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Instead, Semyonovka’s 12-foot, silver-colored Lenin with his right arm extended had been propped back up on a plinth in a discreet, leafy park. “We want to preserve this small corner of Soviet history,” said Mr. Papchenko, 67, a stout former school principal whose multiple gold molars attested to his own life in the U.S.S.R.

Vladimir Vyatrovich, 38, a historian and the head of Ukraine’s National Memory Institute, predicted somewhat rashly that if the effort succeeded in Ukraine, it would cause fateful reverberations next door.

The laws dumped the Soviet traditions for commemorating World War II, opened up what K.G.B. secret police archives remained in Ukraine and sought to rehabilitate certain Ukrainian independence fighters whom Moscow had long pilloried as Nazi collaborators.

A fight has emerged over the Communist symbols, however, not unlike that between supporters and opponents of the Confederate battle flag in the southern United States.

Ukrainians want to instill in the next generation.

“They behave like Bolsheviks: ‘We have to wipe out the past!’ ” said Georgiy V. Kasyanov, a historian and education reform activist. “They think the Soviet legacy can be destroyed by destroying statues of Lenin or by renaming streets, which is false. They are wrestling with ghosts.”

By the time of the Maidan uprising in Kiev that toppled the pro-Russian government in February 2014, Ukraine was down to about 1,300 Lenins, he says. Another 500 have come crashing down since

Some efforts proved more successful than others. One of the largest Lenin statues in Ukraine, in the city of Kharkiv, was dismembered.

Apart from the statues, 910 cities and towns need new names, as do tens of thousands of streets.

Each City Hall has until Nov. 21 to make the changes. If they do not, Parliament will do it for them by Feb. 21.

In Kiev, a television comedy show suggested the modern, landmark Moscow Bridge be renamed the Not Moscow Bridge.

And continue to. A woman wearing a navy blue bathrobe, hearing why foreigners were visiting recently, came bowling over, shaking her fist.

Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.

. In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.

If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster.

In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing

With the Dean campaign came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel Daily Kos, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality.

All of this has shaped the Clinton campaign’s response to Sanders. At the first Democratic debate, she noted that, unlike him, she favors “rein[ing] in the excesses of capitalism” rather than abandoning it altogether. But the only specific policy difference she highlighted was gun control, on which she attacked him from the left.

Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.

that’s only half the story. Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.

Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.

Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate

The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton

the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority.

By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed.

Moreover, the Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about).

“Black Lives Matter developed in the wake of the failure of the Obama administration,” argues the Cornell sociologist Travis Gosa, a co-editor of The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. “Black Lives Matter is the voice of a Millennial generation that’s been sold a ba

Had Black Lives Matter existed when Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency, he probably would have run against the group

Today, by contrast, the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy: with applause

what’s most remarkable isn’t Hillary Clinton’s move to the left, or the Democratic Party’s. It’s the American public’s willingness to go along.

Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.

Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”

Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left

What’s different this time? One difference is that in the 1960s and ’70s, crime exploded, fueling a politics of fear and vengeance. Over the past two decades, by contrast, crime has plummeted. And despite some hyperbolic headlines, there’s no clear evidence that it’s rising significantly again.

When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people.

Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.”

In polling, Americans typically say they favor smaller government in general while supporting many specific government programs. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Americans said they favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” over “a bigger government providing more services” by 37 percentage points. When Obama took power in 2009, the margin was a mere eight points. And despite the president’s many economic interventions, the most recent time Pew asked that question, in September 2014, the margin was exactly the same.

This intervention has sparked an angry response on the Republican right, but not among Americans as a whole.

On health care, the story is similar: no public backlash. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, most polls showed Americans opposing it by about eight to 10 points. Today, the margin is almost identical

Little has changed on taxes, either, even though Obama allowed some of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush to expire. The percentage of Americans who say they pay more than their fair share in taxes is about the same as it was in the spring of 2010 (

in an era when government has grown more intrusive, African American activists have grown more confrontational, and long-standing assumptions about sexual orientation and gender identity have been toppled, most Americans are not yelling “stop,” as they began doing in the mid-1960s. The biggest reason: We’re not dealing with the same group of Americans.

On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more

It is largely because of them that the percentage of Americans who want government to “promote traditional values” is now lower than at any other time since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, and that the percentage calling themselves “socially liberal” now equals the percentage calling themselves “socially conservative” for the first time since Gallup began asking that question in 1999.

Millennials are also sustaining support for bigger government. The young may not have a high opinion of the institutions that represent them, but they nonetheless want those institutions to do more

They were also 25 points more likely than those 65 and older to approve of Occupy Wall Street and 36 points more favorable toward socialism, which they actually preferred to capitalism, 49 percent to 46 percent. As the Pew report put it, “Millennials, at least so far, hold ‘baked in’ support for a more activist government.

The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, that’s inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost—answers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP.

Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either “liberal” or “mixed,” while fewer than one-third call themselves “conservative.” Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed.

Millennials are not liberal primarily because they are young. They are liberal because their formative political experiences were the Iraq War and the Great Recession, and because they make up the most secular, most racially diverse, least nationalistic generation in American history. And none of that is likely to change.

America is not governed by public-opinion polls, after all. Congressional redistricting, felon disenfranchisement, and the obliteration of campaign-finance laws all help insulate politicians from the views of ordinary people, and generally empower the right. But despite these structural disadvantages, Obama has enacted a more consequential progressive agenda than either of his two Democratic predecessors did

If Clinton does win, it’s likely that on domestic policy, she will govern to Obama’s left. (On foreign policy, where there is no powerful left-wing activist movement like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, the political dynamics are very different.) Clinton’s campaign proposals already signal a leftward shift. And people close to her campaign suggest that among her top agenda items would be paid family leave, debt-free college tuition, and universal preschool

Clinton will face this reality from her first day in office. And she will face it knowing that because she cannot inspire liberals rhetorically as Obama can, they will be less likely to forgive her heresies on policy. Like Lyndon B. Johnson after John F. Kennedy, she will have to deliver in substance what she cannot deliver in style.

it’s likely that any Republican capable of winning the presidency in 2016 would govern to the left of George W. Bush. In the first place, winning at all would require a different coalition. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, very few Millennials could vote. In 2016, by contrast, they will constitute roughly one-third of those who turn out

In 2000, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians constituted 20 percent of voters. In 2016, they will constitute more than 30 percent.

even if the 2016 Republican nominee wins 60 percent of the white vote (more than any GOP nominee in the past four decades except Reagan, in 1984, has won), he or she will still need almost 30 percent of the minority vote. Mitt Romney got 17 percent.

This need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how any conceivable Republican president campaigns in the general election, and governs once in office.

If America’s demographics have changed since the Bush presidency, so has the climate among conservative intellectuals. There is now an influential community of “reformocons”—in some ways comparable to the New Democratic thinkers of the 1980s—who believe Republicans have focused too much on cutting taxes for the wealthy and not enough on addressing the economic anxieties of the middle and working classes.

The candidate closest to the reformocons is Rubio, who cites several of them by name in his recent book. He says that partially privatizing Social Security, which Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, is an idea whose “time has passed.” And unlike Bush, and both subsequent Republican presidential nominees, Rubio is not proposing a major cut in the top income-tax rate. Instead, the centerpiece of his economic plan is an expanded child tax credit, which would be available even to Americans who are so poor that they don’t pay income taxes

it’s likely that were he elected, Rubio wouldn’t push through as large, or as regressive, a tax cut as Bush did in 2001 and 2003. Partly, that’s because a younger and more ethnically diverse electorate is less tolerant of such policies. Partly, it’s because Rubio’s administration would likely contain a reformocon faction more interested in cutting taxes for the middle class than for the rich. And partly, it’s because the legacy of the Bush tax cuts themselves would make them harder to replicate

A key figure in passing the Bush tax cuts was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2001 warned that unless Washington lowered tax rates, surpluses might grow too large, thus producing a dangerous “accumulation of private assets by the federal government.” Greenspan’s argument gave the Bush administration crucial intellectual cover. But the idea now looks laughable. And it’s hard to imagine the current Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, endorsing large upper-income tax cuts in 2017.

the kind of centrist, Chamber of Commerce–friendly Democrats who helped Bush pass his tax plan in 2001—including Max Baucus, John Breaux, Mary Landrieu, Zell Miller, Max Cleland, Tim Johnson, Blanche Lambert Lincoln—barely exist anymore. The Democrats’ shift left over the past decade and a half means that a President Rubio would encounter more militant opposition than Bush did in 2001

the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.

That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal

It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the “era of big government is over,” Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.

Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled.

Defence lawyers said the pair had given false confessions under torture in close-door interrogations, an allegation denied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Shin Bet security agency.

"I doubt such confessions will stand up in court," lawyer Hai Haber told reporters. "We know there's no significant external evidence linking the suspects to this incident."

The attack in Duma village and ensuing Israeli investigation laid bare fissures in Netanyahu's coalition government, where one ultra-nationalist partner voiced misgivings about the handling of Jewish suspects.Thirteen other Israeli Jews, most of them minors, were also indicted for hate crimes, including assaulting a Palestinian, vandalism of Arab property and setting fire to a church.

Referred to in Israel as "price-tag attacks", such offences have usually been carried out in what the attackers say are reprisals for Palestinian violence against Israelis or government curbs on unauthorized West Bank settlement building.

Saad Dawabsheh's brother Naser said he hoped the defendants would receive the maximum penalty, but was skeptical of Israel's seriousness in prosecuting the case."We have no trust in the Israeli judiciary. They would not have launched an investigation were it not for the international pressure on them," he said, accusing the government of effectively "support(ing) the terrorism conducted by (West Bank) settlers against our people".

The time it has taken Israel to crack down on the Jewish militants, compared to the speedy and sometimes lethal response by state security forces to similar actions by Arabs, has angered Palestinians, contributing to a wave of stabbings, car-rammings and shooting attacks against Israelis since Oct. 1.

Twenty-one Israelis and a U.S. citizen have died in the latest bloodshed, a number that will rise if police deem a Tel Aviv shooting that killed two people on Friday as a pro-Palestinian attack. The gunman, an Israeli Arab, is at large. Israeli forces or armed civilians have killed at least 132 Palestinians, 82 of whom authorities described as assailants. Most of the others were killed in clashes with security forces.

Israeli officials said their investigation into the attacks by far-right Jews were hampered by the suspects' operating in small, tight-knit cells and eluding electronic surveillance.Netanyau said the indictments demonstrated the rule of law in Israel, telling his cabinet in broadcast remarks: "We oppose murder of all kinds. We oppose violence of all kinds."

But Kik says it can find users on its system with only a user name. And because Kik is based in Canada, law enforcement officials say, it can be a slow process. Requests have to go through the United States Justice Department.

when it comes to the content of conversations, they don’t retain information including photos and videos. So it makes it tough for us.”

Law enforcement officials say they often run across Kik in cases of “sextortion,” or blackmail, in which a sexual predator coaxes a young person to send nude photos — and then threatens to post the photos online, or alert the child’s parents or harm the child, if he or she does not send more.

Professor Finkelhor cautions against “technophobia,” saying character traits — not technology — make young people vulnerable. Those who are socially isolated, who have conflict with their parents, who are bullied in school or who are depressed are “at higher risk,” he said, “both in face-to-face and electronic environments.”

Investigators learned only later that the girl had met Mr. Schroeder on Kik. Asked about the odds of finding her if the man had not gone onto Facebook, Mr. Frattare, of the Ohio crime task force, said, “In my opinion, it would have been slim to none.

According to ICTR’s indictment between about 14 and 18 April 1994 Ntaganzwa is accused of substantially participating in the planning, preparation and execution of the massacre of over 20,000 Tutsis at Cyahinda parish.

He then gave the order for the massacre to begin, “whereupon the gendarmes and communal police shot at the crowd of Tutsis killing and harming many, while the Hutu civilians and Burundian refugees armed with machete and knobkerries also attacked, killed and harmed Tutsis including those who tried to escape from the parish,” the indictment said

Ntaganzwa returned to the parish on 16 and 17 April to encourage the militia to kill the Tutsi but on the 18th he came with men from the military who opened fire with automatic weapons at the Tutsi for the final assault.

The US state department’s Rewards for Justice programme offered up to $5m for any information leading to Ntaganzwa’s capture.

"the possibility of the presence of an Islamic State [ISIS] terror cell in Geneva."

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Chief Charlie Beck defended the decision to close the schools, saying investigators did not know at the time whether the threat was legitimate.

He said the email included all Los Angeles Unified schools and mentioned explosive devices, “assault rifles and machine pistols.”

The district called and texted parents early Tuesday morning to alert them that schools would be closed — the first systemwide closure since the Northridge earthquake in 1994.

Although the school district could technically be subject to a loss of $29 million in per-pupil funding for closing campuses, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said that he is certain the district would not be docked those funds.

Alan Glasband, a substitute teacher at San Pedro High School, said he and several other instructors had not received notifications. He said he heard about the bomb threat through a text from a friend.Another friend, he said, had driven from his home in Norwalk to Orville Wright Middle School near Los Angeles International Airport before he heard the news.

By midday, elected officials briefed by law enforcement said the threat did not appear to be credible.Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Los Angeles), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs committee, said the email lacked “the feel of the way the jihadists usually write.”

Sherman said the roughly 350-word message did not capitalize Allah in one instance, nor did it cite a Koranic verse. He said the elements of the threatened attack also seemed unlikely, such as the claim that it would involve 32 people with nerve gas.“There isn’t a person on the street who couldn’t have written this,” with a basic level of knowledge of Islam, Sherman said. “Everybody in Nebraska could have written this.”

Still, he added, the person did have a knowledge of Southern California, and the threat could not be immediately discredited.

The FBI is working to determine where the email originated and who wrote it. Officials said it was routed through Germany but probably came from somewhere closer.

a song referring to the march on January 11 last year, in which more than 1 million people joined world leaders to march in solidarity

Hollande also made an unannounced visit to the Grand Mosque of Paris

A state of emergency is still in place in France, and people there are still struggling to come to terms with the horrendous events of last year.

The French are hesitating between anger and fear

It's very difficult for the Parisians, because they know they have been touched in the heart, but at the same time they would like their lives to go on like before -- but they also know that is not possible

ISIS claimed responsibility.

Paris, already on edge, faced a fresh scare Thursday as police shot dead a knife-wielding man on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks

"I am here to show my support and to say that we must continue to live," he told CNN.

Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez noted how the U.S. government sought Guzman's extradition as early as June 16, before he escaped for a second time from a Mexican prison in July.

In an interview conducted for Rolling Stone magazine three months after he escaped from prison, he touted his drug trade, saying he "supplies more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world."

He spent hours talking to actor Sean Penn, who interviewed him for the magazine during a secret meeting in the Mexican jungle. He answered followup questions several weeks later while still on the run, the magazine said. Guzman received the followup questions through an intermediary and answered them in a videotape he sent to Penn.

The article posted online Saturday includes a blunt admission about his intricate dealings in the cartel world. "I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats," Guzman told Penn.

When he was not bragging about his drug trade during his time on the run, the kingpin was trying to make a movie deal.

Police and the military successfully hunted down Guzman and his henchmen this week partly because he or his representatives contacted filmmakers about making an El Chapo biopic, Attorney General Gomez said.

"Another important aspect that allowed us to pinpoint his location was having discovered Guzman Loera's intention to film a biographical movie through establishing communication with actors and producers, which formed a new line of investigation," Gomez said.

Hollywood will likely make a movie or even a series about El Chapo, as it has about other drug lords, such as Colombia's Pablo Escobar in "Narcos."But for now, Guzman won't have a direct hand in any.

His efforts to develop a biopic ends in a scene with an interesting twist: After six months on the lam, Guzman is now back in the same maximum security prison from which he escaped, according to a Mexican law enforcement official with knowledge of the case.

ISIS had killed or displaced nearly all the inhabitants, most of whom belonged to Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority.

A lone man with a rifle seemed to know where he was going. We hurried to catch up with him.

hat June, ISIS captured Mosul—the second-largest city in the country, eighty miles to the east—yet most residents still felt safe. But when ISIS moved into Sinjar the peshmerga withdrew. Hundreds of civilians were killed.

living in tents with little food or water, waiting for the day when they could return to their

A crowd had assembled around the entrance to the house.

a group of Iraqi police officers appeared. The mayor hailed them.

That night, we camped in the mountains. Early the next morning, as we navigated the ninety-three hairpin turns that led down to the town, it was easy to appreciate Sinjar’s strategic importance:

There were villages out there, too: vague compounds, water tanks, radio towers.

An explosion erupted nearby, and then gunfire. Soldiers grabbed weapons and ran into a dense collection of buildings behind us.

“He still has a gun!” someone yelled. “He’s still alive!” “Get out of there! He might blow himself up!”

“What will you do now?” I asked. Azad looked around. It was getting dark. “Go back up the mountain,” he said. He turned and walked away.

“Still alive.”

No one seemed to hear.

But Iraq’s northern front has remained relatively static. Tens of thousands of Kurdish troops man fixed positions along six hundred miles of trenches connecting Syria to Iran

When I visited the peshmerga unit on the ridge, its operations officer told me that they could easily take the town below, Bashiqa. But Mosul lies only ten miles farther, and there are numerous villages in between.

U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army and eradicated the Baath Party, it became famous for producing skilled insurgents. Iraq’s Prime Minister at the time of the American withdrawal, in 2011

Atheel al-Nujaifi, a former governor of Nineveh Province, which includes Mosul and Sinjar, told me last spring.

A few weeks later, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, emerged for the first time in years and delivered a speech—videotaped and published online—from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri. ISIS had proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate

n, Barzani’s chief of staff. “There is one thing that everybody knows,” he told me.

Abu Bakr al Baghdad

rusader" countries and beyond.

indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets

, symbols of Western power or decadence

Beyond ISIS "branded" attacks -- those launched by affiliates and members -- ISIS also seeks to make political capital out of individuals who claim to be "inspired" by it, such as those in San Bernardino, California, in December and last week in Philadelphia.

stage of the investigation, there is no evidence accused gunman Edward Archer was part of an organized cell or that other attacks were in the works.

here is no doubting ISIS' lure to a fringe of extremist Muslims and Muslim converts

A year ago, ISIS was focused almost exclusively on carving out its self-declared caliphate. Overseas terror attacks in the style of al Qaeda did not appear high on the agenda

An early indication that ISIS' leadership favored overseas attacks came when the Belgian jihadist Abdelhamid Abaaoud -- a high-profile member of the group, if only a lieutenant -- plotted a series of gun and bomb attacks against police stations

"Know that we want Paris -- by Allah's permission -- before Rome and before Spain, after we blacken your lives and destroy the White House, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower."

the "caliph" himself, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, suggested ISIS will look for further opportunities to export its war to the "far abroad."

Throughout 2015, there was a steady stream of terror attacks that could be linked firmly to ISIS-associated groups, even if the relationship between them and the group's central leadership was often opaque

What, if any, role the central ISIS leadership had in the bombing of the Metrojet plane is still unknown. Its Sinai affiliate claimed the attack, and it was some time before the ISIS online publication Dabiq referred to it.

The suicide bomb attacks in Ankara were likely ordered by ISIS itself

The Paris attacks in November were a landmark: the first clearly organized and claimed by ISIS itself from Syria rather than the autonomous actions of affiliates or individuals.

t has a growing network of wilayat, or provinces -- places where it has an established presence such as Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan -- where government is weak and conflict endemic. In some instances it has sent fighters from Syria and Iraq to expand its presence in these places, most notably in Libya.

It also has a pool of experienced foreign fighters

The disappearance of one of the Paris attackers, Salah Abdeslam, and several alleged co-conspirators suggests ISIS may have a network of safe houses and travel facilitators in Europe

First, members of a group lavish one another with praise

This creates a set of common behavior patterns.

Second, there are nonetheless enforcers within the group who build their personal power and reputation by policing the group and condemning those who break the group code

Third, people are extremely anxious that their group might be condemned or denigrated. They demand instant respect and recognition for their group

Campus controversies get so hot so fast because even a minor slight to a group is perceived as a basic identity threat.

The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition.

this shame culture is different from the traditional shame cultures, the ones in Asia, for example. In traditional shame cultures the opposite of shame was honor or “face” — being known as a dignified and upstanding citizen

In the new shame culture, the opposite of shame is celebrity — to be attention-grabbing and aggressively unique on some media platform.

On the positive side, this new shame culture might rebind the social and communal fabric. It might reverse, a bit, the individualistic, atomizing thrust of the past 50 years.

On the other hand, everybody is perpetually insecure in a moral system based on inclusion and exclusion. There are no permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.

26 Comments If we’re going to avoid a constant state of anxiety, people’s identities have to be based on standards of justice and virtue that are deeper and more permanent than the shifting fancy of the crowd

In an era of omnipresent social media, it’s probably doubly important to discover and name your own personal True North, vision of an ultimate good, which is worth defending even at the cost of unpopularity and exclusion.

The guilt culture could be harsh, but at least you could hate the sin and still love the sinner. The modern shame culture allegedly values inclusion and tolerance, but it can be strangely unmerciful to those who disagree and to those who don’t fit in.

Most of the 102 people died when the building where the fireworks were stored collapsed, Chandy told reporters at the temple complex.

Local TV channels broadcast images of huge clouds of white smoke billowing from the temple, as fireworks were still going off in the night sky. Successive explosions from the building storing the fireworks sent huge chunks of concrete flying as far as a half mile, according to resident Jayashree Harikrishnan.

The temple holds a competitive fireworks display every year, with different groups putting on successive light shows for thousands of devotees gathered for the last day of a seven-day festival honoring the goddess Bhadrakali, a southern Indian incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali.

This year, district authorities denied permission for the fireworks display, Chief Minister Chandy said. advertisement The state's High Court had earlier mandated that fireworks must be stored more than 100 yards from temples — orders that were flouted at the Paravoor temple, said Loknath Behera, a top police official.

It is a coherent approach. It is the pragmatic one. But it is unsatisfying and unsettling

The first problem with itemizing and compartmentalizing is that actions can’t be treated as discrete. In politics, they are the direct result of a system’s arrangements and a leader’s philosophy

the making-the-trains-run-on-time argument. But time judges unkindly those who cheered the timely trains. Some of history’s most ghastly arrangements have been defended by relentlessly pointing to some number of their benefits and turning a blind eye to their costs

In other words, we have to be mindful of a position’s pedigree and its role in a broader program.

If President Trump has a modus operandi, it is the control, manipulation, and distortion of information: hiding his tax returns, meeting with Putin alone, firing the FBI director investigating him, lying habitually, undermining the media, pitting staff against each other. We are being purposely obtuse if we don’t assess his executive actions in this context

Almost every leader in history has had some redeeming characteristic or some defensible initiative.

They reflect the larger enterprise. We deceive ourselves by separating quiet streets from the oppressive police state that brought them about

This does more than debase debate, it does long-term harm: It serves as a conscience-protecting strategy exactly when our consciences shouldn’t be protected.

questions about duty and justice may not be well served by creating a list of positive and negative effects.

On virtually any matter, we can populate the positive side. Stealing stimulates a rush of adrenaline, makes you look tough, and provides some immediate profit. The danger lies in falsely equating the value of the ticks in both columns. Obviously, items carry vastly different weights

Worse, the line separating the columns artificially quarantines the negatives. It treats as separable the indivisble effects of an activity. In actuality, a sound moral system would recognize that some negatives infect all associated positives

It is shrewd for a bad actor to ask that we detach his various choices from one another and focus on the positives of each. We needn’t, and shouldn’t, acquiesce.

Even a strictly utilitarian approach to Trump demands that we do more than note the existence of different entries; we also have to tally them up, to have an accounting. That means we need to evaluate the positives in light of the negatives.

The nature of the four-year term allows us a delay in the reckoning. And the nature of our polarized, binary parties encourages us to avoid any accounting detrimental to our team. The itemize-and-compartmentalize approach focuses our attention on the entries, not the balance

The problem in the case of the Trump administration is that its moral debits are skyrocketing. Material and irreparable harm is being done to our nation, our institutions, and our norms, as well as to conservatism and the Republican party.

But even the ledger approach has two major flaws: one related to the past, the other to the future. Both are traditionally addressed by elements of the conservative disposition

The first problem is that in assessing the effects of immorality, it is impossible in real time to account for costs

Whether lying or embezzlement, infidelity or illicit drug use, hiding income or abusing welfare programs, social offenses can seem utterly inconsequential in the immediate term. It can even be difficult to imagine how they could prove corrosive to society at large.

It is precisely because we know the long-term dangers of certain categories of behavior but lack the capacity to quantify or explain them that we have social rules against things like mendacity, lassitude, and lasciviousness and in favor of selflessness, judiciousness, and initiative.

It is no coincidence that such rules are consonant with the instructions of our faith traditions

they tell us the exact same things in the exact same way: Follow these rules of behavior, even if they seem quaint or troublesome, because they reflect the wisdom of authorities that you cannot subject to cross-examination—countless previous generations or the Almighty.

norms are our community’s load-bearing walls. Undermine them too often, and the edifice will collapse.

The second flaw of the moral ledger is that it appears perfectly designed, at least during the Trump era, to facilitate our slowly succumbing to temptation

we’re consigned to making a series of episodic mini-assessments. We might celebrate a positive and then balance it against a recent negative.

Like the frog that steadily acclimates to—but ultimately dies from—water rising to a boil, we can be oblivious to the gradual escalation of costs.

So long as short-term rationalizations are possible, decline can proceed unabated and largely unnoticed. This is why But Gorsuch is so insidious. It is the pro that excused so many cons: the growing attacks on the media, the callous border policy, the belittling of the intelligence community.

given the enormity of the stakes, placing a gold star on the president’s occasional successful assignment is unwarranted and unwise. The road to Hell is paved with a piecemeal, situational approach to morality.

The bill, known as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, will automatically become law within 15 days unless he vetoes it.

The US national minimum age to buy a handgun is already 21.

Police say expelled former student Nikolas Cruz was 18 when he legally bought the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in the attack.

An enraged public and a core group of advisers predisposed to think the worst of Soviet intentions would have exerted enormous pressure upon Johnson to respond with force.

As officials in cities such as Oakland have touted the progress in gun violence numbers, they have repeatedly faced the same question: is the drop in gun violence just a result of gentrification?

An academic study of gun violence in Oakland neighborhoods found that the city’s focused deterrence strategy, known as “Ceasefire”, significantly reduced shootings, even when accounting for the level of gentrification in different areas.

the fact that big drops in gun violence are coming at the same time as intense gentrification and displacement has raised troubling questions for some local activists about who will get to benefit from living in a safer Oakland – and whose interests the decreases in shootings may ultimately serve.

As we make the city safer, are we opening up the floodgates more for gentrification? That’s what it feels like,” Clarke said. “Are we cleaning up the city for other people to move in?”

The Bay Area’s drop in gun violence does not reflect a drop in overall “crime”. The rate of property crimes such as theft and burglary have decreased only 16% across the region as gun violence has fallen by nearly a third. San Francisco has seen its property crime rate increase even as the number of people killed in gun homicides has dropped.

Criminal justice reforms have reduced the number of residents spending their lives behind bars. Since 2006, California’s state prison population has fallen by 25

California has the strongest gun laws in the country, and it’s enacted more than 30 new gun control laws since 2009 alone

At the same time, Thomas said: “few of the laws enacted in the last 10 years would have been expected to entirely explain the significant reductions in the Bay Area.”

Nor have policies to shield undocumented immigrants led to violence, as Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies often warn. San Francisco saw a 49% drop in its gun homicide rate as it held to its pro-immigrant law enforcement policies

At the heart of the different strategies Bay Area cities are using are the same basic elements: data, dollars, and community leadership, including leadership from formerly incarcerated residents.

“The common context among each of these cities – Richmond, Oakland, and San Francisco – is that they have adopted community-driven, non-law enforcement approaches, and they’ve been robustly funded,

Longtime community outreach workers and violence interrupters, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, are crucial to making these public health strategies effective, experts across the region said

Finally, better analysis of who’s behind the violence has helped law enforcement, social services and community groups intervene more effectively. In Oakland, for example, a 2017 study of every homicide that occurred over 18 months showed that only 0.16% of Oakland’s population, about 700 high-risk men, were responsible for the majority of the homicides

“Gun violence is pretty much a form of disease. Once it starts affecting one person, it starts spreading,” said the former fellow, who asked that his name not be published

The fellowship helped him develop and realize a new vision for his life. He ended up graduating from the historically black college he had visited on one of the trips--a place, he said, where “I didn’t have to watch over my shoulder.” “To have somebody who believes in you, and knows you’ve got the potential to go for it, stuff like that makes you want to keep going right,” he said

They do this by sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.

Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy

The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.

for mass media, this was constrained by one-size-fits-all content and by the limitations of delivery platforms. Not so for internet platforms on smartphones. They have created billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members

On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results. The result is that everyone sees a different version of the internet tailored to create the illusion that everyone else agrees with them.

It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t. The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.

Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.

Tristan Harris, formerly the design ethicist at Google. Tristan had just appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the public health threat from social networks like Facebook. An expert in persuasive technology, he described the techniques that tech platforms use to create addiction and the ways they exploit that addiction to increase profits. He called it “brain hacking.”

The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs

Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts

No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil.

Facebook takes the concept one step further with its “groups” feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.

We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues. Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.

The ads were less important, though, than what came next: once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized “bots” to share incendiary messages and organize events.

Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed.

Real users “like” posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.

A similar strategy prevailed on other platforms, including Twitter. Both techniques, bots and trolls, take time and money to develop—but the payoff would have been huge.

2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections.

Renee DiResta, an expert in how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Renee described how bad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.

It was sophisticated hacker technique, but not expensive. We hypothesized that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.

Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.

Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.

To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.

No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.

Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective.

The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.

It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.

We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost

Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.

Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.

Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.

This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.

decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.

Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session

This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.

We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.

First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed.

At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.

Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.

An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.

This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants.

There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.

Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.

Transparency with respect to those who sponsor political advertising of all kinds is a step toward rebuilding trust in our political institutions.

Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic

Allowing third parties to audit the algorithms would go even further toward maintaining transparency. Facebook and Google make millions of editorial choices every hour and must accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.

Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs), the contracts that specify the relationship between platform and user.

All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.

“Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others. It would limit the risk that platforms would run massive social experiments on millions—or billions—of users without appropriate prior notification. Maintaining more than one version of their services would be expensive for Facebook, Google, and the rest, but in software that has always been one of the costs of success. Why should this generation get a pass?

Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.

Not only do the platforms use your data on their own sites, but they also lease it to third parties to use all over the internet. And they will use that data forever, unless someone tells them to stop.

There should be a statute of limitations on the use of consumer data by a platform and its customers. Perhaps that limit should be ninety days, perhaps a year. But at some point, users must have the right to renegotiate the terms of how their data is used.

Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph. Users created this data, so they should have the right to export it to other social networks.

It would be analogous to the regulation of the AT&T monopoly’s long-distance business, which led to lower prices and better service for consumers.

Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers.

Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram.

While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.

Carlson has regularly said similar words. He’s used “invasion” rhetoric nine times on his show this year, according to liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, including describing a surge of migrants at the southern border as “an invasion, and it’s terrifying.

Carlson has also warned that immigrants could “replace” Americans — an echo, critics say, of the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that also motivated the deadly March attack in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 51 people at mosques.

Carlson framed his argument around the idea that few Americans belong to explicitly white supremacist groups, like the KKK.

But experts say white supremacist mass killers are more likely today to be radicalized in online forums like 8chan, where the alleged El Paso killer reportedly posted his manifesto, than at organized rallies with white hoods

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said the agency had arrested about 100 domestic terrorism suspects in the previous nine months, and most were tied to white supremacist beliefs.

“According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.”

It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already seen a surge in cases it attributes to coronavirus isolation

“We think there has been a rise of 40% or 50%, and there was already really big demand,”

Those alarming figures log only cases where women are able to seek help; many cannot make calls because they fear being overheard by abusive partners, or are stopped from leaving home.

In Italy activists said calls to helplines had dropped sharply, but instead they were receiving desperate text messages and emails.

“For sure there is an overwhelming emergency right now. There is more desperation as women can’t go out.”

In Spain – where lockdown rules are extremely strict, and many people are being fined for breaking them – the government has told women they will not be fined if they leave home to report abuse.

But on 19 March, the country saw the first domestic violence fatality since the lockdown began five days earlier, when a woman was murdered by her husband in front of their children in the coastal province of Valencia.

The increased threat to women and children was a predictable side effect of the coronavirus lockdowns, said activists. Increased abuse is a pattern repeated in many emergencies, whether conflict, economic crisis or during disease outbreaks, although the quarantine rules pose a particularly grave challenge.

“It happens in all crisis situations,” said Marcy Hersh, a senior manager for humanitarian advocacy at Women Deliver. “What we worry about is just as rates of violence are on the rise, the accessibility of services and the ability of women to access these services will decrease. This is a real challenge.”

A prosecutor in Trento, Italy, has ruled that in situations of domestic violence the abuser must leave the family home and not the victim, a decision hailed as “fundamental” by the trade union CGIL.

In Germany the Green party’s parliamentary leader, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, said this week she feared for the lives of thousands of women trapped with violent partners, and called on the government to free up money for safe houses.

In Greece, officials said they were stepping up a campaign to help women deal with problems clearly emerging from the issue of confinement.