Hanging in the Louvre Museum in Paris is an imposing painting, The Preaching of St Paul at Ephesus. In this 1649 work by Eustache Le Sueur, the fiery apostle lifts his right hand as if scolding the audience, while clutching a book of scripture in his left. Among the rapt or fearful listeners are people busily throwing books into a fire. Look carefully, and you see geometric images on some of the pages.

Phoenix mom Claudia Faudoa joined dozens of activists Monday who called the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to relax standards on power plant emissions, like mercury, an “attack on American children.” “I’ve traveled all the way from Arizona this morning to tell you that my children are the most precious resource I have,” Faudoa said at a public hearing on the proposed changes.

President Trump’s budget blueprint for the next decade relies on up to $1.2 trillion in revenue that might not materialize. The budget assumes the government will collect as much as that amount between 2020 and 2029 from taxes the administration opposes or from scheduled tax increases that are likely to draw strong business opposition. The $1.2 trillion estimate comes from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an independent bipartisan nonprofit.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the team he assembled to investigate U.S. President Donald Trump and his associates have been funded through the end of September 2019, three U.S. officials said on Monday, an indication that the probe has funding to keep it going for months if need be.

Dr. Jennifer Roberts, program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s information innovation office, talks about what cyber capabilities are in the works.

Advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) say that we should understand all government spending as being funded by seignorage, which is the technical term for when a government creates new money and then spends it. This then allows them to say things like “taxes don’t fund spending” and other bumper-sticker type slogans that mostly just confuse people.

After almost 50 years of being neglected, it appears the moon is once again a hot destination. On Thursday morning, alongside both former and current astronauts — as well as David Saint-Jacques via satellite from the International Space Station — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada has committed to participate in the Lunar Gateway, a NASA-backed orbiting space platform. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2022.

The controversial topic of the first babies born from gene-edited embryos was one of the most censored on Chinese social media last year, according to researchers at the University of Hong Kong. On 11 February, media researchers Marcus Wang and Stella Fan posted an article to the news website Global Voices in which they describe a censorship project they are part of called WeChatscope.

The Supreme Court will hear two cases on Wednesday that never should have been filed in the first place. The outcomes in American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association, two consolidated cases considering the fate of a cross-shaped monument in Maryland, are as preordained as anything in the Supreme Court can be.

The Chinese government blocked 17.5 million would-be plane passengers from buying tickets last year as a punishment for offences including the failure to pay fines, it emerged. Some 5.5 million people were also barred from travelling by train under a controversial “social credit” system which the ruling Communist Party claims will improve public behaviour. The penalties are part of efforts by president Xi Jinping‘s government to use data-processing and other technology to tighten control on society.

Texas Rep. Will Hurd, the sole Republican representing a congressional district along the southern border, said more than 1,000 farmers in his state are at risk of having their land seized by the federal government to facilitate the construction of President Trump's long-promised wall. "In the great state of Texas, we care about a little thing called private property, and there's going to be over 1,000 ranchers and farmers potentially impacted if the government comes in and takes their land," Hurd said on "Face the Nation" Sunday.

The federal government's chief auditor has recommended Congress consider develop legislation to beef up consumers' internet data privacy protections. much like the EU's EU's General Data Protection Regulatio. The recommendation was included in a 56-page report (PDF) issued Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office, the government agency that provides auditing, evaluation and investigative services for Congress. The report was prepared at the request two years ago by Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has scheduled a hearing to discuss the subject for Feb. 26.

Inadvertently, Ilhan Omar revealed that Trump may have picked the right man to implement his policy in Venezuela.

After years of failing to pass a carbon tax, climate hawks are now rallying behind a bold new proposal for tackling global warming. Known as the Green New Deal, this economic stimulus package for the planet promises to dramatically cut carbon emissions through government spending on clean energy jobs, technologies, and infrastructure.

An app that allows Saudi men to track the whereabouts of their wives and daughters is available in the Apple and Google app stores in Saudi Arabia. But the U.S. tech giants are getting blowback from human rights activists and lawmakers for carrying the app. The app, called Absher, was created by the National Information Center, which according to a Saudi government website is a project of the Saudi Ministry of Interior.

The US national-debt load surpassed $22 trillion on Monday, according to the Treasury Department. It's the first time that the total outstanding public debt has topped that threshold. A little less than $16.2 trillion of that debt was held by the public in the form of Treasurys, while the other $5.8 trillion was intragovernmental holdings.

In a memorandum released Monday night, the US Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General informed Air Force leadership that it will evaluate the military's certification of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy for national security missions.

A judge has ruled that the public cannot know the details of a battle between the US government and Facebook on whether or not the social network could be forced to decrypt Facebook Messenger calls… The U.S. Justice Department applied for a court order forcing Facebook to decrypt the calls, something which would appear technically impossible since the app uses end-to-end encryption – meaning Facebook doesn’t have the key.

Two weeks out from the longest government shutdown in United States history—and with the possibility of another still looming—government employees are still scrambling to mitigate impacts on federal cybersecurity defenses. And the stakes are high. Furloughed cybersecurity employees returned to expired software licenses and web encryption certificates, colleagues burned out from working on skeleton crews, and weeks-worth of unanalyzed network activity logs. The job was already hard enough without having to play catch-up.

Representing a Michigan district for a record 59 years, he was one of the last of a group of powerful Democratic committee chairmen on Capitol Hill.