There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.

This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.

I’ve noticed that a few of my conservative Facebook friends have linked to the recent debate between Paul Krugman and Ron Paul on Bloomberg. Some of them are embarrassed to find that Krugman was the more convincing participant.

I have a theory as to why. In that short interview Ron Paul revealed that his school of Austrian economics is more about assertions and ideology then it is about empirical data.

I’ll give one example that stuck out to me. In Part 1 of the Mediaite video (at 6:00) Ron Paul argues that there was a lot of economic growth after World War Two because:

After World War Two a lot of the debt was liquidated, but guess what else we did. The troops were coming home…big government liberals wanted to have job problems, they weren’t put into place. we cut spending by some 60%, we slashed taxes, finally the depression ended.

Ron Paul’s gloss over history has a grain of truth and a giant problem. The truth is that America did take a step down from having a war-time command economy. The problem is that Ron Paul makes it sound as if government then immediately shrunk. He even says taxes were “slashed”.

Here is a chart from the Tax Policy Center showing what the historical highest marginal tax rates were.

During World War Two, the rate is between 81% and 94%. After World War Two, it is cut down to a low of 82% before being raised back to 91%, which is where it stays till the Kennedy years, during which it drops to a slightly lower 70%.

If this is what Ron Paul thinks it looks like when American liberals lose what does it look like when they win?

There are many more examples that have been cited by other writers about how government remained large long after World War Two. Airlines were heavily regulated, the interest on checking accounts was regulated, even the beer industry wasn’t deregulated until 1979, and yes, that was by Jimmy Carter.

After World War Two government was bigger than Ron Paul admits. Krugman was making the point that during the era when taxes on America’s richest were highest and the country was most regulated, the country as a whole was better off. That is a very important question to be able to answer, and it is not clear that Paul has even grappled with the implications of that data at all.

There’s such a blizzard of misinformation out there that it’s hard to pick any one thing to single out, but David Frum picks up on one bit from the Paul/Paul show : the remarkable way many on the right now portray the postwar years of prosperity as a triumph of libertarian principles.

Yeah, it was a libertarian paradise all right — with a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, a third of the work force in unions, and a minimum wage much higher relative to the average wage than it is today.

Propose a return to those conditions now, and everyone on the right would predict utter disaster. What we actually had was unprecedented prosperity.

In the chart below, I’ve run these comparisons for all major-party vice presidential nominees since 1920. We compare the ticket’s R.V.I. in the year the vice presidential candidate was on the ticket to the next and previous election cycles in which he was not on the ticket and when there was also no one else from his state running for president or vice president.

For instance, in looking at the R.V.I. for the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1992, Al Gore, the comparison years are 1988 (when Mr. Gore was not on the ticket, and nobody else from Tennessee was) and 2004 (since Mr. Gore was again the vice presidential nominee in 1996 and was the presidential nominee in 2000, disqualifying those years). There are also a few cases in which there were multiple candidates on the ticket in the same state in the same year. Richard Nixon’s vice presidential nominee in 1960, for instance, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., was from Massachusetts, the same state as the Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy. We simply throw out these years, since Mr. Lodge’s performance might have been more a reflection of Kennedy’s strength in Massachusetts than his own strengths and weaknesses.

Over all, the benefit provided by a vice presidential nominee has been quite paltry under this method. On average since 1920, he has produced a net gain of only about two percentage points for the top of the ticket in his home state.

Just as talking about income inequality can get you branded as a socialist by the right today, talking about racial inequality on a systemic level can lead to charges of reverse racism against whites. And the ultimate irony of having a black president is that it may make it harder for him to discuss race. The killing of Trayvon Martin has sparked national outrage and a heated debate over race, but the White House responded timidly. “Obviously, we’re not going to wade into a local law enforcement matter,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney said Monday. But that policy didn’t apply to Henry Louis Gates ’ run-in with Cambridge police just three years ago. Obama publicly condemned the police in the case, and was pilloried by the right for it.

Stefancic said Martin’s case is a perfect example of the importance of critical race theory. Without a racial lens on the incident, it would be a narrow legal question about Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense laws. But critical race theory allows us to see the whole picture that a strictly colorblind analysis might miss, she said. “When the law tries to redress an action that comes from a certain stereotype, it’s difficult,” she explained.

Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it’s not going away, either. It’s just getting more powerful. That’s a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that’s crazy.”

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

Rick Santorum greatly overreached when he claimed that Congress required “English be the principal language and that it be taught and spoken universally” in several Southwest territories, Oklahoma and Hawaii as preconditions for them attaining statehood.

Congress did require in some cases that new states conduct government business in English, or that public schools teach in English. But those were the limits of the requirements. There were no requirements that English be the “principal language” or that it be “spoken universally.” In fact, Hawaii is officially a bilingual state — English and Hawaiian.

The issue of English as a requirement for statehood arose after Santorum made headlines for saying — while campaigning in Puerto Rico — that if Puerto Rico wanted to become a state, residents there needed to speak English. On Puerto Rico, the predominant language spoken is Spanish. According to 2012 Census data , 81 percent of Puerto Rico residents spoke English “less than very well.”

Appearing on ABC’s “This Week ” on March 18, Santorum was asked about his previous comment that for Puerto Rico to become a state, “They would have to speak English. That would be a requirement. It’s a requirement that we put on other states. It is a condition for entering the Union.”

Internationally-renowned photojournalist Gerd Ludwig has spent years documenting the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 1986, errors at the plant in Ukraine led to an explosion that ultimately caused over a quarter of a million people to permanently evacuate their homes to escape the radiation and radioactive fallout. Over the course of several trips to the site and the region for National Geographic Magazine in 1993, 2005, and 2011, Ludwig has amassed a documentary record of a people and a place irreparably altered by a tragic accident. His 2011 trip was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Now Ludwig has released an iPad app with over 150 photographs, video, and interactive panoramas. Gathered here is a small selection of the work Ludwig has produced over the years of the still-unfolding tragedy.

In the darkest moments of last year’s nuclear accident, Japanese leaders did not know the actual extent of damage at the plant and secretly considered the possibility of evacuating Tokyo, even as in public they tried to downplay the risks, an independent investigation into the accident disclosed on Monday.

The investigation by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a newly created private policy organization, offered one of the most vivid accounts yet of how Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear crisis than the one that actually engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A team of 30 university professors, lawyers and journalists spent more than six months on an inquiry into Japan’s response to the triple meltdown at the plant, which followed a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that shut down the plant’s cooling systems.

The team was granted extraordinary access, in part because of a strong public demand for greater accountability. Its members conducted interviews with more than 300 people including top nuclear regulators and government officials, as well as the prime minister during the crisis, Naoto Kan. It was assembled by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a policy organization founded by a respected public intellectual, Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s biggest dailies.

An advanced copy of the report describes how Japan’s response was hindered at times by a debilitating breakdown in trust between the major actors: then Prime Minister Naoto Kan, the Tokyo headquarters of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco, and the plant manager at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The conflicts helped produce confused flows of sometimes contradictory information in the early days of the crisis, the report said.

Neanderthals were already on the verge of extinction in Europe by the time modern humans arrived on the scene, a study suggests.

DNA analysis suggests most Neanderthals in western Europe died out as early as 50,000 years ago - thousands of years before our own species appeared.

A small group of Neanderthals then recolonised parts of Europe, surviving for 10,000 years before vanishing.

Relatively mild drought conditions may have been enough to cause the collapse of the Classic Maya civilisation, which flourished until about 950AD in what is now southern Mexico and Guatemala.

Scientists have long thought that severe drought caused its collapse.

But Mexican and British researchers now think that a sustained drop in rainfall of only 25-40% was enough to exhaust seasonal water supplies in the region.

The findings were published in the journal Science.

The research was conducted by the Yucatan Centre for Scientific Research in southern Mexico and the University of Southampton in the UK.

Scientists used advanced modelling techniques to estimate rainfall and evaporation rates between 800 and 950AD, when the classic Maya civilisation went into sharp decline.

They found that a relatively modest decline in rainfall was enough to deplete freshwater storage systems in the Yucatan lowlands, where there are no rivers.

For all its technological sophistication and hefty price tag, modern medicine may be doing more to complicate the end of life than to prolong or improve it. If a person living in 1900 managed to survive childhood and childbearing, she had a good chance of growing old. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , a person who made it to 65 in 1900 could expect to live an average of 12 more years; if she made it to 85, she could expect to go another fouryears. In 2007, a 65-year-old American could expect to live, on average, another 19 years; if he made it to 85, he could expect to go another six years.

Watching the Syrian Army pummel the Syrian town of Homs to put down the rebellion there against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is the remake of a really bad movie that starred Bashar’s father, Hafez, exactly 30 years ago this month. I know. I saw the original.

It was April 1982 and I had just arrived in Beirut as a reporter for The New York Times. I quickly heard terrifying stories about an uprising that had happened in February in the Syrian town of Hama, led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Word had it (there were no Internet or cellphones) that then-President Hafez al-Assad had quashed the rebellion by shelling whole Hama neighborhoods, then dynamiting buildings, some with residents still inside. That May, I got a visa to Syria, just as Hama had been reopened. The Syrian regime was “encouraging” Syrians to drive through the broken town and reflect on its meaning. So I just hired a cab and went.

It was stunning. Whole swaths of buildings had, indeed, been destroyed and then professionally steamrolled into parking lots the size of football fields. If you kicked the ground, you’d come up with scraps of clothing, a tattered book, a shoe. Amnesty International estimated that as many as 20,000 people were killed there. I had never seen brutality at that scale, and, in a book I wrote later, I gave it a name: “Hama Rules.”

Hama Rules are no rules at all. You do whatever it takes to stay in power and you don’t just defeat your foes. You bomb them in their homes and then you steamroll them so that their children and their children’s children will never forget and never even dream of challenging you again.

A lot of what made the old budgeting system work—the system of 1921-1974—was a set of unwritten norms and conventions. To restore a workable budget system, Americans may need to enact into law and rule what was formerly taken for granted:

We have to restore budgeting primacy to the presidency, while developing requirements for budget balance over the business cycle;

We have to reduce the number of political actors in Congress who can amend budgets, especially in ways that increase spending or reduce revenues;

We have to raise the visibility of those actors and find ways to hold them more broadly responsible to their party leaderships and the public.

For 2 generations we have sought to make governmental power more widely distributed, more subject to review, and more transparent. That big project has had perverse results: in trying to stop the next Robert Moses, we empowered Washington lobbyists instead.

What’s needed is effective government, and effective government is executive government, subject to legislative review that can in turn be readily reviewed by the public.

No president’s budget should ever be dead on arrival. He should be able to force votes on his original proposal—and those members of Congress who oppose a budget proposal should have to oppose it in ways that expose their own counter proposals to public debate.

In this sense, Paul Ryan is doing the right thing, whatever the substantive merits of his proposals.

If we’re to make a success of the coming era of budget retrenchment, we need first to make the institutions of budgeting work again.

The broken glass from an attack by vandals on the National Museum here has been swept away, and the remnants of the Buddhist statues they destroyed — nearly 30 of them, some dating to the sixth century — have been locked away. But officials say the loss to this island nation’s archaeological legacy can never be recouped.

In the midst of the political turmoil racking this tiny Indian Ocean nation of 1,200 islands, a half-dozen men stormed into the museum last Tuesday and ransacked a collection of coral and lime figures, including a six-faced coral statue and a one-and-a-half-foot wide representation of the Buddha’s head. Officials said the men attacked the figures because they believed they were idols, and therefore illegal under Islamic and national laws.

The attack was reminiscent of the Taliban’s demolition of the great carved Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in early 2001, and it has raised fears here that extremists are gaining ground in the Maldives, a Sunni Muslim country that historians say converted from Buddhism to Islam in the 12th century. The country has incorporated elements of Islamic law into its jurisprudence for years. Idols cannot be brought into the country, for example, and alcohol and pork products are allowed only at resorts that cater to foreigners

A US Marine scout sniper unit in Afghanistan posed for a photo in front of a flag resembling the logo of the Nazi SS, the Marine Corps says.

In a statement, a Marine spokesman said use of the SS symbol was not acceptable, and that the Corps had now addressed the issue.

On investigation, use of the flag was not thought to be racially motivated.

Marines in the September 2010 photo, taken in Sangin, Afghanistan, are no longer in that unit, he added.

The photo was brought to the attention of a Marine inspector general in November 2011.

Entrepreneur Donald Trump dismissed the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum by claiming that Santorum lost his Senate seat in 2006 by a wider margin than any incumbent senator in history. He’s wrong.

In fact, there have been two dozen incumbent senators who have taken worse beatings than Santorum did in 2006. Trump need only have checked back as far as the 2010 midterm elections — when Democrat Blanche Lincoln lost her Arkansas seat — to find an incumbent senator who lost by a bigger margin than Santorum did.

In an interview with Matt Lauer that aired before the Super Bowl, Barack Obama argued that “I deserve a second term.” And if the election were held right now, he’d probably get one.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows the president opening a six-point lead over Mitt Romney (and moving over the magic 50 percent mark) among registered voters has been generating plenty of attention today. It confirms the degree to which Obama’s reelection prospects have improved recently. Just a month ago, the same poll gave Romney a two-point edge (48 to 46 percent), and not since last July had Obama run ahead of Romney among registered voters. This is also the first time either man has cleared the 50 percent mark in the ABC/WaPo poll. Among all adults, Obama notches a 50 percent job approval rating — his highest mark since last March.

The government has rejected calls for computer pioneer Alan Turing to be granted an official pardon for convictions for homosexuality dating back to the 1950s.

An online petition of over 23,000 signatures had requested the pardon.

Justice Minister Lord McNally dismissed the motion in the House of Lords.

“A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence,” he said.

In 2009 former Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology to Mr Turing, labelling the treatment he had received as “utterly unfair” and “appalling”.

So, Obama is the least liberal Democratic president since World War II, and presumably the least liberal since Woodrow Wilson.

I’m not bashing Obama, by the way; I wish he took stronger stands, but I think he’s moving in that direction; also, even if his health reform was devised by Heritage and implemented by Mitt Romney, it’s a lot better than nothing.

The point, instead, is that this very moderate Democrat is portrayed by the right, not to mentioned the aforementioned Romney, as a radical redistributionist — when the real radicals are on the other side. And now we have numbers.

The United Nations’ highest court confirmed Friday that Germany has legal immunity from being sued in foreign courts by victims of Nazi atrocities. The International Court of Justice in The Hague said that Italy ’s Supreme Court violated Germany’s sovereignty in 2008 by ruling that an Italian civilian, Luigi Ferrini, was entitled to reparations for his deportation to Germany in 1944 to work as a slave laborer in the armaments industry. The ruling is expected to stem the flow of civil cases against Germany in Italian courts in the aftermath of the Ferrini verdict. Germany had argued that the Italian ruling jeopardized a restitution system put in place after the Nazis’ defeat, under which Germany has paid tens of billions of dollars in reparations.

To listen to the candidate, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was about the Gipper and Newt.

“I worked with President Reagan in the entire recovery of the 1980s,” Newt Gingrich declared in a recent debate of Republican presidential hopefuls. He frequently talks about the way he and President Ronald Reagan “changed” Washington.

The former House speaker has cited Mr. Reagan 61 times in 19 debates; he casts the contest against former Governor Mitt Romney as one between a “Massachusetts moderate” and a “Reagan conservative.”

“Gingrich had absolutely nothing to do with the Reagan Revolution,” replies Lou Cannon, who as a journalist covered the entire Reagan presidency and wrote the best biography of the 40th president, “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.”

“There were congressmen who influenced Reagan, especially Jack Kemp,” Mr. Cannon said in an interview. “I’m not sure Reagan even knew who Gingrich was.”

Mr. Gingrich is only mentioned once in Mr. Cannon’s book, in a discussion about the post-Reagan era. In one of the former president’s own books, “The Reagan Diaries,” the former Georgia congressman comes up only once in passing and the reference is largely negative. He doesn’t appear at all in Mr. Reagan’s autobiography, “An American Life,” or in Edmund Morris’s biography, “Dutch.”

The central figure in the Reagan administration was James A. Baker, first White House chief of staff and later Treasury secretary. One Reagan insider ventures that in those eight years he doesn’t believe that Mr. Baker ever met one-on-one with Mr. Gingrich.

Most worrying is a populist streak that is at best nasty, and at worst downright dangerous. Mr Gingrich’s attacks on the attempt to build the “Ground-Zero mosque” in Manhattan (in fact, an Islamic study centre some distance from Ground Zero) were calculated to stir up the worst passions. He has said that, as president, he might send police to arrest judges he thought guilty of overreaching. His attacks on “vulture capitalists” like his rival Mitt Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, damage his own party and capitalism itself. Mr Obama must be delighted to have the case against Mr Romney made for him.

Mr Gingrich’s record in office casts doubt on his ability to run the country. After four years as Speaker, he was forced out by his own colleagues, who found him unbearably capricious and disorganised. Senator Tom Coburn, who worked with Mr Gingrich then, has called him “the last person” he would vote for as president.

Mr Gingrich’s energy, intellect and originality would be welcome in America’s highest office. But unless he dispels serious doubts about his character, the Republicans would do better with the more reliable and competent Mr Romney.

A Guatemalan judge has ordered a former military dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, to appear in court on Thursday, the first step in a process that could lead to his being tried on genocide charges and to a reopening of the darkest chapter in Guatemala ’s brutal 36-year civil war.

During General Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule in 1982 and 1983, the Guatemalan Army pursued a scorched-earth campaign in the Mayan highlands that included massacres that are regarded as among the most horrific in the war. To flush out small bands of leftist guerrillas, soldiers entered Indian villages and hunted down their inhabitants, slaughtering men, women and children indiscriminately.

Survivors’ groups have sought justice through the courts for more than a decade, but only in the last year have prosecutors begun to bring cases to trial against high-ranking military officers. Mr. Ríos Montt had immunity from prosecution because he was elected to Congress in 2000, but that immunity ended this month when his term in office expired.

A lawyer for him told the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre that his client would appear to hear the prosecutor’s charges. “We are sure that there is no responsibility, since he was never on the battlefield,” said the lawyer, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gálvez.

In past interviews, Mr. Ríos Montt has said that he never ordered massacres. But military documents have shown that the military was operating under a rigid chain of command and that reports from the field went right up to top commanders.

A United Nations-backed truth commission set up after peace accords were signed in 1996 found that some 200,000 people had been killed or had disappeared during the civil war, and that government forces committed 626 massacres in indigenous villages over 36 years. The military’s actions in the Ixil triangle of El Quiché department, where the Maya-Ixil population were the targets, amounted to genocide, the commission found.

The cases where the national polling lead shifted after New Hampshire are few and far between. It has never happened in a Republican race, although it did occur for Democrats in 1972, 1984, 1988 and 2008. With the partial exception of 1988, when Michael Dukakis became a fairly clear favorite after Super Tuesday, each of those contests was a fight to the finish.

But in each case the front-runner’s lead had been marginal — not like the robust lead that Mr. Romney had seemed to hold. What has been especially strange about the recent reversal in polls is that it seemed to come out of nowhere. The Monday night debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., was not Mr. Romney’s strongest, and he was judged by most observers to have lost it to Mr. Gingrich. Even when a candidate loses a debate, however, he usually does not see an overnight 20-point shift against him in polls.

Perhaps, then, there is profound resistance among Republican voters to nominating Mr. Romney after all. He has significant weaknesses as a candidate, having reversed his position on several major issues at a time when conservative voters distrust the Republican establishment and value authenticity. And he is a Mormon from Massachusetts — not a traditional pedigree for a Republican candidate.

If the resistance is strong enough, perhaps Republicans will nominate Mr. Gingrich. Or perhaps there will be an effort to draft a candidate who is not currently running for president, like former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida or Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin or Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

Political parties sometimes do go through challenging phases. In the past, they have not happened to coincide with periods in which the other party had an incumbent president with a 45 percent approval rating amid a poor economy. But parties have tended to nominate more ideologically extreme candidates in their first cycle out of the White House rather than being willing to settle for an electable moderate.

Still, the nomination of Mr. Gingrich would very much violate the “More of the Same” paradigm, given that he has proudly and loudly proclaimed that he will not adopt the auspices of a traditional campaign, and that he would be one of the most unpopular candidates ever to be nominated by a major party.

But perhaps “This Time Is Different.” We will learn a lot more in the coming days based on the results in Florida and movement in national polls.

In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today.

The contract was so risky — and such a big deal — because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village's collective farm; there was no personal property.

Archaeologists working in Egypt have discovered the tomb of a female singer in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb was found by a team from the University of Basel in Switzerland who came across it by chance.

The woman, Nehmes Bastet, was a temple singer during Egypt’s 22nd Dynasty (approximately 945 - 712BC), according to an inscription in the tomb.

The coffin found in the tomb contains an intact mummy from almost 3,000 years ago.

The King Center has published 200,000 personal documents belonging to Martin Luther King Jr, as the US marks the civil rights leader’s birthday.

The online archive contains personal notes, telegrams to John F Kennedy and a handwritten draft of King’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The second collection of images from 2011 once again brought us nature at its full force with floods, drought, wild fires, tornadoes and spectacular images of volcanic eruptions. The death of Osama bin Laden, the attack on an island in Norway by a lone gunman, continued fighting in Libya, and protests around the globe were a few of the news events dominating the headlines.

What does a sudden evacuation look like? After everyone is gone, what happens to the places they've abandoned? National Geographic Magazine sent Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder to the nuclear exclusion zone around Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant to find out. Evacuated shortly after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami led to a nuclear radiation crisis, the area has been largely untouched, with food rotting on store shelves and children's backpacks waiting in classrooms. The area may face the same fate as the town of Pripyat, Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. This isn't the first time Guttenfelder has gotten a rare glimpse of a place few see, as The Big Picture featured his photographs of North Korea in an earlier post. Collected here are Guttenfelder's haunting images just released of a place abandoned, and of people dealing with the loss.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has given what he described as his “last interview” and again denied any involvement in the Lockerbie bombing.

Megrahi is the only person to have been convicted in connection with the 1988 attack, which killed 270 people.

He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009, after being diagnosed with cancer, and returned to Libya.

Megrahi said: “I am an innocent man. I am about to die and I ask now to be left in peace with my family.”

The interview with Megrahi was filmed by investigator and former police officer George Thomson.

Newt Gingrich wrongly claimed the Dred Scott decision “ruled that slavery extended to the whole country.” It did not. The ruling stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in new territories, but it stopped short of applying the ruling to all states. Gingrich also claimed that President Lincoln “explicitly instructed his administration to not enforce Dred Scott.” But the research historian at the Lincoln presidential library knows of no such directive or any reason to issue one.

In arguing for the need to curb the power of the judiciary, Gingrich frequently cites Lincoln’s well documented opposition to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling. Gingrich did so twice Dec. 18 on “Face the Nation .” The former House speaker, who earned a Ph.D. in history and taught the subject briefly, often says he is speaking “as a historian .” We asked Bryon Andreasen , the research historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., to review Gingrich’s comments about Lincoln on “Face the Nation” for historical accuracy.

Gingrich, Dec. 18 : Lincoln spends part of his first inaugural because people tend to forget, the Supreme Court in Dred Scott, ruled that slavery extended to the whole country. And Lincoln said very specifically, that’s the law of the case that is not the law of the land. Nine people cannot create the law of the land or you have eliminated our freedom as a people.

Andreasen made three points about Gingrich’s comments. We’ll provide Andreasen’s detailed analysis later, but first we will summarize his main points:

The Dred Scott decision did not extend slavery “to the whole country,” as Gingrich claimed.
Gingrich’s statement that “Lincoln said very specifically, that’s the law of the case that is not the law of the land” — is, in Andreasen’s words, “historically defensible.”
It is “essentially accurate,” Andreasen said, for Gingrich to paraphrase Lincoln’s belief that “nine people cannot create the law of the land or you have eliminated our freedom as a people.”

The notebooks in which Sir Isaac Newton worked out the theories on which much classical science is based have been put online by Cambridge University.

More than 4,000 pages have been scanned, including his annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, containing Newton's laws of motion and gravity.

Newton wrote mainly in Latin and Greek, the scientific language of his time, and was reluctant to publish.

The university plans to put almost all of its Newton collection online.

The papers mark the launch of the Cambridge Digital Library project to digitise its collections.

As well as Principia and Newton's college notebooks, the Newton Papers section of the online library contains his "Waste Book".

The large notebook was inherited from his stepfather, and scholars believe it helped Newton to make significant breakthroughs in the field of calculus.

The Pearl Harbor attacks' few remaining survivors have led US commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the event that changed World War II's course.

About 120 veterans joined military leaders at the Hawaii naval base as a moment of silence was observed at the time Japan sprung its offensive.

President Barack Obama called for US flags to be flown at half mast on federal buildings across the country.

Some 2,400 Americans died in the Japanese attacks of 7 December 1941.

President Obama, who was born in Hawaii, hailed veterans of the bombing in a statement marking National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

As time passes, Kodak looks more and more like a truck spinning its wheels in mud. The company hasn't had a profitable year since 2007. Its current chairman, Antonio Perez (a former executive at Hewlett-Packard, another company riding on bald tires), said last month on announcing Kodak's dismal third-quarter results that he's delighted in the profit prospects for its inkjet printers. But does anybody else out there think that desktop printing is a growth market?

Kodak's biggest revenue score of 2010 was $838 million it collected from patent licensing, evidently including a settlement it reached with LG after suing the South Korean company for patent infringement. Through the first three quarters of this year, the same category produced zero. But Perez is still hoping for a big score from another patent sale.

It may be premature to write Kodak off. After all, the company does have more than a century's experience in consumer marketing and a technology portfolio potentially worth billions. But companies that can remake themselves to survive changes on the scale of what Kodak confronts are rare indeed.

IBM has done so, and General Electric, but not many others.

Kodak was once such a pervasive part of our lives that the "Kodak moment," defined as a personal event that demanded to be recorded for posterity, entered our lexicon.

Now when even the most private Kodak moment seems to unfold before the digital gaze of a hundred iPhones, it looks as though Kodak's moment has passed. The circle of life in business is a natural phenomenon, the lesson of which shouldn't be overlooked by companies that seem to have cemented themselves into permanent spots at the top of the world today — including Apple, Google and Facebook. The lesson is: Nothing lasts forever.

A Chilean judge is seeking the extradition of former US military attache in Chile, Ray Davis, who has been charged with the 1973 killing of a US journalist working in the country.

Reporter Charles Horman disappeared on 17 September 1973 - days after Gen Augusto Pinochet seized power in a coup - and was found shot a day later.

He was investigating links between the CIA and the Chilean military.

His death was the subject of the 1982 Oscar-winning film Missing.

Judge Jorge Zepeda asked the Chilean Supreme Court to authorise an extradition request, so Ray Davis can stand trial in Chile for the murder of Mr Horman and student Frank Teruggi.

The judge's investigation suggests Mr Horman was detained at his home on Chile's Pacific coast by Mr Davis, who allegedly took him to the capital, Santiago.

Mr Davis was the commander of the US military mission in Chile at the time.

To the victors go the spoils. Still, in the Democratic presidential contest four years ago, the losers did pretty well.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is vice president, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is secretary of state.

Christopher J. Dodd went on to be the Senate co-author of the seminal Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and now is the head of the Motion Picture Association of America. (O.K., let’s skip John Edwards.) Similarly, in the 1980 Republican nominating race, the also-rans had bright futures. George H.W. Bush became vice president and later, president. Howard Baker and Bob Dole both went on to be Senate majority leaders; the former subsequently became a White House chief of staff, and the latter, his party’s nominee for president.

In seven weeks, four or five of the current Republican presidential aspirants will no longer be in the race; one or two will probably be gone a month later.

Underscoring the unusual weakness of this contingent, unlike the 1980 or 2008 fields, there is no one in this crop likely to be a future candidate or top player in a Republican administration.

JUST before Christmas in 1952, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., let President Dwight D. Eisenhower know that the man Eisenhower had appointed as secretary to the president, his friend and chief of staff, my godfather, Arthur H. Vandenberg Jr., was a homosexual.

It was part of a pattern of persecution that would destroy thousands of lives and careers. Earlier that year, the American Psychiatric Association’s manual had classified homosexuality as a kind of madness, and Republican senators had charged that homosexuality in the Truman administration was a national security threat. Hoover — the subject of Clint Eastwood’s new film — was determined to stave off such threats.

A public Puritan with a compulsively bureaucratic and controlling personality, he built an intricate system of files on people of influence — personal and confidential, official and unofficial, and all full of dirt. The most damning were the voluminous “Sex Deviate” files on famous actors, syndicated columnists, senators, governors, business moguls and princes of the Roman Catholic Church, just to name a few. There was one on Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president, because some college basketball players being investigated by the F.B.I. for game-fixing claimed that Stevenson, one of “the two best-known homosexuals in the state,” was nicknamed “Adeline.” There was even a file on Eisenhower himself, recording rumors of an affair with Kay Summersby, his driver in Britain during the war.

One was devoted to my godfather because, while he had years of experience in politics and foreign affairs and working for his father, Arthur H. Vandenberg Sr. — a Republican senator from Michigan with a mistress and a file of his own — he also drank, and he wasn’t discreet. Apparently, the file held reports of some incidents with two enlisted men at Camp Lee, Va., in 1942, before he served with and became friends with my father. Worse, at the time Eisenhower appointed him to the White House, he was sharing an apartment in Washington with another man. This was not uncommon. But the other man had been arrested on some morals charge. That was enough for Ike, whom Hoover later described, to an aide to Richard M. Nixon, as “astounded.”

There will always be situations—an armed and barricaded suspect, a man with a knife to his wife’s throat, a school-shooting rampage—that require disciplined, military-like operations. But most of what police are called upon to do, day in and day out, requires patience, diplomacy and interpersonal skills. I’m convinced it is possible to create a smart organizational alternative to the paramilitary bureaucracy that is American policing. But that will not happen unless, even as we cull “bad apples” from our police forces, we recognize that the barrel itself is rotten.

Assuming the necessity of radical structural reform, how do we proceed? By building a progressive police organization, created by rank-and-file officers, “civilian” employees and community representatives. Such an effort would include plans to flatten hierarchies; create a true citizen review board with investigative and subpoena powers; and ensure community participation in all operations, including policy-making, program development, priority-setting and crisis management. In short, cops and citizens would forge an authentic partnership in policing the city. And because partners do not act unilaterally, they would be compelled to keep each other informed, and to build trust and mutual respect—qualities sorely missing from the current equation.

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let's not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

That these changes in the police force have occurred is not in dispute. They've been sufficiently open that academics can write long papers detailing the changes in police responses to protests from the middle of the 20th century to today. They are described in one July 2011 paper by sociologist Patrick Gillham called, "Securitizing America." During the 1960s, police used what was called "escalated force" to stop protesters.

"Police sought to maintain law and order often trampling on protesters' First Amendment rights, and frequently resorted to mass and unprovoked arrests and the overwhelming and indiscriminate use of force," Gillham writes and TV footage from the time attests. This was the water cannon stage of police response to protest.

But by the 1970s, that version of crowd control had given rise to all sorts of problems and various departments went in "search for an alternative approach." What they landed on was a paradigm called "negotiated management." Police forces, by and large, cooperated with protesters who were willing to give major concessions on when and where they'd march or demonstrate. "Police used as little force as necessary to protect people and property and used arrests only symbolically at the request of activists or as a last resort and only against those breaking the law," Gillham writes.

That relatively cozy relationship between police and protesters was an uneasy compromise that was often tested by small groups of "transgressive" protesters who refused to cooperate with authorities. They often used decentralized leadership structures that were difficult to infiltrate, co-opt, or even talk with. Still, they seemed like small potatoes.

Then came the massive and much-disputed 1999 WTO protests. Negotiated management was seen to have totally failed and it cost the police chief his job and helped knock the mayor from office. "It can be reasonably argued that these protests, and the experiences of the Seattle Police Department in trying to manage them, have had a more profound effect on modern policing than any other single event prior to 9/11," former Chicago police officer and Western Illinois professor Todd Lough argued.

No one wanted to be Seattle and police departments around the country began to change. "In Chicago for example, paramilitary gear such as that worn by the Seattle Police was quickly acquired and distributed to officers," Lough continued, "and the use of force policy was amended to allow for the pepper spraying of passive resistors under certain circumstances." (That emphasis is mine.)

9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.

This is what it looked like on the ground in Miami in 2003. Occupy protests have shown that variations on this unprecedented show of force have now become commonplace.

Ronald Reagan insisted on two things upon taking office as governor of California. One was the head of Clark Kerr, president of the University of California. The second was the imposition of tuition on UC students. Kerr was soon gone, replaced by Charles Hitch. The Regents of the University of California also agreed to impose education fees for the first time on the university's students. Excuses were made that the new fees were not really the adoption of tuition, but Senator Rodda insisted that the fees were exactly that—a violation of the university's long history of tuition-free public education. Tuition meant payment for education, while student fees were presumably payment for incidentals. The line between the two concepts was being blurred—or even erased.

Once the fees were in place, it naturally followed that the Regents could not resist raising them periodically. In this paper, prepared by Sen. Rodda to provide information to his Democratic colleagues, the Senator refers to a pending proposal to set student fees at $600 per year by 1971-72. By way of comparison, University of California undergraduate fees were $8129 in 2005-06.

Sen. Rodda also refers to the community college system in this paper. Tuition was later imposed on community college students, an explicit tuition system based on a payment per academic unit. Tuition-free higher education in California belongs to history, not the present. Rodda was prescient in his warning.

The Framers of our Constitution meant Congress to be a great deliberative body. It has become an embarrassment. Congress doesn't deliberate to resolve important national issues. Congress fundraises, and postures to fundraise, to support the next fight for control.
The transformation to this "Fundraising Congress" began in 1993. Newt Gingrich was its leader. After claiming Republican control of both houses of Congress in 1995 — for the first time in 40 years — Gingrich launched his new army of reformers on a project to secure permanent control of that institution, and of government.
Fundraising was the key to that strategy of control. The Republicans came to power raising a then unheard of amount of money: $618.42 million in the election cycle ending in 1994, compared to the Democrats' $488.68 million.
In the four years between 1994 and 1998, Republican candidates and party committees would raise over $1 billion. Never before had a party come anywhere close to raising that amount of money, because never before had any party's leaders so effectively focused the energy of their members on this single task: fundraising.
Gingrich concentrated the "work" of Congress into a three-day "work" week. He sent his caucus home for the rest of the week, in part so that they had time necessary to launch cross-country fundraising missions.
He exploded the number of committees, radically increasing the number of fund-raising targets. He ended any idea of bipartisanship. Instead, as Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee, has described, the focus of Congress after Gingrich's reforms became the "majority of the majority," (i.e., the majority of the Republicans) polarizing the institution to the end of assuring ever more loyal and energized troops.
Members of Congress now spend between 30%-70% of their time raising money to get re-elected to Congress or to get their party back into power. And not just the Republicans: The Democrats quickly followed the lessons of Professor Gingrich. And in the almost 20 years since he came to power, practically everything about that great institution has changed.
Gone is any semblance of deliberation, or the idea that there is a business of the nation to be done, as opposed to the business of the party in power. Instead, the institution that Gingrich inherited — the one in which Democrats worked with Republicans to pass the most important tax reform in modern history (Reagan's), and in which Republicans led Democrats to break a filibuster in the Senate and pass the most important social legislation in a century (The Civil Rights Act of 1964) — was gone. What replaced it is the completely dysfunctional institution which practically no American has confidence in today.

The US National Archives has released the grand jury testimony of former President Richard Nixon, made after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign.

Jurors asked about almost 19 missing minutes of a key conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff.

The former president swore it was an accident that tapes had been erased, saying "I practically blew my stack."

The secret testimony was given in June 1975 and released by order of a US judge following a historian's request.

Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin has written a number of books about Nixon.

Speaking to the jurors near his home in California, the former president offered no clues as to what might have been discussed during the 18 minute 30 second gap in recordings.


Nixon's testimony was given under oath and contributed to a number of ongoing investigations into the Watergate scandal.

The grand jury was collecting evidence to determine whether to issue criminal charges relating to the Watergate case.

As the United States ends its second war in Iraq, the legacy of the first one still haunts. The memory of the first President Bush’s urging Iraqi Shiites to rebel against the government in 1991, and standing by as thousands were slaughtered, is a tragic counternarrative to the revolutions that have swept the Middle East and a torment that even now complicates relations between the countries.

In an effort to salve the long-festering wounds and to counter Iran’s influence ahead of the military drawdown, the United States ambassador, James F. Jeffrey, has offered Iraq’s Shiite leaders something they have heard very little of from Americans over the years since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003: remorse and humility.

In a move that analysts say is highly unusual for a top-level diplomat, Mr. Jeffrey has lately apologized to Iraqi politicians and tribal leaders in the Shiite-dominated south for the United States inaction during the 1991 popular uprising. Particularly galling for the Iraqis was that President George Bush publicly encouraged the revolt and then allowed American forces to stand by while it was suppressed by Saddam Hussein’s helicopter gunships and execution squads in a bloodbath that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The perception of American betrayal still resonates deeply in the Iraqi psyche, and explains one of this war’s enduring contradictions: that even though the Shiites benefited most from the war that overturned a long reign of tyrannical Sunni rule, they never completed trusted the Americans. Meanwhile, the Middle East revolts this year have reopened the wound of 1991, with Iraqis left to wonder what might have happened if their own revolution had received the same support as Libya’s did this y

Republicans, on the other hand, tend to be more homogenous. The 2008 campaign, however, was the beginning of the end of Republican uniformity, says Professor Steger, with increasing rifts over economic and social issues.

A September Times/CBS poll found signs of this internal discord, with differences of opinion on several subjects among Tea Party supporters, white evangelicals and Republicans who do not support the Tea Party.

The Times/CBS poll showed that right-leaning groups were not completely consistent on certain social issues like same-sex marriage and climate change. A solid majority of white evangelicals, usually a major component of the Republican base, did not support legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship, but a majority of all Republicans said they agreed with civil unions or legal marriage for gay couples. About a third of white evangelicals and non-Tea Party Republicans said climate change was real and was mostly caused by human activity, whereas only 15 percent of Tea Party supporters agreed with that view.

Differences about government priorities and policies emerged, as well. Half of Tea Party supporters said cutting government spending should be the nation’s higher priority, while about the same number of white evangelicals said creating jobs should be more important. About seven in 10 white evangelicals and non-Tea Party Republicans said both tax increases and spending cuts were needed to reduce the federal budget, while half of Tea Party supporters said only spending cuts should be used. And while about half of both white evangelicals and non-Tea Party Republicans said taxes on wealthy households should be increased to balance the budget, only three in 10 Tea Party supporters supported a tax increase on the rich.

These shades of difference among Republicans are adding to the indecision about this year’s slew of candidates, with different candidates appealing to different segments of the party. Professor Steger says the Republican elite was “facing tremendous uncertainty.

The angry responses to Cheney’s book are evidence of how embattled the Bush White House became in its last years, and how central Cheney’s role was. Colin Powell has accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots” in his book. He has challenged Cheney’s claim that he had forced Powell out of the State Department. Powell himself had long made clear that he would serve only four years, and he charged Cheney with lying. Powell also called Cheney’s statements in the book “the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist.” He added, “I think Dick overshot the runway.” Rice responded to Cheney by describing his book as “utterly misleading” and an “attack on my integrity.” Even Donald Trump, in the aftermath of his preposterous hints that he would run for president, gave an interview in which he accused Cheney of “lying.”

Together, Rumsfeld and Cheney served through many crises and many disasters. It is not surprising that in the turbulent post-9/11 years there would be contention, disappointment, failure, sniping and broken friendships. If they had written candidly about these battles, their books would be of real interest. Instead, both men have stuck to their defensive postures. Cheney said in a television interview that his book would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” For the most part, the explosions were tame. But perhaps the most remarkable explosion was one of Cheney’s own statements. Toward the end of his book, he boldly describes the Iraq war — one of the most disastrous events of recent decades — as a great American triumph. The fiasco that nearly destroyed Bush’s presidency was, according to Cheney, “one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency — the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.” If that statement isn’t an “explosion,” it would be hard to know what is.

Experts have a poor understanding of uncertainty. Usually, this manifests itself in the form of overconfidence: experts underestimate the likelihood that their predictions might be wrong.

Examples of this can be found in numerous fields. Economics is an obvious one. In November 2007 — just a month before the economy officially went into recession — economists polled in the Survey of Professional Forecasters thought there was only about a 1 in 500 chance that economic growth would decline by 2 percent or more in 2008. (In fact, it declined by 3.3 percent). Many or perhaps most published findings in medical research are false — researchers cannot reproduce them when they try to re-create the experiment.

But political forecasts may be especially vulnerable to this. A long-term study of expert political forecasts by Philip E. Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found that events that experts deemed to be absolutely impossible in fact occurred with some frequency. In some fields, these zero-percent-likelihood events came into being as much as 20 or 30 percent of the time. (What is an expert, by the way? Mr. Tetlock defines it as anyone who makes a living writing or thinking about politics.)

Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday that he did not support a proposal to create license plates in Texas bearing the Confederate flag, ending speculation over where he stood on an issue that risked becoming divisive in his home state.

The board of the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles has been deadlocked, 4-to-4, on whether to grant a request to issue specialty license plates that show a likeness of the Dixie flag. The nine-member board, all appointed by the governor, has one new member, who has not yet indicated which way he will vote.

In an interview in St. Petersburg, Fla., with the Bay News 9 television station that is to be shown Sunday, Mr. Perry suggested that the proposal, if approved, could renew old divisions and bad memories.

Until recently, newspaper editorial pages overwhelmingly favored Republican presidential candidates. Over the past three decades, however, the endorsement scales have been balancing out, eventually tipping towards the Democrats in the past two presidential elections.

From 1972 to 1988, Republicans carried 84 percent of editorial page endorsements. The 1972 election was the most lopsided. Richard M. Nixon, the incumbent running against then Senator George McGovern, was favored by more than 90 percent of editorial pages.

In our sample, not until 1992 did a Democrat, Bill Clinton, garner more editorial nods than a Republican. The Republican candidates won endorsement majorities in the next two cycles, 1996 and 2000, albeit by less crushing margins.

Senator John Kerry just barely edged George W. Bush in 2004, and President Obama won 64 percent of editorial page endorsements last election. Mr. Obama notched the largest Democratic share of endorsements Editor & Publisher has ever tallied, even including surveys prior to 1972. (Mr. Clinton’s margin ranks second; then comes the 1964 election, when Lyndon Johnson had the support of 440 dailies compared to 359 for Barry Goldwater. The 1964 election was the first cycle in which E&P found more Democratic endorsements than Republican since they began their survey in the 1940s.)

Dr. Pepin’s book, The Origin of AIDS, is gaining attention for some of its surprising conclusions. He collects evidence that the virus spread not only through sexual activity but, crucially, through well-meaning European doctors and nurses fighting tropical diseases in pre-independence Africa.

They used syringes and needles to inject hundreds of patients a day in medical campaigns against diseases such as sleeping sickness, tuberculosis and leprosy. In the process, Dr. Pepin believes, they helped turn a virus infecting a lone ape hunter in Africa into a global epidemic with some 32 million victims.

“The chances that this hunter alone could launch an epidemic are very low,” Dr. Pepin said. “But there are all the chances in the world that he went to be treated for a tropical disease and a little HIV stayed in the syringe. Then the next patient was injected with it intravenously.”

Dr. Pepin got an inkling about the subject from personal experience.

He spent many years working and living in Africa, first landing there as a 22-year-old Quebec med-school graduate in 1980. During a later stint treating sleeping sickness on a Canadian-funded program in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he believes he may have inadvertently passed along the AIDS virus himself.

Electricity failures meant the machines that sterilized syringes didn’t always work; nurses boiled the instruments instead. Dr. Pepin isn’t sure the syringes were properly sterilized, or whether they may have inadvertently passed the AIDS virus from one patient to the next.

“Honestly, I have no memory of asking myself the question at the time,” he said. “But afterwards, I reflected on what I did in good faith. I realized that maybe I had transmitted a bit of the AIDS virus.” The thought, he said, left him with a sense of “humility.”

Dr. Pepin’s research over the years also involved testing the blood of older Africans; and he spent years sifting through historical documents on the colonial period – newspapers, records, academic studies – in capitals across Europe. His turning point, he said, came one day in the southern French city of Marseilles. He was poring over medical archives and found a motherlode of original records crammed with painstaking charts and entries outlining the massive use of injections in colonial Africa.

“That day was a revelation. I realized that these reports probably contained a big part of the explanation of what happened behind the emergence of AIDS,” he said. “If there hadn’t been those medical campaigns, in my opinion, there probably wouldn’t have been an AIDS epidemic.”

Being French-speaking helped him to tackle the mounds of records from the French and Belgian colonial powers, he added.

His work led him to connect the dots between that first bush hunter, who probably got infected with HIV while manipulating chimpanzee meat, to the sex trade in fast-growing African cities decades later. Then, in a more speculative turn, he believes the virus bridged the Atlantic with a single Haitian teacher returning home in the 1960s after working in Zaire, before spreading through a Haitian plasma centre, sex tourism and finally surfacing among gay men in California.

Right-wing media have been hyping the claim that a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks shows that President Obama had planned to "apologize" for the bombing of Hiroshima during his 2009 visit to Japan. But the cable only shows there was speculation from "anti-nuclear groups" that Obama might travel to Hiroshima after expressing support for a "nuclear-free world," and the Obama administration has said no apology was ever planned.

That chart is from a new report from the New York State Comptroller’s office on the securities industry in New York City.

It shows that the average salary in the industry in 2010 was $361,330 — five and a half times the average salary in the rest of the private sector in the city ($66,120). By contrast, 30 years ago such salaries were only twice as high as in the rest of the private sector.

BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

The home of World War II codebreakers at Bletchley Park has been awarded a £4.6m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

The investment will enable the restoration of key codebreaking huts and create a world-class visitor centre at the Buckinghamshire site.

The HLF said new exhibitions and interactive displays will bring Bletchley's story alive.

Bletchley Park was the wartime home of the Government Code and Cypher School.

According to a series of letters brought to light by The Nation , Mr. Koch wrote to Hayek in 1973 asking him to be a scholar in residence at the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian group founded by Mr. Koch. Hayek declined, saying that he recently had had surgery in Austria, which made him anxious about “the problems (and costs)” of falling ill far from home.

An associate of Mr. Koch’s wrote back to suggest that Hayek could take advantage of the generosity of Social Security if he came to this country (and noting that it would be prohibitive to secure him private health insurance here.) Mr. Koch followed up with another letter, enclosing a brochure on the benefits of Social Security, and noting that while in this country, Hayek (who had become eligible for government benefits because of his earlier employment at the University of Chicago) would also get free hospital care.

This was more than a decade after Hayek (who died in 1992) had written against Social Security in “The Constitution of Liberty,” calling such safety net programs the pathway to social and moral decay.

Mr. Koch went on to finance several institutions and organizations whose primary mission is to work against government spending and regulation. One, Americans for Prosperity, has given money to Tea Party groups, which surged in membership as they fought against legislation that would expand health care coverage to millions more Americans. (Americans for Prosperity sponsored a bus tour against the legislation.)

The Nation obtained the letters through the Hayek archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. “Nowhere,” the magazine notes, “do they worry that by opting into and taking advantage of Social Security programs they might be hastening a socialist takeover of America. It’s simply a given that Social Security and Medicare work, and therefore should be used.”

In a way, it's easy to feel sorry for Dukakis. The downturn and budget woes of the late '80s were mainly mainly the products of factors beyond his control. Then again, so was the Massachusetts Miracle.

So while it certainly makes sense for Perry to embrace the "Texas Miracle," the Dukakis example should serve as a cautionary tale for him: Live by the boast, die by the boast.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly claimed that "rampant taxation" is "strangling the U.S. economy." But the total U.S. tax burden is "at [the] lowest level since [19]58," and the economy and employment grew at high levels under the Clinton administration, when federal income taxes were higher.

SOME people recite history from above, recording the grand deeds of great men. Others tell history from below, arguing that one person's life is just as much a part of mankind's story as another's. If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already "longer" than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010, according to an updated version of Angus Maddison's figures.

At least 83 Guatemalans are thought to have died not long after being deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhoea in the 1940s, a presidential commission in Washington has heard.

US government scientists infected hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers to study the effects of penicillin.

None of those infected consented.

Guatemala's vice-president said an apology would be made to the people, as local doctors were also involved.

The head of the commission, Amy Gutmann, called the research a "shameful piece of medical history".

The Presidential Commission for the study of Bioethical Issues said some 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in all the research that took place between 1946 and 1948.

In an interview on NBC’s “Dateline,” former Vice President Dick Cheney says that his new book, “In My Time,” will have “heads exploding all over Washington.” Whatever readers think of Mr. Cheney’s politics, their heads are more likely to explode from frustration than from any sense of revelation. Indeed, the memoir — delivered in dry, often truculent prose — turns out to be mostly a predictable mix of spin, stonewalling, score settling and highly selective reminiscences.

The book, written with his daughter Liz, reiterates Mr. Cheney’s aggressive approach to foreign policy and his hard-line views on national security, while sidestepping questions about many of the Bush administration’s more controversial decisions, either by cherry-picking information (much the way critics say the White House cherry-picked intelligence in making the case to go to war against Iraq) or by hopping and skipping over awkward subjects with loudly voiced assertions. It’s ironic that Mr. Cheney — who succeeded in promulgating so many of his policy ideas through his sheer mastery of bureaucratic detail — should have written a book that is often so lacking in detail that it feels like a blurred photograph.

Mr. Cheney writes that “the liberation of Iraq” was “one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency” — never mind the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that were cited as a chief reason for the invasion, or a botched occupation that allowed an insurgency to metastasize for years. He describes Guantánamo as “a model facility — safe, secure, and humane” and writes that the C.I.A.’s program of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was “safe, legal, and effective.” As for Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Cheney praises President Bush for “personally” dedicating “hundreds of hours not only to ensuring an effective federal response but to reaching out to people who needed to know that their government cared about them.”

The famously tight-lipped Mr. Cheney does serve up some interesting tidbits in these pages. We learn that the “undisclosed locations” at which he spent so much time were often Camp David or the vice president’s residence; that he wrote a letter of resignation dated March 28, 2001, and told an aide to give it to the president were he ever to suffer a heart attack or stroke that left him incapacitated; and that he spent several weeks unconscious in 2010 after heart surgery.

In addition to genuinely moving accounts of his health difficulties, there are some affectionate portraits of family members in these pages, and an apology of sorts to his friend Harry Whittington, whom he shot in the face while quail hunting: “I, of course, was deeply sorry for what Harry and his family had gone through. The day of the hunting accident was one of the saddest of my life.”

On substantive matters of policy, however, this volume tends to rehash well-known debates even as it circumvents important questions. Mr. Cheney offers no real explanation for why the Bush administration did not do more to try to prevent the 9/11 attacks, given the warnings from the counterterrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, and an Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney reveals in his autobiography he urged President George W Bush in 2007 to bomb a suspected nuclear site in Syria.

According to the New York Times, Mr Cheney says in his forthcoming book that he was "a lone voice" for military action against Syria.

Mr Cheney also reportedly criticises Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, who each served as secretary of state.

In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir will be published next week.

Mr Cheney writes in the autobiography that he made his case on Syria in June 2007, according to the New York Times.

"But I was a lone voice," Mr Cheney wrote. "After I finished, the president asked, 'Does anyone here agree with the vice-president?' Not a single hand went up around the room."

He says other Bush advisers were reluctant to back his plan because of "the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction".

The Israelis bombed the remote desert site in Syria later in 2007.

The New York Times says that in his book Mr Cheney accuses Condoleezza Rice of being naive in efforts to forge a nuclear agreement with North Korea.

And he believed Colin Powell tried to undermine President Bush by criticising administration policy to people outside the government.

Spain and Ireland had low debts and budget surpluses on the eve of the crisis. The US financial crisis represented a collapse of confidence in private debt, not public debt. So Schaeuble is just making stuff up, inventing a crisis that didn’t happen rather than dealing with the crisis that did happen.

Unfortunately, he’s not alone. The fiscalization of the crisis story — the insistence, in the teeth of the evidence, that it was about excessive public borrowing — has become an article of faith on both sides of the Atlantic. And that faith has done and will do untold damage.

The answer to what the proper role of government is really lies in what kind of country we want to have. And I think the vast majority of Americans share a common vision for what they want our nation to be. They want our nation to be two things at the same time.

Number one: they want it to be free and prosperous, a place where your economic hopes and dreams can be accomplished and brought up to fruition. That through hard work and sacrifice you can be who God meant you to be. No matter who your parents were, no matter where you were born, no matter how much misfortune you may have met in your life, if you have a good idea, you can be anything if you work hard and play by the rules. Most, if not all, Americans share that vision of a free and prosperous America.

But they also want us to be a compassionate America, a place where people are not left behind. We are a nation that is not going to tolerate those who cannot take care of themselves being left to fend for themselves. We’re not going to tolerate our children being punished for the errors of their parents and society.

So, we are a nation that aspires to two things – prosperity and compassion. And Ronald Reagan understood that. Perhaps better, again, than any voice I’ve ever heard speak on it.

Now America’s leaders during the last century set out to accomplish that, but they reached a conclusion that has placed us on this path, except for the Reagan Administration to be quite frank.

Both Republicans and Democrats established a role for government in America that said, yes, we’ll have a free economy, but we will also have a strong government, who through regulations and taxes will control the free economy and through a series of government programs, will take care of those in our society who are falling behind.

That was a vision crafted in the twentieth century by our leaders and though it was well intentioned, it was doomed to fail from the start. It was doomed to fail from the start first and foremost because it forgot that the strength of our nation begins with its people and that these programs actually weakened us as a people.

You see, almost in forever, it was institutions and society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to.

We took these things upon ourselves and our communities and our families and our homes and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities. All of the sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government’s job.

For those who met misfortune, that wasn’t our obligation to take care of them, that was the government’s job. And as government crowded out the institutions in our society that did these things traditionally, it weakened our people in a way that undermined our ability to maintain our prosperity.

The other thing is that we built a government and its programs without any account whatsoever for how we were going to pay for it. There was not thought given into how this was going to be sustained. When Social Security first started, there was 16 workers for every retiree. Today there are only three for every retiree and soon there will only be two for every retiree.

Program after program was crafted without any thought as to how they will be funded in future years or the impact it would have on future Americans. They were done with the best of intentions, but because it weakened our people and didn’t take account the simple math of not being able to spend more money than you have, it was destined to fail and brought us to the point at which we are at today.

It is a startling place to be, because the 20th Century was not a time of decline for America, it was the American Century. Americans in the 20th Century built here –- we built here –- the richest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world. And yet today we have built for ourselves a government that not even the richest and most prosperous nation in the face of the Earth can fund or afford to pay for. An extraordinary tragic accomplishment, if you can call it that.

And that is where we stand today.

Teddy Roosevelt left office more than 100 years ago, but I think these words rule him out. They probably don’t rule out Warren Harding, but even Calvin Coolidge as governor of Massachusetts signed a maximum-hours bill for women and children. For sure, Rubio’s words condemn Presidents Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Truth be told they condemn Ronald Reagan too, but shhh. They condemn almost every one of the party’s presidential nominees since Wendell Wilkie except Barry Goldwater: Tom Dewey, Bob Dole, and John McCain. And of course they condemn almost every important Republican governor, senator and member of Congress of the post-1945 period, Robert Taft very much included.

One of the effects of the Tea Party movement is to cut the Republican Party off – not only from the measured policy preferences of the American people – but from the Republican Party’s own history. It shrivels the GOP into a party without heroes, or rather a party with only one hero, Ronald Reagan, and otherwise a long succession of false and deluded leaders.

And it points Republicans to a doomed future of continuing failure and recrimination. After all, if almost every elected Republican leader of the past 100 years save Reagan fell short of conservative principle, then it seems overwhelmingly probable that the next Republican leader will also fall short of conservative principle. In which case, conservative principle has become a vehicle for guaranteeing eternal conservative disappointment and alienation. Unhealthy, no?

In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.

Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.

Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.

The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”

In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.

“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues. While he praises Mr. Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney, who made guarding the secrecy of internal deliberations a hallmark of his time in office, divulges a number of conflicts with others in the inner circle.

The Obama team falsely suggests Texas Gov. Rick Perry advocated secession. Perry's actual remarks have been mischaracterized. Perry entertained a reporter's question about secession after a tea party rally in 2009, and warned that "if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?" But he's made clear all along that "we've got a great union" and there is "no reason to dissolve it."

Perry has carelessly commented that Texas has a unique right to secede from the union, having once been an independent republic. That's a myth, historians say. But Perry never advocated secession.

Yet despite the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, hardly anyone in the summer of 1991 predicted that the U.S.S.R. itself would fall apart by the end of the year. It might have limped on for decades, as the Ottoman Empire did in the late 19th century, dying slowly amid civil wars. Yet the second most powerful country in the world simply withered away, not in the classical Marxist sense, but it literally ceased to exist. And the manner of its going was one of the best things. The Soviet people destroyed the Soviet Union, not outsiders, and not through violent conflict.

BUT what followed has not been a democratic idyll. Despite the putsch’s failure, some Soviet residue remains — a “coup culture” that breeds a winner-take-all view of politics. In Russia today, there is no concept of a loyal opposition, no separation of powers, no mass participation in political life and a news media that is far from free.

There was a fleeting opportunity for liberal democracy and genuine free markets to emerge in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. But Yeltsin did little to develop civil society, the rule of law, the emergence of viable political parties or a modernized economy after the failed 1991 coup. A few people became very rich, adopting methods reminiscent of, but even more ruthless than, the 19th-century robber barons in the United States. But a middle class with a stake in how the country is run barely exists.

Yeltsin’s corrupt cronyism encouraged a gangster capitalism from which Russia is still suffering. But the few years that he and Mr. Gorbachev led the country together seem today a halcyon period for freedom in Russia.

Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, Vladimir V. Putin, reversed the few fledgling democratic reforms that had been made, turning Russia into a country that merely goes through the motions of democracy every few years while power remains concentrated in the same hands. Mr. Putin replaced a one-party state with a one-clique state of people around him — a pattern replicated elsewhere in the former Soviet Union — financed almost entirely by booming oil and gas revenues.

Today, he is one of the few to lament the Soviet Union’s passing. Mr. Putin, who in 1991 was a middle-ranking intelligence officer in St. Petersburg, left the K.G.B. during the coup. To him the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was “a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”

But for the millions who had to endure life under the Soviet yoke — born in bloodshed and kept alive for decades through intimidation — its end was long overdue.

Still, 20 years later, as Mr. Putin’s continuing influence and popularity attest, the traditional Russian ideal of a strongman in the Kremlin remains. And depressing as it is, if dire economic times come again, a coup d’état still seems as likely a way as any for political change to occur in Russia or many former Soviet states. The Bolsheviks may have disappeared for good when Yeltsin climbed atop a tank in August 1991, but the legacy of authoritarian rule lingers.

Archaeologists believe they have found the first pre-Roman planned town discovered in Britain.

It has been unearthed beneath the Roman town of Silchester or Calleva Atrebatum near modern Reading.

The Romans are often credited with bringing civilisation to Britain - including town planning.

But excavations have shown evidence of an Iron Age town built on a grid and signs inhabitants had access to imported wine and olive oil.

Prof Mike Fulford, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, said the people of Iron Age Silchester appear to have adopted an urbanised 'Roman' way of living, long before the Romans arrived.

In 1961, East Germany erected a wall -- initially barbed wire, eventually concrete -- in the middle of Berlin to prevent its citizens from fleeing the communist country to West Germany during the height of the Cold War. It has been reported that 136 people died while trying to escape, but the total number is unknown. The wall finally came down at the beginning of November in 1989, part of the reunification of East and West Germany. Here are images from this past weekend’s recognition of the construction of the wall 50 years ago, as well as historic images.

Even at this date — on the 66th anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb against a city — few Americans know that among the tens of thousands victims in Hiroshima were at least a dozen and perhaps more American prisoners of war. This was kept from the American people—even the families of the Americans — for decades, along with so much else related to the atomic bombings (as revealed in my new book).

Do the former directors of the institutions that collapsed during the financial crisis have anything to worry about? If the experience of Enron is any example, the answer is a resounding no.

A look back at the career paths of onetime Enron directors indicates that the former directors of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers will continue their prominent careers.

Enron collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001 amid accusations of accounting improprieties and outright fraud. The scandal sent shock waves through corporate America, but compared with the global financial crisis, it almost seems small and quaint.

Still, in the case of Enron, unlike in the financial crisis, top corporate executives went to prison. Most prominently, Jeffrey Skilling, a former chief executive of Enron, was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

Yet while some Enron executives paid a price for the scandal, it is a different story with Enron’s former directors — the people charged with overseeing the company. A search of their current whereabouts shows that they have recovered nicely from the scandal.

The truth is that the United States doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one. There’s no debt limit in the Constitution. And, if Congress really wants to hold down government debt, it already has a way to do so that doesn’t risk economic chaos—namely, the annual budgeting process. The only reason we need to lift the debt ceiling, after all, is to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we’ll face an absurd scenario in which Congress will have ordered the President to execute two laws that are flatly at odds with each other. If he obeys the debt ceiling, he cannot spend the money that Congress has told him to spend, which is why most government functions will be shut down. Yet if he spends the money as Congress has authorized him to he’ll end up violating the debt ceiling.

After months of slow-motion capitulation, President Obama has cut an eleventh-hour deal with Republican leaders to raise the debt ceiling. After vowing to heed the public outcry for a balanced approach, he has instead consented to a plan that manages to run rough-shod over the poor and middle-class, coddles those who caused the recession, imperils the government’s two most popular entitlement programs, and virtually guarantees that our economy will continue to falter.

In other words, just another day at the office for our 44th president.

I have no doubt that Barack Obama wants to do right by the country, and that he genuinely believes giving in to every Republican demand (and then some) is his only play. But to me, the debt deal proves once and for all that Obama lacks the courage to lead effectively. The evidence resides not just in his policies, but in his words.

To put it bluntly: every time Obama opens his mouth, what comes out is a bloodless, abstract drone. The central failure of his presidency has been one of rhetoric. In the interest of appearing reasonable, he comes across as feckless and pliant, a weak man who can't (or won't) speak in the urgent moral terms his historical moment demands.

Instead, he has ceded the national conversation to his "Republican friends," who learned long ago that the media will slavishly transcribe and trumpet the most inflammatory jibe uttered each day, whether it contains even a grain of truth.

And thus, around my house -- as in progressive households across the country -- we have taken up a sad little parlor game called What We Wish Obama Had Said. I’m pretty sure you know the rules already…

This shows what everyone was supposed to know: we had an awesome performance in the generation following the war (despite very high tax rates on the rich and a very strong union movement); we had a long period of poor productivity performance that spanned the Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush I administrations; we then had a revival during the Clinton administration, but even so not up to postwar standards. By the way, I don’t give Clinton credit for that revival; it was about learning to use technology. But in any case, there is no hint of a Reagan miracle in the data.

So what on earth is going on with people like Boskin and Taylor? It’s not hard to guess; but as Dan Quayle said, a mind is a terrible thing to lose.

A spectacular increase during the high-tax, strong-union postwar generation; fitful improvement since, with the only sustained rise during the Clinton years. That’s the story; it’s amazing how many people don’t know it.

Oh, by the way, GW Bush presided over pretty good productivity growth but terrible job growth, even before the recession. So the overall result was poor.

Medieval suits of armour were so exhausting to wear that they could have affected the outcomes of famous battles, a study suggests.

Scientists monitored volunteers fitted with 15th Century replica armour as they walked and ran on treadmills.

They found that the subjects used high levels of energy, bore immense weight on their legs and suffered from restricted breathing.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The effect of the heavy armour was so great, that the researchers believe it may have have had an impact on the Battle of Agincourt.
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“Start Quote

It is a huge fraction of the wearer's body weight”

Dr Graham Askew University of Leeds

In this famous Anglo-French conflict of 1415, French knights were defeated by their English counterparts, despite the fact that they heavily outnumbered them.

The researchers say their study suggests that the armour-clad French, who had to trek through a muddy field to meet the stationary English line, were so slowed and exhausted by their march that they would have stood little chance.

For these reasons, many legal scholars, like Jack Balkin of the Yale Law School, view the debt limit as a national security issue that would justify a presidential response equivalent in magnitude to what would be justified by a foreign invasion or an oil blockade. Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas law school notes that Franklin D. Roosevelt justified his extraordinary actions on the economy in 1933 on the grounds that the economic crisis was as important as war.

Although this view has been rejected by the Treasury, Professors Balkin, Levinson and other legal scholars assert that if Congress adamantly refuses to raise the debt limit until default is the only option, then the Constitution gives the president the authority to act unilaterally. This could be done under Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which says the “validity” of the public debt “shall not be questioned.”

Even Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who rejects the Section 4 option, says failure to raise the debt limit would empower the president to take actions that would normally be illegal, such as impounding funds in order to prioritize debt payments.

Throughout our history, great presidents have pushed the limit of what the Constitution permitted when circumstances demanded it –- as when Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from the French despite lacking any constitutional authority to do so.

A debt crisis resulting from Congressional irresponsibility may force the onetime constitutional law professor Barack Obama to do the same.

Is it accurate when the media portrays the atheist movement as a club for old white men? It’s undeniable that most of the time men outnumber women, whether you’re looking at conference attendees or conference speakers, blog readers or best-selling authors. But when Monica Shores wrote that “no women are currently recognized as leaders or even mentioned as a force within the movement,” the atheist community cried out.

Why? Because it’s blatantly untrue.

Women atheists not only exist–we’ve played pivotal roles within the secular community. The most vocal atheist activist at the beginning of the modern movement was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who founded American Atheists in 1963 and was instrumental in the removal of compulsory prayer from public schools in the US. While her personality was off-putting to some, it is undeniable that she brought atheism into the public eye.

Since then, women continue to fill leadership positions in the movement. Lori Lipman Brown is the founding director of Secular Coalition for America, the only lobbying group for atheist, agnostic and humanist Americans. Annie Laurie Gaylor is co-founder and current co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization devoted to upholding the separation of church and state. Camp Quest, a summer camp for children of parents with naturalistic worldviews, was co-founded by Helen Kagin and currently has Amanda Metskas as its executive director. Lyz Liddell is director of campus organizing for the Secular Student Alliance. Debbie Goddard is the director of African Americans for Humanism and campus outreach coordinator at the Center for Inquiry. Before someone quips that there are no atheist women in foxholes, Kathleen Johnson is the founder of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, in addition to being vice president of American Atheists.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.