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calling him "cruel" and a "barbarian".

But he said those criticising him had failed to understand that the idea behind the hunt was to target an old, non-breeding male rhino that was endangering the rest of the herd.

Mr Knowlton said his name had been posted on Facebook and threats had been made to harm both him and his children.

Namibia issues three hunting permits per year, and this is the first time an auction has been held outside the southern African nation. However, tens of thousands of people signed online petitions against the auction, and animal rights groups condemned as "perverse" claims that the hunt was really about conservation.

The money raised from the 11 January auction will go to the Namibian government and will be earmarked for conservation projects, according to the Dallas Safari Club.

"It takes money for these animals to exist. A lot of people don't recognise that," club executive Ben Carter told NPR radio.

Experts say that growing demand for rhino horn in Asia is driving up instances of poaching.

Horns can sell for around $65,000 a kilogram

, when it made $27.2bn.

"Our 2013 performance was not what I expect from Shell," Shell chief executive Ben van Beurden said in a statement.

Mr van Beurden became chief executive at the beginning of this year, taking over from Peter Voser.

Shell said its profits in the fourth quarter were hurt by a range of factors, including higher exploration costs, security problems in oil-rich Nigeria, and maintenance work that hit oil and gas production.

It has seen a string of disappointing quarterly results over the past 12 months.

In December, the Anglo-Dutch company also cancelled a $20bn project to build a gas processing plant in Louisiana.

This sort of thing also happens to send liberals spinning, since there’s no good way to respond. If you point out that this is just a new way to propagate the lie that Obama is a secret Muslim, you fear giving credence to the idea that there’s anything wrong with being a Muslim in the first place. But if you start by arguing that the anti-Muslim-in-office position is bigoted and unconstitutional, you fear reinforcing the idea that Obama is, indeed, a secret Muslim. After all, why are we debating this thing if it’s not an imminent issue in the real world?

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

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

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

Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.

The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below.

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

Ben.Lynch Augusta, Georgia 1 day ago I've followed Mr. Coates for sometime now and tend to agree with his viewpoints. As a white southern male who works in our segregated education systems, it took years for me to actually apprehend my day to day interactions with black children in poverty. For the longest time, I simply couldn't understand the behaviors I saw, the reactions, and at first I reacted with contempt, but then I began to understand little by little. I don't think I can express it to anyone here, let alone Mr. Brooks, but it is something that one only appears to get by letting it sink into your bones day after day, hour after hour. The conditions are terrible and promise to remain so for the rest of my career. My students know, even if they lack the rhetorical chops to express it, that the game is rigged, that what we sell, meaning America at large, to make ourselves feel better, to feel just, is demonstrably a false bill of goods that does nothing to solve the actual problems of their life. These students are so used to being crushed that they can't even begin to articulate that they are being crushed because it's simply how it is. Some suppose Mr. Coates is overly dour, overly negative, but he provides a necessary contrapuntal to those who assume that the arc of the universe inevitably Bends toward justice. Struggle can and often does end in defeat. The wicked often sleep as well as the just and sometimes better. The sins of the fathers remain fixed around the necks of the sons and daughters.

Some people interpret this loss of lead-dog status as a sign of national decline. Other people think we are losing our exceptionalism. But, the truth is, there’s just been a change in the shape of the world community. In a world of relative equals, the U.S. will have to learn to define itself not by its rank, but by its values. It will be important to have the right story to tell, the right purpose and the right aura. It will be more important to know who you are.

What is the core feature of the converging world? It is the rise of a gigantic global middle class

Middle-class parents have fewer kids but spend more time and money cultivating each one. They often adopt the bourgeois values — emphasizing industry, prudence, ambition, neatness, order, moderation and continual self-improvement.

middle-class people are more likely than their poorer countrymen to value democracy, free speech and an objective judiciary. They were more likely to embrace religious pluralism and say that you don’t have to believe in God to be good.

These two forms of inequality exist in modern America. They are related but different. Over the past few months, attention has shifted almost exclusively to Blue Inequality.

Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

Young people are more optimistic than their rueful elders, especially those in the technology world. They are the anti-Cheneys, competitive but not triumphalist. They think of themselves as global citizens, not interested in exalting America above all other countries.“The 23-year-olds I work with are a little over the conversation about how we were the superpower brought low,” said Ben Smith, the editor in chief of Buzzfeed. “They think that’s an ‘older person conversation.’ They’re more interested in this moment of crazy opportunity, with the massive economic and cultural transformation driven by Silicon Valley. And kids feel capable of seizing it. Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture.”

many millennials are paralyzed by all their choices. He quoted Walker Percy’s “The Last Gentleman”: “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

He also noted that, given their image-conscious online life in the public eye, millennials worry about attaching themselves with a click to the wrong clique or hashtag: “It heightens the level of uncertainty, anxiety and risk aversion, to know that you’re only a bad day and half a dozen tweets from being fired.”

the biggest change in America is that “technology’s never had to shoulder the burden of optimism all by itself.”

World War I drew in combatants from the United States to the farthest reaches of empires.

Mr. Garth, 26, said that when he gets thanked it can feel self-serving for the thankers, suggesting that he did it for them, and that they somehow understand the sacrifice, night terrors, feelings of loss and bewilderment. Or don’t think about it at all.

Mr. Freedman, 33, feels like the thanks “alleviates some of the civilian guilt,” adding: “They have no skin in the game with these wars. There’s no draft.”No real opinions either, he said. “At least with Vietnam, people spit on you and you knew they had an opinion.”

But doesn’t their sacrifice merit thanks? “Patriotic gloss,” responded Mr. O’Brien, an unofficial poet laureate of war who essentially elevates the issue to the philosophical; to him, we’re thanking without having the courage to ask whether the mission is even right.

They are being thanked for risking their life on the off chance we are actually under attack here. They need to stop assuming the people thanking them know nothing. I get the same thing from my son, who is a Marine. I told him he is not being thanked for what he did, but for the potential and for doing what the person thanking is not doing. I think he understands a bit better now.

What's worse is the majority of America that doesn't enlist doesn't seem to care. What happened to the notion of shared sacrifice? If it's important enough to go to war then ALL Americans should sacrifice. If we don't all sacrifice then don't go to war.

Instead of uttering this insipid phrase how about thanking a teacher or a doctor. Better yet get educated about politics and government and participate in it so we can stop electing the people who promote this sort of nonsense while doing their best to avoid actually putting on a uniform.

for paying your taxes, it's how I bought this motorcycle / Challenger, took this vacation, etc."And if we talk any further, it's to communicate that service doesn't automatically anyone a hero, and being a hero doesn't make someone good or decent or nice. Oh, and to ask them to think long and hard every time they vote.

If my countrymen were all that grateful they'd be storming Congress to demand fast efficient medical care for veterans and the most generous possible educational benefits.

His ideas about the need to prove himself slipped away, along with any patriotic fervor. He hates it when people dismiss the Taliban as imbeciles when he saw them as cunning warriors. To Mr. Garth, the war became solely about survival among brothers in arms.

He struggled to explain his irritation. “It’s not your fault,” he said of those thanking him. “But it’s not my fault either.”

So what to say to a vet? Maybe promise to vote next time, Mr. Freedman said, or offer a scholarship or job (as, he said, some places have stepped up and done). Stand up for what’s right, suggested Mr. O’Brien. Give $100 to a vet, Ben Fountain, author of the “Billy Lynn” book, half-joked, saying it would at least show some sacrifice on the thanker’s part.

At first glance, the Mountain View, Calif., company looks plenty healthy. It generated $14.4 billion in profits in 2014 and revenue was up 19 percent from the year before. Google accounts for three-quarters of the world’s web searches, and the company also controls Android, by far the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, and YouTube, the world’s most popular video site.

as smartphones eclipse laptop and desktop computers to become the planet’s most important computing devices, the digital ad business is rapidly changing. Facebook, Google’s archrival for advertising dollars, has been quick to profit from the shift.

Google’s enormous search haul is only a slice of the $550 billion global advertising market, according to the research firm eMarketer. As Mr. Thompson pointed out, most of that money is not in direct response ads like Google’s.Instead, the bulk of the ad industry is devoted to something called brand ads. These are the ads you see on television and print magazines. They work on your emotions in the belief that, in time, your dollars will follow.

This gets to the crux of Mr. Thompson’s argument that Google has peaked. The future of online advertising looks increasingly like the business of television. It is likely to be dominated by services like Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest that keep people engaged for long periods of time.

“Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in,” Mr. Thompson said. “Google creates transactional services. You go to Google to search, or for maps, or with something else in mind. And those are the types of ads they have. But brand advertising isn’t about that kind of destination. It’s about an experience.”

“To me the Microsoft comparison can’t be more clear,” he said. “This is the price of being so successful — what you’re seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It’s almost like a natural law of business.”

“Israel did not traditionally represent that kind of emotional focus for any element of the Republican Party,” he said. “But the feeling now is that it is a winning issue, as it helps them to appear strong on foreign policy.”

the most significant contributor by far to Republican supporters of Israel has been Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, who with his wife has invested at least $100 million in conservative causes over the last four years. A large chunk was spent on the 2012 presidential campaign, but Senate Republicans also benefited, and could soon again, particularly those considering a run for president.

The shift has also meant the Republican Party today accepts little dissent on the topic of Israel, said Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, an outcome he believes is in part driven by the demands of financial supporters.“Republicans interested in foreign policy used to understand that it was not in America’s national interest to ignore entirely Arab claims against Israel,” he said. “Now, there is a fanatical feeling of one-sidedness.”

Mr. Kristol, emailing from Israel where he was meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, described the shift as a result of broader underlying trends in American politics as the political left grows more “European” and the political right grows more “Reaganite.”

He added that “the conservative belief in American exceptionalism is akin to Zionism.

J Street, the liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization that hosted Mr. Baker at its convention in Washington this week, said the Republican Party had grown more radical, leaving behind the former secretary of state and others like Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser under the first President George Bush, and Colin L. Powell, another former secretary of state.

“These used to be the center of the Republican Party,” Mr. Ben-Ami said. “I don’t think they’ve shifted. They’re still saying the same thing. The Republican Party of today has moved so far to the right they can’t relate to what these folks are saying.

Within minutes, conservatives on Twitter blasted Mr. Baker, who served under the first President Bush, and who had just been listed as an adviser to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor now poised to run for president. By the next morning, Jeb Bush authorized his spokeswoman to publicly differ, but Mr. Adelson and other pro-Israel donors are said to remain incensed at Mr. Bush for not stopping the speech or dumping Mr. Baker.

Republican presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and George Bush were not always seen as unequivocally supportive of Israel. For decades, throughout the Cold War especially, Republican leaders were viewed as close to anti-Communist Arab allies and the oil industry. They presided over a predominantly Protestant electoral base while Democrats assembled a more urban coalition with lopsided support from American Jews. Even when Republican presidents supported Israel, they also openly quarreled with its leadership at times, much as Democratic presidents did.

As secretary of state, Mr. Baker gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, calling on all sides in the Middle East conflict to face hard truths, including Israel, which he said should stop settlement activity. Mr. Baker even barred Mr. Netanyahu, then a deputy foreign minister, from the State Department building after the Israeli called American policy dishonest.

“Historically,” Mr. Ross added, “it was the Democrats who were closer to Israel than the Republicans. Now among Republicans, it is not just a possible issue to try to wean voters away but a measure of American reliability with its friends.”

That shift really began in earnest under President George W. Bush. Although he, too, had his differences with Jerusalem at times — he was the first president to make support for a Palestinian state official American policy — he became known as probably the strongest ally Israel had ever had in the Oval Office

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary at the time, recalled a flare-up of violence between Israel and Arabs. He was given talking points with a typical American message for such episodes urging both sides to refrain from violence.“I took them to Bush, and Bush said: ‘No, don’t say that. Just say this: Israel has a right to defend itself,’” Mr. Fleischer said. “It was one of those decisions that sent shock waves through the bureaucracy. But that was Bush.”

Mr. Bush, and other Republicans, came to identify with Israel’s struggle with terrorism. “Sept. 11 made it vivid, made it real and made it powerful,” said Mr. Fleischer, now a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s board of directors. “It happens to them, it happens to us, we’re on the same side. Being pro-Israel is a no-brainer, absolutely moral issue to take inside the Republican Party.”

But I wouldn’t be so sure. True, a new president who looked at the evidence and listened to the experts wouldn’t go down that path. But evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.

Financial markets seem to believe the same. At any rate, there’s no sign in current asset prices that investors see a significant chance of the catastrophe that would follow a return to gold.

The interesting question is what will happen to monetary policy if a Republican wins next year’s election. As best as I can tell, most economists believe that it’s all talk, that once in the White House someone like Mr. Rubio or even Mr. Cruz would return to Bush-style monetary pragmatism.

this hard-money orthodoxy is relatively new. Republicans used to base their monetary recommendations on the ideas of Milton Friedman, who opposed Keynesian policies to fight depressions, but only because he thought easy money could do the job better, and who called on Japan to adopt the same strategy of “quantitative easing” that today’s Republicans denounce.

George W. Bush’s economists praised the “aggressive monetary policy” that, they declared, had helped the economy recover from the 2001 recession. And Mr. Bush appointed Ben Bernanke, who used to consider himself a Republican, to lead the Fed.

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."

Mr Pate said Mr Cruz's mailers "misrepresent Iowa election law" and that they were "not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses," but he stopped short of any official action.

Mr Trump pointed to the fact that during the caucus the Cruz campaign told voters rival Ben Carson planned to quit the race, which was not true.

Mr Trump placed second in Monday's contest, which he called "a long-shot great finish" in an earlier tweet.

Mr Cruz's camp is not taking the accusations too seriously.

"Reality just hit the reality star - he lost Iowa and now nobody is talking about him, so he's popping off on Twitter," Mr Cruz's communications director Rick Tyler told Politico in an email.

Cruz says he spent the morning investigating what happened before making his decision. Campaign manager Jeff Roe confirmed that Tyler had formally resigned."I have made clear in this campaign we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards and integrity," Cruz told reporters Monday, adding that Tyler is a "good man."

A former, longtime spokesman for Newt Gingrich, Tyler was a senior aide and one of the Cruz campaign's first hires in the run-up to his presidential announcement.

Tyler had apologized late Sunday for the incident."I want to apologize to Sen. Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today," said Tyler, the spokesman, wrote in a Facebook post.The latest dust-up comes as the two senators' campaigns have been clashing heatedly for days about "dishonesty" and "lies" on the trail.

Trump immediately sought to capitalize on the moment."Wow, Ted Cruz falsely suggested Marco Rubio mocked the Bible and was just forced to fire his Communications Director. More dirty tricks!," he tweeted.

And Rubio's campaign similarly rubbed salt in the wound, praising Tyler's skills but saying he "had the unenviable task of working for a candidate willing to do or say anything to get elected."

Rubio said he accepts Tyler's apology, but called for the Cruz campaign to hold someone accountable.

The flub by the Cruz campaign comes after Rubio finished narrowly ahead of Cruz for second place in the South Carolina primary Saturday, behind Donald Trump. In the heated contest there, the Cruz campaign was repeatedly accused by both Rubio and Trump for being dishonest and engaging in dirty tactics.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity

He and his wife have not only displayed superior integrity themselves, they have mostly attracted and hired people with high personal standards.

all sorts of unsightly characters floating around politics, including in the Clinton camp and in Gov. Chris Christie’s administration

Second, a sense of basic humanity.

Donald Trump has spent much of this campaign vowing to block Muslim immigration. You can only say that if you treat Muslim Americans as an abstraction. President Obama, meanwhile, went to a mosque, looked into people’s eyes and gave a wonderful speech reasserting their place as Americans.

Imagine if Barack and Michelle Obama joined the board of a charity

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

Third, a soundness in his decision-making process.

Take health care. Passing Obamacare was a mighty lift that led to two gigantic midterm election defeats.

Sanderscare would take employer coverage away from tens of millions of satisfied customer

This is epic social disruption

Fourth, grace under pressure.

Fifth, a resilient sense of optimism

To hear Sanders or Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson campaign is to wallow in the pornography of pessimism, to conclude that this country is on the verge of complete collapse.

But there is a tone of ugliness creeping across the world, as democracies retreat, as tribalism mounts, as suspiciousness and authoritarianism take center stage.Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.