History Readings

For most people, pleading guilty to a felony means they will very likely land in prison, lose their job and forfeit their right to vote.

The Justice Department negotiations coincide with the banks’ separate efforts to persuade the S.E.C. to issue waivers from automatic bans that occur when a company pleads guilty. If the waivers are not granted, a decision that the Justice Department does not control, the banks could face significant consequences.

Most if not all of the pleas are expected to come from the banks’ holding companies, the people said — a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty.

bound Amtrak train that derailed and overturned late Tuesday, killing six people, injuring dozens more, and disrupting train service for thousands of riders in the Northeast region.

The train had at least seven cars, including the engine, which separated from the rest, officials said. Six cars overturned. At least one looked as bent as a crumpled soda can, and parts of the damaged cars were so badly mangled that firefighters had to use hydraulic tools to rescue people trapped inside.

On Wednesday, Temple University Hospital said it had received 54 people from the wreck. Herbert E. Cushing, the chief medical officer, said one person died overnight from a massive chest injury, and 25 remained in the hospital, including eight people in critical condition.

North Korea has publicly executed the country's defense minister after the regime accused him of treason, according to reports from South Korea.

l in front of hundreds of people in Pyongyang, the South Korean Intelligence Agency was reported to have told parliament members in a closed door session

expressed discontent towards leader Kim Jong Un, and failed to follow Kim's orders on several occasions, according to Kim Gwang-lim

there are a few broader trends to be observed. The first is that the cutting-edge, progressive economic arguments do not seem to be swaying voters.

Over the past few years, left-of-center economic policy has moved from opportunity progressivism to redistributionist progressivism. Opportunity progressivism is associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago today. This tendency actively uses government power to give people access to markets, through support for community colleges, infrastructure and training programs and the like, but it doesn’t interfere that much in the market and hesitates before raising taxes.

The conservative victories probably have more to do with the public’s skepticism about the left than with any positive enthusiasm toward the right.

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center.

While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages.

But the major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014.

ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey accused Iran last month of trying to “dominate the region” through its proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, suggesting to some that Turkey was shifting toward confrontation with its neighbor and joining a Saudi-led coalition to push back against Iranian influence across the Middle East.

Yet it was all smiles and handshakes in Tehran on Tuesday, as Mr. Erdogan was welcomed by Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, at the start of a one-day visit that had been long planned but was put in jeopardy after some Iranian lawmakers called for it to be canceled after Mr. Erdogan’s comments.

In a joint news conference broadcast live on state television, Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Rouhani pledged to work together to calm regional crises. “The region is burning in a fire,” Mr. Erdogan said. “So far, more than 300,000 were killed in Syria. All were Muslim. We do not know who is killing whom. We have to get united and block the killing and bloodshed.”

n Egyptian court on Saturday reconfirmed a corruption conviction of former President Hosni Mubarak amid signals from the authorities that he may soon be released.

The court on Saturday reissued a three-year sentence for Mr. Mubarak that had been originally handed down in May 2014 but temporarily set aside in January when an appeals court ordered a retrial.

After the verdict, Egyptian state news also reported that prosecutors were calculating whether Mr. Mubarak had now served enough time to warrant his release. He has already spent more than three years in detention since his overthrow in 2011.

ATHENS — The United States, wading into the international efforts to shape Greece’s economic and geopolitical orientation, is pushing the leftist government in Athens to resist Russia’s energy overtures.

The dueling sales pitches, reminiscent of a Cold War struggle, come as debt-burdened Greece is desperate for new sources of revenue of the sort that a gas pipeline could bring.

That pipeline would carry Russian gas to Europe through Turkey and Greece, bypassing pipelines that run through Ukraine.

As the head of the vast column reached Red Square, the marchers were joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who held a photograph of his late father in his naval uniform.

The march of the so-called Immortal Regiment was part of Saturday's commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.

Earlier in the day, 16,500 troops took part in a military parade on Red Square.

The battle for Tikrit and its surrounding villages, which pro-government forces won more than a month ago, was seen as a crucial test of the ability of the Iraqi government and its partners — including Shiite militias, Iranian military advisers and the American-led coalition — to win back territory from the Islamic State.

After the victory, an equally important challenge remains: stabilizing the Sunni-dominated area, and repopulating it, without recreating the sectarian animosities that helped the Islamic State seize the territory in the first place.

Another question was who would control the territory after it was wrested from the Islamic State: the Shiite groups or local Sunni forces.

It turns out that the Wall Street bonus pool in 2014 was roughly twice the total annual earnings of all Americans working full time at the federal minimum wage.

Yet while we broadly lament inequality, we treat it as some natural disaster imposed upon us. That’s absurd. The roots of inequality are complex and, to some extent, reflect global forces, but they also reflect our policy choices.

We as a nation have chosen to prioritize tax shelters over minimum wages, subsidies for private jets over robust services for children to break the cycle of poverty. And the political conversation is often not about free rides by corporations, but about free rides by the impoverished.

When I grew up, I realized that in 1944 and 1945, my father was sinking ships that were evacuating German civilians and troops from Riga, in Latvia, and Tallinn, in Estonia. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people met their deaths in the waters of the Baltic — for which my father received his medals. It’s been a long time since I was proud of him, but I don’t judge him. It was war.

My father fought the evil of fascism, but he was taken advantage of by another evil. He and millions of Soviet soldiers, sailors and airmen, virtual slaves, brought the world not liberation but another slavery. The people sacrificed everything for victory, but the fruits of this victory were less freedom and more poverty.

So my father went off to defend his homeland. He was still a boy when he went to sea, in constant terror of drowning in that steel coffin. He ended up protecting the regime that killed his father.

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”

It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.

Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth.

Of course, I wish my homeland victory. But what would constitute a victory for my country? Each one of Hitler’s victories was a defeat for the German people. And the final rout of Nazi Germany was a victory for the Germans themselves, who demonstrated how a nation can rise up and live like human beings without the delirium of war in their heads.

Today, though, Victory Day has nothing to do with the people’s victory or my father’s victory. It is not a day of peace and remembrance for the victims. It is a day for rattling swords, a day of zinc coffins, a day of aggression, a day of great hypocrisy and great baseness.

hanks to the “zombie box,” the population now has a make-believe idea of the world: The West wants to destroy us, so we are compelled, like our fathers and grandfathers, to wage holy war against fascism and we must be prepared to sacrifice everything for victory.

DuPont is a pretty well-run company. Under the leadership of Ellen Kullman, a company veteran who became its chief executive in 2009, this once unwieldy conglomerate has undergone a great deal of change, with more still to come. It has cut some $2 billion in costs, eliminating a third of its management; announced the spinoff of its performance chemicals business; and “refreshed” its board with such corporate stalwarts as Edward Breen, who is best known for turning around Tyco International in the early 2000s. Since Kullman took over, the company has delivered 266 percent in total shareholder returns, easily outpacing the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. It is in the middle of a major restructuring designed to boost earnings growth.

Have we really gotten to the point where the activist now gets the benefit of the doubt, no matter how well run the company?

In the DuPont/Trian fight, the hedge fund is on record as saying that the company is not getting a return on its research-and-development spending. Yet R.& D. — science — is at the very heart of DuPont’s business model and always has been. And it can take years to turn a scientific advance into a successful product. A DuPont stripped of much of its R.& D. doesn’t just hurt the company; it hurts the country.