wage a war of necessity  in the future, whether to defend the nation after an attack or to prevent an imminent one, I'll never again favor a war if choice. If the consequences of foreign intervention are so unclear that experts are deeply divided, I will err on the side of nonintervention after that wise physicians' guidepost: "First do no harm." There are a lot of very smart people working at the highest levels of the U.S. government. So in a country like Syria, it's tempting to imagine that we can funnel weapons to the particular rebels that are most aligned with the values and interests of the United States. It's tempting to think that we can know the consequences and the possible unintended consequences of intervening in Syria. But Iraq taught me that of course we can't.

Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.

convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.

Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.

While acknowledging some of the benefits of free trade, Bivens points out the danger of the global expansion of competition:

Reducing trade barriers allows each to specialize in what they do more efficiently, and this specialization generally leads to national-level gains for both countries — that is, increased efficiency, worldwide production and total consumption. This is essentially chapter one in trade textbooks.

However, a later chapter in the textbook points out that, when the United States exports financial services and aircraft while importing apparel and electronics, it is implicitly exchanging the services of capital for labor. This exchange bids up capital’s price — profits and high-end salaries — and bids down wages for the broad working and middle class, leading to rising inequality and wage pressure for many Americans.

the basic argument is rather simple: that the health and nutrition of pregnant mothers and their children contribute to the strength and longevity of the next generation. If babies are deprived of sufficient nutrition in the womb and early in life, they will be more fragile and more vulnerable to diseases later on. These weakened adults will, in turn, produce weaker offspring in a self-reinforcing spiral.

Technology rescued humankind from centuries of physical maladies and malnutrition, Mr. Fogel argues. Before the 19th century, most people were caught in an endless cycle of subsistence farming. A colonial-era farmer, for example, worked about 78 hours during a five-and-a-half-day week. People needed more food to grow and gain strength, but they were unable to produce more food without being stronger.

“In many parts of the world, including the United States in the 20th century, medical advances appear to be at least as important as improvements in nutritional intake,”

Where her children were involved, Ann was eas­ily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.

“If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you’re going to need some values.” When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. “She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking,” said Don Johnston, who worked with Ann in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house. Saman said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann “would call him into his room and would spank him with his father’s military belt.”

“We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. . . . If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?’ Sort of compelling us ever toward empathy and those kinds of things and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”

Trump is proposing a massive ideological and moral revision of the Republican Party. Re-created in his image, it would be the anti-immigrant party; the party that blows up the global trading order; the party that undermines the principle of religious liberty; the party that encourages an ethnic basis for American identity and gives strength and momentum to prejudice.

We are already seeing the disturbing normalization of policies and arguments that recently seemed unacceptable, even unsayable. Trump proposes the forced expulsion of 11 million people, or a ban on Muslim immigration, and there are a few days of outrage from responsible Republican leaders. But the proposals still lie on the table, eventually seeming regular and acceptable.

they are not acceptable. They are not normal. They are extreme, and obscene and immoral. The Republican nominee — for the sake of his party and his conscience — must draw these boundaries clearly

Trump has been many things -- a billionaire real-estate developer, a brash reality-TV star and a best-selling author. But he's never held elected office or delved deeply into foreign policy. Read More

"He comes across as someone with a lot of instincts and not a lot of reserve about acting on those instincts."

Trump vows to champion U.S. economic strength and military power -- "to make America great again," as he says.He's giving voice to many voters' frustrations and fears about America's place in the world.

he UK's leading employers are "fighting it out" for a handful of top candidates, as the graduate jobs market continues to improve, a report says.

The report by the High Fliers market research company found that about 1,000 graduates turned down job offers at the last minute, leaving employers searching for replacements in 2015.

"But as the job market goes from strength to strength, it's clear that our brightest graduates are becoming increasingly choosy about the employers they join."

we know now that the whole Kabuki drama in which we keep asking when the GOP will resist this, or stop it, or come to its senses, is simply a category error. This is what the GOP now is. It’s an authoritarian, nationalist leadership cult, hostile to the global order.

Republican voters increasingly like Putin, and 71 percent of Republicans back Trump’s handling of Russia in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. A whole third of Republicans do not believe the Kremlin attacked our democracy in 2016, despite every single intelligence agency and the Republicans in the House saying so

This is not treason as such. It is not an attack on America, but on a version of America, the liberal democratic one, supported by one of the great parties in America. It is an attack on those institutions that Trump believes hurt America — like NATO and NAFTA and the E.U. It is a championing of an illiberal America, and a partnering with autocrats in a replay of old-school Great Power zero-sum politics, in which the strong pummel and exploit the weak

Since the morning of January 3, 1868, Japan has struggled to answer one question: What does it mean to be modern and Japanese? It was on that date that a group of mid-level samurai and imperial courtiers announced the formation of a new government to be ruled by the 16-year old Meiji emperor, thus ending two-and-a-half centuries of control by the Tokugawa samurai family.

several generations of growth and development have not erased the feeling that Japan remains in the midst of a transformation pitting tradition against modernity.

Perhaps even more so today, 25 years since their economy cratered, Japanese people question what kind of society they want, how much to incorporate Western concepts of individualism, how much capitalist disruption to permit, and how to deal with the threat posed by hostile foreign countries—the same questions unleashed by the events of 1868.

In 2017, the Communist Party formally took control of all print media, including books.

Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines, literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with L.G.B.T. themes, have been hit especially hard. History textbooks crafted by independent scholars are being replaced with those produced by the state at a disturbing rate

Last month, the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s education minister Ziya Selcuk revealed — proudly — that 301,878 books had been taken out of schools and libraries and destroyed. All these books were purportedly connected to Fethullah Gulen,

When iHeartMedia announced this month it would fire hundreds of workers across the country, the radio conglomerate said the restructuring was critical to take advantage of its “significant investments … in technology and artificial intelligence.” In a companywide email, chief executive Bob Pittman said the “employee dislocation” was “the unfortunate price we pay to modernize the company.

But laid-off employees like D’Edwin “Big Kosh” Walton, who made $12 an hour as an on-air personality for the Columbus, Ohio, hip-hop station 106.7 the Beat, don’t buy it. Walton doesn’t blame the cuts on a computer; he blames them on the company’s top executives, whose “coldblooded, calculated move” cost people their jobs.

It “ripped my [expletive] heart out,” Walton said. “The people at the top don’t know who we are at the bottom. They don’t understand the relationships and the connections we had with the communities. And that’s the worst part: They don’t care.”

In the aftermath of the US drone strike that killed the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad, the phrase “World War III” began trending on social media.

a US government agency which registers young men for a potential military draft saw its website crash

It added that it was “conducting business as usual” and emphasised that a return to the draft is not imminent: “In the event that a national emergency necessitates a draft, Congress and the president would need to pass official legislation.”

With President Trump touching down in North Georgia on Monday to court white rural voters and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. rallying support from a diverse electorate in Atlanta, the high-stakes Senate runoffs are concluding with a test of how much the politics have shifted in a state that no longer resembles its Deep South neighbors.

That’s a marked change from the 2000 election, when George W. Bush won decisively in the Atlanta suburbs to win the state and Democrats still ran competitively with right-of-center voters in much of rural North and South Georgia.

After nominating a string of candidates for statewide office who they hoped would be palatable to rural whites, only to keep losing, Democrats elevated three candidates in the past two years whose views placed them in the mainstream of the national party and whose profiles represented the party’s broader coalition.

In Arizona, for example, the president had an eight-point advantage with men but Mr. Biden was the overwhelming favorite of women, winning 56 percent of them compared with Mr. Trump’s 38 percent.

The former vice president is leading by double digits among white voters with college degrees in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona and beating him, 48 percent to 45 percent, with that constituency in Florida.

MIAMI — Despite a late push to court Latino voters over the last several weeks, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is ending his presidential bid on shaky and perhaps perilous ground with this diverse, essential segment of the electorate, according to interviews with Democratic officials, community activists and voters.

Did Mr. Biden do too little, too late to court Latino voters, committing a strategic error that could be the 2020 version of Hillary Clinton taking Wisconsin for granted in 2016?

Polling in battleground states this fall has generally shown Mr. Biden leading President Trump among Hispanic voters, but not in every case — and rarely by the same margin that Mrs. Clinton commanded in 2016, especially among Hispanic men.

cretary of Defense Mark Esper is on shaky ground with the White House after saying Wednesday that he does not support using active duty troops to quell the large-scale protests across the United States triggered by the death of George Floyd and those forces should only be used in a law enforcement role as a last resort.

"we are not in one of those situations now," distancing himself from President Donald Trump's recent threat to deploy the military to enforce order.

"The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act," he told reporters. Esper also distanced himself from a maligned photo-op outside St. John's Church.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Wednesday castigated President Donald Trump as "the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people"

"We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children."

The comments from Mattis are a significant moment for a man who has kept mostly silent since leaving the administration. The retired Marine general had been pressed many times to comment on Trump, troop policies, the Pentagon, and other current events and had always refused because he didn't want to get involved and be a contradictory voice to the troops. Instead, Mattis always insisted he had said everything he wanted to say in his resignation letter.