Headlines edition

Tuesday headlines: There’s probably a moral here.

Putin hugs Assad during a rare meeting at a resort on the Black Sea. Putin promised to call Trump afterward to let him know how it went.

Justice Department takes “a surprisingly tough stance” by attempting to stop AT&T Inc.’s takeover of Time Warner Inc. Harvard’s admissions policies are also getting a hard look.

"The end of the Merkel era has surely begun." Uncertainty in Germany makes Emmanuel Macron the top leader in Europe.

The top officer at US Strategic Command says a presidential order to launch nukes can be ignored if deemed illegal.

White House Press Secretary asks pool reporters what they're thankful for. "The First Amendment."

For all the absurdities and hypocrisy, Ross Douthat says Ken Starr was right; Clinton should have been pushed out.

“I have learned a great deal as a result of these events, and I hope others will too.” Charlie Rose, like other harassers outed in recent weeks, apparently can’t help but sound like a total asshole.

An academic explains how he uses Google Street View to map urban populations for research purposes.

German regulator bans smartwatches for children, describing them as spying devices.

"Volcanism has coincided with most, if not all, mass extinctions." Volcanos are the worst serial killers.

“The fact that Charles Manson and his family looked like hippies and did lots of LSD gave a new breed of magazine journalists just what they wanted to see—the dark side to the youth movement they’d helped invent.” Charles Manson was a “scab mite” who arrived at the perfect time and place “to be enshrined in Baby Boomer lore.”

Strava updates its global map of human activity, with "a total recorded activity duration of 200 thousand years."

Inside baseball notes on that $450,312,500 Da Vinci. "There's probably a moral here, but I have no idea what it is."

Video: Famed photographer Martin Parr demonstrates that he’s an adult who enjoys coloring books, especially his own.

Silent reading is a relatively new, dangerous form of leisure for Westerners. For centuries, Europeans read aloud.

There's only one Rooster in the world who eats turkey: Presenting the Long List for the 2018 Tournament of Books.