On August 7, 1974, a trio of Republican politicians made a sombre journey from Capitol Hill to the White House. Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and Representative John Rhodes had dedicated their professional lives to the conservative movement and to the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party. But, on this occasion, they chose to put the interests of their country ahead of the partisan concerns of the G.O.P. They had come to level with Rochard Nixon, their fellow-Republican and the President of the United States. The three men told Nixon that the wounds of Watergate had finally cut too deep. His party was abandoning him. It was time for the President to go. He announced his resignation the next day.

A massive ransomware attack was carried out Friday, hitting hospitals, companies and government offices in nearly 100 countries.It spread through a vulnerability leaked last month in a trove of hacking tools believed to belong to the NSA. The ransomware outbreak has reignited the debate about when spy agencies should disclose these vulnerabilities — especially when people’s lives are at stake.The NSA and other spy agencies look for software vulnerabilities and then build tools to target and exploit them. Under current laws, they don’t have to report the flaws to the company at risk. Instead, they can use them for intelligence gathering or law enforcement.The leaked hacking tools publicized a Windows vulnerability. Even though Microsoft released a patch in March, computers and networks that hadn’t updated their systems were still at risk. The ransomware, called WannaCry, locked down all the files on an infected computer and asked the computer’s administrator to pay in order to regain control of them.

Eighty years after the first Americans went to war against Nazi-backed fascists, a small group of historians trying to preserve the volunteers’ memory has found their services unexpectedly in demand.“Why are people puzzled over the meaning of that word, fascism?” asked Peter Carroll, a historian of the Spanish civil war at Stanford University. “Do I think Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler? No. But there are patterns of contempt for opposition by political leaders that are as unacceptable and intolerable as National Socialism.”Spain remembers: war veterans honoured Read moreFor decades, Carroll has worked with a nonprofit, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (Alba), whoch hosted reunions for the volunteers. As the survivors aged, the nonprofit turned to awarding human rights work, and more recently started a workshop for high school teachers on how to teach history in an age when politics feels inescapable.

Just 29 percent of Americans say they approve of President Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, while 38 percent disapprove, according to results from a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 32 percent of respondents don’t have enough to say on the matter.Yet among those who say they have read, seen or heard “a lot” about the firing, 53 percent say they disapprove, versus 33 percent who approve.The NBC/WSJ poll — conducted May 11-13, after Trump’s dismissal of Comey — doesn’t show a significant change in the president’s overall standing.Trump’s job-approval rating stands at 39 percent, whoch is one point lower than last month’s NBC/WSJ survey — well within the poll’s margin of error.Thirty-eight percent of Americans hold a positive view of the president, while 52 percent have a negative opinion — again mostly unchanged from last month’s 39 percent positive/50 percent negative score. (By comparison, the FBI has a 52 percent positive/16 percent negative score in the new poll, and Comey’s is 18 percent positive/26 percent negative.)