History Readings

The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455.

To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature.

Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.

You see, shame used to be a mangrove

Payments to thousands of former and current athletes will approach $2.8 billion, minus the trial lawyers’ cut of the class-action suits. This follows the NCAA’s decision to let college athletes benefit financially from their names, images and likenesses

Most legal analysis of the settlement concludes that the days of the “amateur” college athlete are over. In the future, the men and women on Division I teams and others likely will be regarded as professionals who will be paid to play by universities through revenue-sharing agreements up to $20 million a year per school.

If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is an elected prosecutor who ran as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic city. Trump also received more scrutiny from prosecutors after he became a political figure than he’d ever experienced before. But none of this has any bearing on whether Trump actually committed the crimes with which he was charged.

The bar for convicting any defendant in the American justice system is extremely high: It requires a unanimous decision by 12 citizens who deem a crime to have occurred beyond a reasonable doubt

The more important question is not what motivated the charges, but whether they were justified and proved to a jury’s satisfaction.

simply tossing your résumé and cover letter into a company’s job portal has a low probability of success, especially now. It’s so easy to submit applications that companies are being bombarded with thousands of them. Human beings can’t possibly review all of them, so they’re reviewed by computers, which simply search for keywords. They don’t understand in any deep way either the applicant’s qualities or the employer’s needs.

“The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won’t use keywords” the way the evaluation algorithm wants,

Personal contact is crucial, he said. Rather than spraying applications far and wide, he recommends focusing on a handful of companies, researching them in depth and contacting a wide range of people connected with them, even their suppliers and customers.

In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.

For a long time, Belgian politicians and citizens hoped that European integration would release them from their own tribal squabbles. Who needed intricate federal coalitions if the behemoth in Brussels would soon take over? Except for the army and the national museums, all other levers of policy could comfortably be transferred,

The upward absorption has not come to pass. The European Union remains a halfway house between national government and continental superstate. There is no E.U. army or capacious fiscal apparatus. Consequently, Belgium has been put in an awkward position. Unable to collapse itself into Europe, it is stuck with a ramshackle federal state

Elon Musk is racing to a sci-fi future while the AI chief at Meta Platforms is arguing for one rooted in the traditional scientific approach.

Meta’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, criticized the rival company and Musk himself. 

Musk turned to a favorite rebuttal—a veiled suggestion that the executive, who is also a high-profile professor, wasn’t accomplishing much: “What ‘science’ have you done in the past 5 years?”

. The concept of irrational German angst has become a bit of a cliche over the years, but this time the threats to social cohesion feel very real

a wave of aggression against politicians and activists. Last year alone there were 3,691 offences against officials and party representatives, 80 of which were violent

This series of assaults on politicians and activists fuel wider fears around the state of Germany’s post-war order

a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.

If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

“When Hitler was in power, would it have made sense to say ‘he’s bad on this front but on the other hand, he’s built good roads and the trains run on time, so let’s be balanced’? In a normal situation, I would be more neutral, but this is not the time for neutrality. This election is a fight for Indian democracy. If we lose, there won’t be any chance in future to be neutral.”

Most of the measurable and qualitative improvements in today’s large language model AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—including their talents for writing and analysis—come down to shoving ever more data into them. 

AI could become a commodity

To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to “synthetic data,” which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models,

For years, economists’ best estimates of the cost of climate inaction were giant but not quite big enough to stimulate immediate and adequate action. The cost of inaction was, in a sense, high enough to be terrifying but too low to be galvanizing

now a groundbreaking new study has raised the estimated cost of inaction by so much that it makes acting seem like a bargain, and even makes it makes sense for wealthy countries to act alone, regardless of what their peers are doing. It’s a rare academic paper that could change everything.

Until the new paper, the most commonly used economic models were predicting climate impacts on the world economy on the order of about $200 in losses per ton of carbon emitted, or around 2 percent of world GDP (the monetary value of everything people produce) per degree of warming

By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.

But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.

I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness