Soon after 9/11, law enforcement and national security officials identified the perpetrators of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

While Osama bin Laden, the attack's architect, was killed in 2011 and al-Qaeda is now a shadow of its former self, New York faces no shortage of potential threats a quarter-century after September 11. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch recently said that New York City now confronts the most perilous threat environment that she has seen in her 18 years in government. "It's an everything, everywhere all at once terrorist threat environment," said Rebecca Weiner, the New York Police Department's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism.

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Russell L. Riley writes at the beginning of "Inside the George W. Bush White House," an oral history of the Bush 43 years, that Peter Baker, a reporter for the New York Times, "speculated that the press corps gets only about 20 percent of the full story within any given White House 'in real time.'" That sounds about right to this former Bush White House staffer—I rated most stories about events in which I participated to be about 80% wrong.

That's no knock on Mr. Baker. It's nearly impossible to get the full story on what's happening inside any White House, particularly one as leak-averse as Mr. Bush's.

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Long before there was a Jewish exile, the Torah already spoke of the Jewish return.

In Parshat Nitzavim, the first of this week's double portion, Moshe tells the Jewish people that a day will come when they will be scattered among the nations. But he also promises that exile will not last forever.

"Then the Lord your G-d will return your captivity and have compassion upon you, and He will return and gather you from all the peoples among whom the Lord your G-d has scattered you" (Devarim 30:3).

Two verses later, Moshe goes even further: "And the Lord your G-d will bring you to the Land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it" (30:5).

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President Trump's Operation Economic Outcast is unleashing a painful wave of financial sanctions on the Iranian regime and its economic enablers.

The plan has a reasonable chance of success. Regime figures are already expressing concern about the Iranian economy, which was collapsing long before the current war erupted.

Still, the Trump administration can dial up the pressure further by weakening the regime's network of terrorist proxies.

Since the 1980s, the Iranian regime has preferred to fight its enemies by proxy, keeping conflict far from its borders. In so doing, the regime has been able to engage in hostile acts against the United States, Israel and other regional actors with little risk.

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Dwight Eisenhower is said to have counseled that if a problem can't be solved, you should enlarge it.

Is Vladimir Putin now applying that maxim perversely? I'll bet you a ruble the CIA thinks so.

The problem Mr. Putin can't solve is, of course, Ukraine. In 2014, the Russian strongman invaded, occupied, and annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. The "international community" merely tut-tutted.

In August 2021, Mr. Putin witnessed President Biden's shambolic and shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan. I'm convinced that led him to believe the U.S. was in retreat and posed no obstacle to his neo-imperialist ambitions.

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This has been a terrible year for the higher education industrial complex. Among the many crises are a year and a half of assaults by the Trump administration against research grants and foreign money, discriminatory hiring and admissions policies and reliance on foreign students.

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Pope Leo XIV began an official visit to Spain (June 6–12) by urging Spaniards to embrace multicultural coexistence with Islam and stop "fanning the flames of polarization" over mass migration from the Muslim world. He said that Christians and Muslims can live together as friends and proceeded to present medieval Spain—which was occupied by Islamic invaders for nearly 800 years—as an interfaith utopia that led to advancements in astronomy, medicine, and science.

The Pope declared:

"Your own history suggests that a culture of encounter, not confrontation, is what fosters stability and prosperity....

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A century ago, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and one of the founders of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois published The Gift of Black Folk, a book that was commissioned by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, as part of a series intended to help Americans appreciate the contributions of minority groups.

DuBois was highly educated and an avid reader of great texts from Plato to Frederick Douglass. The irony of the present moment is that if DuBois were currently a student in a core philosophy class at Texas A&M University, he would be assigned only a redacted version of Plato's great work, The Republic.

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Imagine your physician walks into the exam room, recommends a prescription medication, and casually mentions she's being paid by the company that makes the drug to say so. You'd probably have questions.

You might even find a new doctor.

Now imagine that same scenario playing out on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube — except the advice is coming from a celebrity "influencer" who's very familiar to you, who has an emotional backstory, and a financial arrangement buried somewhere in a sea of hashtags. Millions of people encounter exactly this situation every day, and most of them have no idea it's happening.

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ANYONE WHO spends time with me knows me knows how much I despise litter. For as long as I can remember, I have fumed at the sight of trash on sidewalks, beer cans in the gutter, or garbage flung from passing cars. I often pick up litter when I'm walking, and when my kids were young I made them pick it up, too.

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