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The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.

What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people

there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.

The Assad government, for its part, capitalizing on recent insurgent infighting to make advances on the outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo, is eager to portray itself as offering mercy from a position of strength.

But up to now, rebels and civilians say, the picture is far different. The government rains aerial attacks on areas that refuse cease-fire offers. People in places that accept can find themselves facing new demands: to turn over wanted men, give up their light weapons and accept a military governor. Food is delivered piecemeal to retain the government’s leverage.

more like surrender.”

Israeli warplanes struck three training facilities in the Gaza Strip early Thursday after rockets were fired into Israel from the coastal enclave, witnesses and security officials said

Security officials said several missiles were fired at a training facility that belongs to Hamas' armed wing, the Izzidin al-Qassam Brigade, and to Islamic Jihad, another militant group.

The airstrikes on Gaza last week and Thursday were the most intense since the end of a 50-day Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip last summer.

Security officials say Lebanese forces have fired on Syrian aircraft that violated the country's airspace.

It was the first time since the outbreak of the Syria's conflict three years ago that the Lebanese military took action to prevent Syrian warplanes from violating its airspace.

Syrian forces have fired toward Lebanon in the past, trying to deter rebels from fleeing to the neighboring country or from sheltering in Lebanese border towns.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell has scheduled a news conference Sunday to discuss the fatal shooting by sheriff’s deputies of a man wielding a gun at a busy Lynwood intersection, an incident caught on a dramatic video that has sparked protests in the neighborhood.

The sheriff and homicide detectives will discuss the shooting at a news conference at 11 a.m. at the Hall of Justice downtown. A group of civil rights organizations are planning their own news conference and are calling for a meeting with McDonnell.

In the 29-second video obtained by KTLA and filmed from a restaurant across the street, a sheriff's deputy follows Robertson as he appears to be walking away from the deputy.

When a gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, he was carrying an AR-15-style rifle that allowed him to fire upon people in much the same way that many American soldiers and Marines would fire their M16 and M4 rifles in combat.

Since 2007, at least 173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s, according to a New York Times analysis.

What all of this means is that the Parkland gunman, in practical terms, had the same rifle firepower as an American grunt using a standard infantry rifle in the standard way.

He is a New Yorker in Washington, far more consumed with the news media and personalities than policy issues. He elides facts, fudges the specifics and dispenses with professional norms in the service of success and status.

To put it mildly, it can be hard to attain the unalloyed truth from a president who has long boasted of gaming the press, or from competing courtiers who often wield insider anecdotes as sword and shield in their efforts to protect themselves and bloody their rivals. Then there is the sheer outlandishness of the Trump era: When most anything is plausible it is also printable, but that does not necessarily mean you are getting it right

“Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book,” he says. To confront his problem, Wolff notes that there are times he lets “the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them.” Unfortunately for the reader, he throws up his hands when dealing with three of the most pivotal moments of the Trump campaign and presidency.

Outraged Democrats called the firings a “Friday night massacre” aimed at taking revenge against government officials who had no choice but to testify under subpoena about what they knew.

In fact, Colonel Vindman read from Dr. Hill’s personnel evaluation at his own hearing: “Alex is a top 1 percent military officer and the best Army officer I have worked with in my 15 years of government service. He is brilliant, unflappable, and exercises excellent judgment.”

Companies, including grocery chains Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, airport concession operators, local authorities and even a furniture company owned by the billionaire Warren Buffett have moved to control efforts to unionize as workers become increasingly concerned about workplace safety during the emergency.

“It’s a blatant anti-union letter,” said a Trader Joe’s employee in New Jersey who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s in bad taste and shows the greed this company has instead of taking proactive measures to keep the crew and customers safe.” A Trader Joe’s spokesperson told the Guardi

As workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic have organized protests and strikes, several employers have responded by stepping up attempts to oppose unionization, repeal workers’ rights won in bargaining, and fire workers en masse who had recently publicized intent to organize a union in their workplace.

became the first hominin to master flames, possibly in order to cook their food.

Despite the significance of kindling flames, when and where human ancestors learned how to do it remains a subject of debate and speculation.

“The evidence from Wonderwerk Cave suggests that Homo erectus had some familiarity with fire,”

Two North Carolina sheriff's deputies who fired shots during the incident in which Andrew Brown Jr. was killed returned to work this week after being placed on administrative leave, Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten announced on Friday.

A third deputy who also fired his gun plans to resign from his position at the end of the month.

Deputy Aaron Lewellyn told the sheriff's office that he is resigning effective June 30, the sheriff said, and that Lewellyn will use accrued leave until then.

To debate whether these punishments were fair is to commit a category error. These weren’t verdicts weighed and delivered on behalf of society. These were the actions of self-interested organizations that had decided their employees were now liabilities.

Cancellations — defined here as actually losing your job or your livelihood — occur when an employee’s speech infraction generates public attention that threatens an employer’s profits, influence or reputation.

The problem is when that one awful thing someone said comes to define their online identity, and then it defines their future economic and political and personal opportunities

On Thursday, NASA’s new big rocket, the Space Launch System, fired its engines for more than 8 minutes and did not go anywhere.

This test, called a hot fire, was a crucial step for the rocket, which has been in development for more than a decade.

The Space Launch System is the 21st-century equivalent of the Saturn 5 that took NASA astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

For the second time this year, inmates at a jail in downtown St. Louis broke into a small riot.

The men threw chairs and other objects to onlookers down below as they chanted, "We want court dates!"

Social media posts from local reporters on the scene show the inmates setting a fire on the third floor of the building, according to KMOV4 in St. Louis.

Napa boasts some of the country’s most expensive farmland, selling for as much as $1 million per acre; a ton of grapes fetches two to four times as much as anywhere else in California. If there is any nook of American agriculture with both the means and incentive to outwit climate change, it is here.

But so far, the experience of winemakers here demonstrates the limits of adapting to a warming planet.

If the heat and drought trends worsen, “we’re probably out of business,” said Cyril Chappellet, president of Chappellet Winery, which has been operating for more than half a century. “All of us are out business.”

In a pair of exceptionally hard-fought arguments on Tuesday, the Supreme Court struggled to decide whether a landmark 1964 civil rights law bars employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status.

Job discrimination against gay and transgender workers is legal in much of the nation

If the court decides that the law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, applies to many millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees across the nation, they would gain basic protections that other groups have long taken for granted.

For more than eight years, the Libyan conflict has festered and the European Union has mostly looked away. Libya mattered, if at all, as a playground for terrorism and a source of the migrants disrupting European politics.

But with the recent involvement of Russia and Turkey on opposite sides of a nasty civil war, adding to the meddling of other neighbors, Europe has suddenly woken to the implications of a new Great Game, this time in North Africa, that is rapidly destabilizing its backyard. Belatedly, the Continent is paying attention.

The new European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said in an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel that the bloc could even send troops to safeguard a potential cease-fire, a move that Italy and Greece have already suggested they would be interested in committing troops to.“If there is a cease-fire in Libya, then the E.U. must be prepared to help implement and monitor this cease-fire — possibly also with soldiers, for example as part of an E.U. mission,” he said.

President Donald Trump suggested Sunday he would fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a touchstone of scientific wisdom during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after the election.

As Trump spoke about the coronavirus and derided his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, the crowd began chanting “Fire Fauci!”, a notion the president seemed to be on board with:

Fauci has long warned that the country is headed in the wrong direction. In an interview last week, Fauci painted a grim picture for the nation after more than 99,000 Americans tested positive for the virus in a 24-hour period.

Two U.S. Park Police officers in Virginia were indicted Thursday on state manslaughter charges in a 2017 case in which they fired nine shots at close range into the car of a 25-year-old man, a prosecutor announced.

Each officer was indicted on single charges of manslaughter and reckless discharge of a firearm

If convicted, the officers, members of the U.S. Park Police, a unit of the National Park Service within the Interior Department, face up to 15 years in prison, he said.

Much of the Amazon could be on the verge of losing its distinct nature and switching from a closed canopy rainforest to an open savannah with far fewer trees as a result of the climate crisi

As much as 40% of the existing Amazon rainforest is now at a point where it could exist as a savannah instead of as rainforest,

Any shift from rainforest to savannah would still take decades to take full effect, but once under way the process is hard to reverse.