No 10 says no plan to detain British resident on return from imprisonment without trial in US military camp where he was beaten.

One Saturday morning in August, Pastor Farris Wilks, a brawny man with a close-cut beard, walked up to the altar of the church he leads, the Assembly of Yahweh, 7th Day.

Judy Clarke excelled at saving the lives of notorious killers. Then she took the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. By Patrick Radden Keefe.

They maintained an intellectual companionship for decades—colored, it should be said, by an element of the erotic. By Barry Gewen.

In an open letter to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the President of the Pontifical Council, Pope Francis said priests will be able to grant forgiveness to women who have had abortions.

Tim Campbell identifies a problem with the standard view of self-defense.

A new study sheds light on a common side effect of dementia—the loss of morals. Strohminger’s research depends in part on an extremely rare type of brain cell, the spindle neuron. Outside of the sharpest mammals, like dolphins, elephants, and great apes, no other animal shares them with us.

Janet Geipel of the University of Trento in Italy posed fictional scenarios to German-, Italian-, and English-speaking college students in each student’s native language and in a second language that they spoke almost fluently. What Geipel found in her July 2015 study is that “the use of a foreign language, as opposed to a native language, elicited less harsh moral judgments.” She concluded that a distance is created between emotional and moral topics when speaking in a second language.

How much is your attention on the Internet really worth? By Tim Hwang.

How six survivors experienced the atomic bomb and its aftermath. By John Hersey. (August 31, 1946)

In the months after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government tried to cover up what it had done. By Susan Southard.

A US federal judge has ruled that Idaho’s law banning secret filming of animal abuse at agricultural facilities is unconstitutional, giving animal rights activists across the country hope that the decision will pave the way to overturn similar laws in other states.

In an age of social-media shaming, a single tweet can launch a crusade. But maybe Ricky Gervais should have picked another woman to mess with. By Kerry Howley.

Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

A judge found that an accused Taliban fighter may still be held even if the administration considers the United States’ war in Afghanistan to be over. By Charlie Savage.

A new implant that wirelessly delivers drugs directly into the brain brings up challenging questions for neuroethicists. By Zachary Siegel.

Barack Obama toured the El Reno Federal Correction Institution in Oklahoma last week, making him the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. He took the occasion to reiterate some points from his lengthy speech about criminal-justice reform, delivered earlier in the week before the NAACP in Philadelphia. He was philosophical, too, as he reflected on the way some young people end up in prison for mistakes...

When I was chatting with Linda Calhoun at the goat dairy, she brought up the “justification by faith, not works” issue as an argument against religion. What kind of God, she argued, would forgive someone who lived a life that harmed others (Hitler is the classic example), if that person simply confessed on his deathbed that he accepted Jesus as a personal savior?

The victims of crime who go to prisons to confront criminals, and why they do it. By Mark Obbie.

“Like torture and genocide, preventive war is a foreign policy option which civilized countries deny to themselves, at some cost if necessary.” By Michael Lind.