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When a German Chancellor feels the need to explain the refugee convention to an American president, the speaker of British House of Commons says the leader of its closest ally is not welcome to address parliament, China positions itself as the grown-up in the room by chiding him for his blunt Twitter diplomacy and the botched travel ban is denounced not just by US adversaries, such as Iran, but allies, such as France and Canada, is it not time to sound the death-knell of American exceptionalism?

Trump's America might end up being a forcefully protected citadel, but will it be a city on a hill?

In the Face of Weighty Problems, Trump Focuses on Squabbles

The morning after North Korea launched a ballistic missile into the sea, apparently to test President Trump’s resolve in his first days in office, the new commander in chief wanted to make one thing very clear to the world: Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner, was not smart enough to have his job.

“He backed me big-time but I wasn’t interested in taking all of his calls. He’s not smart enough to run for president!”

“They should be hauled out of Congress and taken to Guantánamo!” a military veteran said of the few dozen elected officials — including Hillary Clinton and the only two Muslim members of Congress — identified in the film as having connections to terrorists. “Can’t we get a law passed so we can go in and get these people the hell out of our government?”

White and the filmmaker, Trevor Loudon, assured the group that there is “a new sheriff in town.”

Trump’s election has presented a “God-given opportunity,” Loudon said. “The fate of the Western world” now depends on how they use it.

There’s no doubt that Vesey was a violent man, who planned to attack and kill Charleston whites. But those who condemn him as a terrorist merely demonstrate how little we, as a culture, understand about slavery, and what it forced the men and women it ensnared to do.

More than a decade ago, while I was giving a talk on Vesey in Charleston, a member of the audience challenged my view that what Vesey wished to accomplish — the freedom for his friends and family — could be a good thing, on the grounds that he went about it the wrong way. “Why not work within the system for liberation,” the man asked, or even “stage a protest march?”

Although well intentioned, such questions reveal how far American society still has to travel before we reach a sophisticated understanding of the past. There was no “system” for Vesey to work within; his state had flatly banned private manumissions, or the freeing of slaves, in 1820. The only path to freedom was to sharpen a sword. Americans today can admire the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his 1963 nonviolent March on Washington, but his world was not Vesey’s, and we must understand that. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment Continue reading the main story

This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens — nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s, and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.

Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State aggressively target youths as young as 14.

“This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.

GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism

About 10 months ago, after terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 11 people, congressional Republicans quickly began looking for ways to blame American leadership

Republican field is dominated by candidates with no meaningful experience in or understanding of foreign affairs, and nearly all of whom continue to think the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was a great idea.

It is undeniably enjoyable to watch Trump. He's red-faced, discursive, funny, angry, strange, unpredictable, and real. He speaks without filter and tweets with reckless abandon. The Donald Trump phenomenon is a riotous union of candidate ego and voter id. America's most skilled political entertainer is putting on the greatest show we've ever seen.

Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he's a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he's also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante.

He lies so constantly and so fluently that it's hard to know if he even realizes he's lying.

The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.

History, though, tells a different story.

King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.

After the demise of yet another Trump administration nomination, it's worth taking a look at lessons learned. So far, the president has tried to blame Democrats as "obstructionists" for White House physician Ronny Jackson's downfall and described Jackson on Friday as an "American hero."

Trump has always managed by instinct and gut — not by orderly process. And for him, the chaos that ensues is just part of his brand. But it doesn't always result in a successful Cabinet confirmation or policies that can withstand judicial scrutiny. Turning to Rear Adm. Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs surprised many on the White House staff, just like Trump's decision to rush out the travel ban in his first week in office or to impulsively announce steel tariffs on U.S. allies.

Jackson and the president insist the allegations are false, but, in the end, neither was willing to fight them. After all, as Trump admitted, Jackson hadn't even asked for the job.

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of

When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.

In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.

One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.

(CNN)In 2020, Women's History Month comes amid a time of social upheaval and global fear over the coronavirus pandemic and resulting political turmoil. While for many the 2020 presidential race is now an afterthought, this Women's History Month does also mark the departure of the last remaining women candidates from the 2020 presidential field -- during an election year that also marks the centennial of women's suffrage.

Here is a glimpse at those inspiring stories and figures—who they are, what they've meant to these women in the past and what they mean to them now, looking forward in 2020 and beyond. As trailblazing tennis legend Billie Jean King once said to me, "Whatever you care about, you can make a difference. You really can. Don't ever underestimate yourself. Do not underestimate the human spirit."

Madeleine Albright is the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State. She is the author of multiple books, including the shortly forthcoming "Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir."

In the name of “America First,” President Trump has pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and questioned the usefulness of the United Nations and NATO, displaying his distaste for the multinational institutions the United States had constructed and led since World War II.

As the coronavirus crisis escalates across the globe, the United States is stepping back further, abandoning its longtime role as a generous global leader able to coordinate an ambitious, multinational response to a worldwide emergency.

During both the economic meltdown in 2008 and the Ebola crisis of 2014, the United States assumed the role of global coordinator of responses — sometimes imperfectly, but with the acceptance and gratitude of its allies and even its foes.

shortly after taking effect, the measures designed to prevent new infections in the United States created the exact conditions that facilitate the spread of the highly contagious virus, with throngs of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder in bottlenecks that lasted late into the night.

“AT THIS MOMENT, HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ARRIVING FROM NUMEROUS COUNTRIES ARE JAMMED TOGETHER IN A SINGLE SERPENTINE LINE VAGUELY SAID TO BE ‘FOR SCREENING,’” read a tweet from Tracy Sefl, who wrote that she waited for several hours to be screened at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport

“Authorities are going to have to deal with the ramifications of the breakdown of whatever this system is supposed to be,” she wrote. “Not to mention needless exposure risks from containing thousands of passengers like this.”

My colleagues here in the US, even as they are reeling from the stumbling response of the Donald Trump administration to the crisis, assumed that reports of the UK policy were satire – an example of the wry humour for which the country is famed. But they are all too real.

The stated aim has been to achieve “herd immunity” in order to manage the outbreak and prevent a catastrophic “second wave” next winter

the reasoning goes that even though in a perfect world we’d not want anyone to take the risk of infection, generating immunity in younger people is a way of protecting the population as a whole.

With 532 new cases on Wednesday, there are now at least 1,871 cases of coronavirus in New York City and 11 deaths, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office confirmed to CNN.Health officials and government leaders have encouraged Americans to avoid populous places and large group gatherings to mitigate the spread of the virus. In one of the more drastic measures, San Francisco is demanding that residents shelter in place during the pandemic.

Ridership on the city's subway system was down 3.7 million on Tuesday, compared with the same day last year when more than 5.5 million people rode the subway, the MTA New York City Transit said in a tweet.

Times Square, normally teeming with vehicle and foot traffic, was lit up as ever but nearly uninhabited Monday as bars and restaurants became take-out only and public spaces like theaters and gyms shuttered.

In Italy, 9.5 percent of the people who have tested positive for the virus have succumbed to covid-19, according to data compiled at Johns Hopkins University. In France, the rate is 4.3 percent. But in Germany, it’s 0.4 percent.

The biggest reason for the difference, infectious disease experts say, is Germany’s work in the early days of its outbreak to track, test and contain infection clusters. That means Germany has a truer picture of the size of its outbreak than places that test only the obviously symptomatic, most seriously ill or highest-risk patients.

Germany, with 31,150 cases at midday Tuesday, appeared to have a larger outbreak than France, with 20,149. But the higher death rate in France implies there were more undiagnosed cases there. France’s outbreak could be larger than Germany’s.

San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February

Nearly a month after those initial orders to enforce social distancing, San Francisco and the broader Bay Area have emerged as a national model for how early and aggressive action can prevent the explosive rise in cases that has overwhelmed hospitals in New York, where leaders were slower to respond

San Francisco’s case count of 857 as of April 10—with just 13 recorded deaths due to the coronavirus—is much lower than that in metropolises of comparable size such as New Orleans, Detroit, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The city’s curve is low and flattening, and patients are not flooding into its emergency rooms.

True, his brand of immature leadership is not the only reason the United States lags behind South Korea in its pandemic response, including testing and containment. Organizational inertia and garden-variety bureaucratic politics matter as well.

the Trump White House’s inadequate handling of the outbreak highlights his every toddler-like instinct

The most obvious one is his predilection for temper tantrums