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The triangular piece found has the words "Mazal Tov" written in Hebrew on one side along with Cohn's date of birth. The other side has the Hebrew letter "heh," an initial for God, as well as three Stars of David.

Since 2007, the Israel Antiquities Authority, together with Yad Vashem, has been conducting excavations at the former camp in Poland in a novel approach to Holocaust research. The camp was destroyed after an October 1943 uprising, with the Nazis leveling it and planting over it to cover up their crimes. Yet, archeologists have managed to uncover the gas chamber foundations and the original train platform.

The U.S.-led coalition supporting the Iraqi forces offensive on Mosul told The Associated Press on Friday that the Islamic State group "warped the purpose of a beloved institution of higher learning when they used the university for military purposes."

"The entire university has been burned,"

"I think it will take at least two or three years to rebuild," he added

The extremist group, which controls most of Deir el-Zour province, has kept the provincial capital under siege since 2014. Government forces have withstood the encirclement thanks to air-dropped humanitarian assistance and weapons and ammunition flown into the airport. Remaining residents have reported malnourishment and starvation amid severe shortages of food, water and fuel. The Islamic State group, which in 2014 seized large parts of Iraq and Syria and established a so-called Islamic caliphate straddling both sides of the border, is under intense pressure in both countries where it has lost significant territory in recent months.

The document is now up for sale for $62,500,

It is up for sale at the fixed price just days before President-elect Donald Trump takes the same oath, some 36 years later.

“It was very special to be able to celebrate his election and the presidency -- those were great years, and my mom was up on the main stage with him,” he said. “It was kind of overcast and cloudy that day, but pretty much as soon as he took the oath and gave his inaugural address, the skies opened up and it became sunny, leaving people joking, 'wow, is this a sign?'”

(An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)

Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year

the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.

none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.

Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.

Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.

This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.

I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.

In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”

These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.

I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.

And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.

Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.

Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.

, we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.

politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth

Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.

As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.

And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.

When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.

when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!

By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.

in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.

2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

He describes 9/11 as “a turning point for me.” He was by then hosting a show in New York, and remembers walking from Ground Zero to his studio and reading on air a 19th-century hymn written by a Mormon pioneer fleeing Missouri on his way to Utah. Beck says he felt a special calling at that moment. “If you have a position on the gate and you don’t warn the people of what you see,” he remembers thinking, “you’re to blame.”

In Doctrine and Covenants, a book of Mormon scripture, God says, “I have established the Constitution of this land by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.” According to polling by David Campbell, a Notre Dame political scientist, 94 percent of American Mormons believe that the “Constitution and the Bill of Rights are divinely inspired.”

Mormons tend not to accentuate these views publicly. Mormon culture, he told me, emphasizes a “moderate way of speaking.” Think Mitt Romney

Today, many Mormons see defending the Constitution the way many Jews see opposing genocide: as a way of honoring their ancestors and affirming their identity.

Mormons don’t just consider the Constitution sacred. They believe that its violation has allowed their persecution.

The same doomsday sensibility that helps him appreciate the menace posed by Trump led him to massively exaggerate the menace posed by Obama—and thus to breed the hateful paranoia on which Trump now feeds. Beck, in fact, pioneered some of Trump’s most disturbing themes

during the first 14 months of the Obama administration, according to Dana Milbank’s book Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America, Beck and guests on his Fox News show invoked “fascism,” “Nazis,” “Hitler,” “the Holocaust” and “Joseph Goebbels” 487 times. For good measure, Beck in 2007 said that Hillary Clinton sounds like “the stereotypical bitch.”

Beck says he’s sorry for all that. “I played a role, unfortunately,” he told Megyn Kelly during a 2014 interview on Fox News, “in helping tear the country apart.” He told me that now that America has “hit the iceberg,” he wants to help it heal

Although still generally conservative, Beck now insists that America’s real moral divide isn’t between left and right. He recently angered some conservatives by sending aid to undocumented children detained at the Mexican border. In a New York Times op-ed this fall, he called on conservatives to show “empathy” for Black Lives Matter activists. He says Americans must stop thinking in terms of ideological sides

When Barack Obama rose to the presidency after insisting, “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Glenn Beck called him a racist. Now that Donald Trump is president, Beck wants to bind the country’s racial and ideological wounds. He really does.

But for years and years, he called sheep wolves. Now that the wolf is here, it may be too late

And the fact that people trust us more than the president who accuses us of “fake news” suggests this isn't a winning battle for Trump when it comes to expanding his appeal.

as for which of these groups makes America great, I’m not sure what criteria to use, but if it is generating wealth and contributing to gross domestic product, it’s not even close.

According to the Brookings Institution, the 500 counties won by Clinton produced 64 percent of U.S. economic output, while the 2,600 counties won by Trump produced just 36 percent of GDP.

It is blue states, which voted against Trump in 2016, that fund the red states that voted for him. From 1990 to 2009, Clinton states collectively paid $2.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received in federal spending, while Trump states altogether received $1.3 trillion more than they paid.

this is not the way I think we should look at America. It’s one country, and different parts and people contribute in different ways.

The goal should be to use politics as a mechanism to bring us together through both public policy and public discourse.

Most presidents begin their tenure by trying to reach out to their political opponents, signaling that they want to represent those who didn’t vote for them as well as those who did, and generally trying to bring the country together. Trump has made almost no such effort, simply asserting that the country was divided before he was elected and thus absolving himself of any responsibility for unifying it. In office, he has mercilessly attacked anyone who dares to disagree with him

The challenge for the media must be to ensure that we don’t mirror Trump’s attitude of hostility. We cannot absorb and reflect that negativity. We are not the opposition. We are a civic institution, explicitly protected by the Constitution, that is meant to hold government accountable and provide real information to the citizenry.

Throughout the years, the U.S. has depended on drone strikes in hunting down Al Qaeda's top leaders and operatives. In 2015, the group's leader was killed in a drone strike in the southern city of Mukalla, the provincial capital of Yemen's largest province of Hadramawt, and which fell into the hands of the group for a year.

the bulk of these Republicans no longer believe in the Republican party. They identify more strongly with the Tea Party or Evangelical groups or Fox News than the GOP. On social issues, the defining issue is homosexuality – not abortion. That intransigence will alienate them them even further from the future mainstream. Their next big issue: denying climate change

you have to see the bigger cultural and religious picture when analyzing what has happened to American conservatism these past two decades or so

The bewildering economic and social and demographic changes have created a cultural and existential panic among those most heavily concentrated in those districts whose members are threatening to tear down the global economy as revenge for losing two presidential elections in a row. They feel they have already lost and have nothing to gain from any constructive engagement with a president they regard as pretty close to the anti-Christ of parasitic minorities. They feel isolated in a more multi-cultural country. They feel spied upon and condescended to. They have shut out any news sources apart from Fox. It does not occur to them, for example, that Obamacare might actually help them. And you get no actual specifics on policies they like or dislike. It is all abstractions based on impressions.

I see no way to integrate these groups and people into the broader body politic or conversation. Their alienation is so deep it is close to unbridgeable. And further defeats will make their isolation worse, not better, their anger more, not less, intense.

without strong economic growth, it is hard to see how it can be ameliorated in the near future.

I fear it will get even worse than this until it gets better.

Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).

The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).

Lehrer: Can non-experts do anything to encourage a more effective punditocracy?

Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.

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Johnson & Johnson faces claims that it, in an effort to boost sales, failed for decades to warn consumers that its talc-based products could cause cancer. About 1,000 cases have been filed in Missouri state court, and another 200 in New Jersey.

Jurors found Johnson & Johnson liable for fraud, negligence and conspiracy, the family's lawyers said. Deliberations lasted four hours, following a three-week trial.

Trials in several other talc lawsuits have been set for later this year, according to Danielle Mason, who also represented Fox's family at trial.

In October 2013, a federal jury in Sioux Falls, South Dakota found that plaintiff Deane Berg's use of Johnson & Johnson's body powder products was a factor in her developing ovarian cancer. Nevertheless, it awarded no damages, court records show.

But Mrs. Clinton’s problems are broader than just her message: Opinion polls show that some Democrats and other voters continue to question her trustworthiness and whether she cares about their problems. Recent polls show that her once-formidable lead over Mr. Sanders in Iowa has all but vanished, while he is holding on to a slight lead over her in New Hampshire.

Mrs. Clinton and her team say they always anticipated the race would tighten, yet they were not prepared for Mr. Sanders to become so popular with young people and independents, especially women, whom Mrs. Clinton views as a key part of her base.

Several Clinton advisers are also regretting that they did not push for more debates, where Mrs. Clinton excels, to more skillfully marginalize Mr. Sanders over his Senate votes in support of the gun industry and the enormous costs and likely tax increases tied to his big-government agenda.

Instead, Mrs. Clinton, who entered the race as the prohibitive favorite, played it safe, opting for as few debates as possible, scheduled at times when viewership was likely to be low

Both Mrs. Clinton and her husband believe she can still win the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa and the Feb. 9 primary in New Hampshire despite Mr. Sanders’s gaining ground recently and now being virtually tied with her in many polls in those states. But the Clintons also believe she can survive losses in both places because of the strength of her political organization and support in the Feb. 27 primary in South Carolina and in many March 1 Super Tuesday states and other big states to follow.

Yet some Democratic Party officials who remain uncommitted said that after nine months of running, Mrs. Clinton still had not found her voice when it came to inspiring people and making herself broadly likable.

While Mrs. Clinton is known for connecting well with people in small settings, she has not shown the same winning touch as consistently at rallies or in television interviews, they said.

“Her voter base does not seem as gung-ho energetic as Sanders’s base,” Mr. McDonald said. “It may be that they feel like they are waiting for the real race to begin. But an enthusiastic base can make a big difference in the early stages of a presidential nomination campaign, and if Hillary can’t pull away from Sanders fairly early in the season, I suspect he will gain strength rapidly.”