Douglas London, who retired during Trump’s tenure after a 34-year career in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, penned the editorial published Wednesday for the news site Just Security. In his article, London, an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, warned that the president was more focused on garnering attention than national security. “When it comes to intelligence, like with so much else, President Donald Trump likes big names,” the former intelligence officer wrote....

The two Georgia runoff elections, scheduled for January 5 with early voting starting on December 14, will determine control of the Senate, meaning Biden’s ability to push through a Democratic agenda under his first term. But a number of pro-Trump Republicans have taken to Parler, the “free-speech” social media platform, to discourage members of their own party from voting. Screenshots shared by reporter Marcus Baram showed Trump supporters invoking a conspiracy theory about “rigged” voting machines to urge a boycott of the upcoming elections in Georgia....

When he would go on road trips, he said, his trash cans would get overturned and garbage would be spread on his lawn. When he went to his local police station, he got a disingenuous smile and the assurance that it was probably just raccoons. Russell knew better—and responded shrewdly. He asked where he could get a gun permit. You know, to deal with those raccoons. After that, Russell said, his trash cans were never overturned again....

Yet his local cavalry commanding officer asserted that Lieutenant Reagan was a “greater ‘swordsman’ " than Errol Flynn–a remark I gathered was meant metaphorically. If so, Dutch was shy about communicating it. We guffawed over a magazine spread of suggestive “swimming lesson” cheesecakes that showed him intertwining limbs with a buxom starlet (RONALD REAGAN SHOWS SUSAN HAYWARD THE PROPER POSITION). Their couplings reminded me of nothing so much as Greek sculpture: a cold choreography of elbows, knees, and clenched buttocks....

No, brain surgery this definitely isn’t. To get in cheaply, one needn’t have friends in high places; just buy a Slurpee down at the 7-Eleven store and save the cup. To get in for nothing, just show up at your local arena on the advertised tryout day and attempt to pass the rigorous contender physical. About 2,500 auditioned in Cleveland; almost as many as showed up at Madison Square Garden....

Real Madrid show off new kit for 2017-18 Madrid unveiled their new strip in images featuring a number of Adidas athletes, including Gareth Bale, Marcelo, Toni Kroos, Sergio Ramos, Karim Benzema, Zinedine Zidane and even Nacho. But there was no sign of James or Morata, even though both of those players are also under contract with the German sports brand. Morata is wanted by both Manchester United and AC Milan this summer, while James is interesting a number of Europe’s elite clubs, including the Red Devils....

As investigators told it, Tim and Angie Phillips of Buffalo, S.C., were entertaining their friends Carl Sydney White and Sonja Phillips at a family cookout last week when the subject of Susan Smith came up. White, 29, and Tim Phillips, 26, were lifelong buddies; Sonja Phillips, who was not related to Tim, was White’s girlfriend. The Phillipses’ three young daughters were there, along with Sonja Phillips’s two girls and a 3-year-old boy for whom Sonja often baby-sat....

Fortunately, treatments are improving, and an understanding of cancer on the molecular level has led to improvements in survival as well. We will look at some of the types of oncology professionals, common (and uncommon symptoms), and how it may be diagnosed and treated. Basics While the term “Onco” means mass, and “logy” means study, not all cancers cause a mass. There are hundreds of types of cancer that may arise from epithelial cells (such as breast ducts and airways in the lungs), connective tissue (such as sarcomas), or blood cells (such as leukemias and lymphomas)....

way. It improved life modestly for millions of people and showed that government could orchestrate constructive change. There are small and large lessons in this. The small lessons involve poverty; the large lessons involve politics. One little-known fact is that we have made gains against poverty in recent decades–and welfare reform deserves some credit. The poverty rate among blacks has fallen sharply, though it’s still discouragingly high. From 1968 to 1994 it barely budged, averaging 32....

Call it Grade Conflation. Spurred by reform proposals around the nation, educators are discarding traditional age groupings. Instead, they are once again turning to multiage classrooms. Kentucky has mandated that every school in the state offer multiage classes for kids from 5 to 9. In Cincinnati, officials are aiming to have all classes be multiage from kindergarten through 10th grade by 2001. These aren’t the one-room schoolhouses of frontier lore; they more closely resemble the popular but flawed open-classroom experiments of the late 1960s....

One Million Moms, which has previously protested Toy Story 4 for presenting a lesbian couple, issued the call to action on its website after a Drag Queen Story Hour took place at a public library in Atlanta. Local performer Miss Terra Cotta Sugarbaker was joined by Atlanta mayor Keisha Bottoms at the event. After initial complaints, the storytelling session was allegedly removed from the library’s public calendar listings, but was not canceled....

Data published by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University shows that of the 47,313 people involved in the program as of September, less than 10,000 had seen their cases completed, while more than 37,000 were left pending. Of those whose cases had been completed, 5,085 had faced removal orders, while another 4,471 saw their cases dismissed without a decision and at least 4 left through “voluntary departure....

There are about a million ways to finish that sentence. Only Winston can throw three first-quarter interceptions against Florida then throw two TDs to give No. 1 Florida State a 21-16 halftime lead. Only Winston can throw another interception in the second half and watch the Gators miss two field goals and drop a would-be first down on the final drive. Of course, the Seminoles escaped with a 24-19 win....

The Open is the only one of the four PGA Tour majors that is not held on U.S. soil. Instead, it is always held in the U.K. and this year, the tournament will be making its return to St. Andrews to play on one of the oldest courses ever. The world’s top golfers will be in attendance for the event, as all but one of the top 50 in the world will be at the event....

Trained using text from 8 million web pages, users could give GPT-2 a prompt—typically a sentence or two—and the model can create text that reads like natural English-language writing, even if the ideas contained within the words don’t always relate to anything in the real world. “You can prompt the model with whatever text you want, and it will try to guess how to complete it,” Presser told Newsweek....

The number of young people aged 0 to 19 years old being poisoned by opioids has decreased since 2010, but the proportion of suspected suicides and cases that needed critical care treatment increased between 2005 and 2018. Experts in pediatric medicine who conducted the study told Newsweek more needs to be done to identify children with mental health issues, and help them and their families to access the right services....

“Work remains stopped in the area while all established procedures are followed,” Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) spokesman Eric Carpenter told the Orange County Register. The bones were found next to the Interstate 405 freeway, near an overpass that is not being identified per the request of the OCTA to make sure the remains stay protected. The overpass was in the process of being widened, one of eighteen scheduled for improvement during the $1....

Data shared by the Oregon Health Authority said 319 children under 10 had confirmed or presumptive positive cases by Tuesday, June 30. At the end of May, only 58 cases within that age group had been reported to the OHA. The multiplying case numbers in young children was first reported Wednesday by The Oregonian, which said the age group had the fastest-growing number of new cases than any other in the state....