How to avert America's Brexit - The Washington Post - 0 views
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there is a meaningful chance that 2016 could begin a retreat of the United States from the mix of economic policies and the global engagement that U.S. businesses have regarded for decades as central to their success — unless business leaders can move decisively to redefine their goals as harmonious with those of working- and middle-class families.
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The key question is how we rise up in more muscular defense of the interests of U.S. workers and industries without doing permanent damage to our economy. We must also demonstrate that government can function and that business can be a constructive partner to it.
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every generation, we seem to witness an election that startles us, triggering tectonic shocks that change our politics and policies for decades to come. This could be one of those elections. Very much like the realignment revealed by the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, U.S. politics might be transforming into a debate less between right and left and more between those voters who are advantaged by globalization and those who are not.
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Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit - BBC News - 0 views
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Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit
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The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after a devastating attack on its lorries near Aleppo on Monday.
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Russia and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved.
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Mosul battle: Iraq gaining momentum against IS - BBC News - 0 views
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The announcement by the Iraqi military that its forces have reached the Tigris River for the first time in the battle for Mosul marks a significant moment in the 12-week campaign to recapture so-called Islamic State's (IS) last major stronghold in the country.
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Broad-based advances suggest that IS resistance is "showing signs of collapse" in east Mosul, as suggested by Brett McGurk, the senior US official in the counter-IS coalition, in a tweet on 8 January.
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Iraqi forces are now present in 35 of east Mosul's 47 neighbourhoods, including the largest and most densely populated parts of the east side.
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Adviser: Russia crucial to Trump's Middle East plans - 0 views
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Walid Phares, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump transition, met with Arab ambassadors Wednesday to brief them about the incoming Trump administration's policy toward the Middle East. "We invited him as an adviser to President-elect Trump," one of the ambassadors said about the meeting at the Arab League offices in Washington.
The American Dream Is Dying: Our Culture Needs Repair | National Review - 0 views
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If you were born in 1940, there was a 92 percent chance you’d do better than your parents. That number has declined every decade since — from 79 percent for those born in 1950, to 62 percent in 1960, 61 percent in 1970, to a low of 50 percent for those born in 1980.
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Even worse, younger people who do better than their parents are highly concentrated in the upper-middle class. Those born outside of the top-30th income percentile were likely to make less than their parents:
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American life expectancy has decreased for the first time in decades. The decline is due to increases in deaths from multiple causes, including heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and suicide.
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The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy - The Atlantic - 0 views
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This go-it-alone mentality works against the ways that, historically, workers have improved their lot. It encourages workers to see unions and government as flawed institutions that coddle the undeserving, rather than as useful, if imperfect, means of raising the relative prospects of all workers.
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It also makes it more likely that white workers will direct their frustration toward racial and ethnic minorities, economic scapegoats who are dismissed as freeloaders unworthy of help—in a recent survey, 64 percent of Trump voters (not all of whom, of course, are part of the white working class) agreed that “average Americans” had gotten less they they deserved, but this figure dropped to 12 percent when that phrase was replaced with “blacks.” (Among Clinton voters, the figure stayed steady at 57 percent for both phrases.
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This is one reason that enacting good policies is, while important, not enough to address economic inequality. What’s needed as well is a broader revision of a culture that makes those who struggle feel like losers.
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Israelis and Palestinians absent from Middle East talks in Paris | World news | The Gua... - 0 views
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Senior diplomats attending a summit in France are aiming to organise a peace conference by the end of the year to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
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Israeli and Palestinian representatives are absent, making the chances of success slim
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French diplomats said they felt compelled to act as the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel was slipping away, with the situation in the region deteriorating.
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Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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geneticists applying new statistical approaches have taken a first shot at both identifying and dating the major population mixture events of the last 4,000 years, with the goal of providing a new source of information for historians.
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Some of the hundred or so major mixing events they describe have plausible historical explanations, while many others remain to be accounted for.
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many populations of the southern Mediterranean and Middle East have segments of African origin in their genomes that were inserted at times between A.D. 650 and 1900, according to the geneticists’ calculations. This could reflect the activity of the Arab slave trade,
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Paris Was My Middle-School Classroom - Tara Isabella Burton - The Atlantic - 0 views
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during the two years I spent on-and-off as a homeschooled middle-schooler (spanning what would have been the seventh and eighth grades), the opportunity to work at my own pace and largely develop my own curriculum provided me with a level of academic intensity and emotional as well as intellectual independence unavailable (and, indeed, unaffordable) through more traditional means.
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I was encouraged to spend as much time as possible outside on my bicycle, visiting the historical sites that interested me most, teaching myself to communicate out of sheer necessity. I was given free rein to explore the household bookshelves—to craft a humanities course according to my own interests. Textbooks and popular history books were readily available; my mother encouraged me to “read them like novels”—in other words, to visualize the vast panorama of human history not as a series of facts to be memorized, but as the stories: vivid and gripping, of real people, people I could care about and remember.
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It's all too easy, as a child raised in the hothousing-heavy environment of New York City, to associate self-worth with grades, external standards, whether or not a teacher approved of my stance, whether or not my sixth-grade geography test would get me into Harvard six years later.
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Other Nations Offer a Lesson to Egypt's Military Leaders - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Is the era of the military big man back?
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The turmoil highlights the central role of the military in some postcolonial Muslim countries, where at least in the fitful early stages of democracy, it forcefully imposes itself as the self-appointed arbiter of power and the guardian of national identity.
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But a look at other Muslim countries that have struggled with democratic transitions, including two other polestars of the Muslim world, Pakistan and Turkey, should provide a kind of warning to General Sisi.
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Palestinians Make a Surprise Move, and Mideast Talks Falter - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Surprising the United States and Israel, the Palestinian leadership formally submitted applications on Wednesday to join 15 international agencies, leaving the troubled Middle East talks brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry on the verge of breakdown.
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relayed to the appropriate body for each of the 15 treaties and conventions the Palestinians want to join, adding that there is “a whole procedure involved” in examining the documents. “You basically submit that you want to accede and then it goes to the depository and there’s a process of review,” Ms. Ramming said. “To say this takes effect tomorrow, that’s a bit misleading.”
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In that planned deal, the United States would release from prison Jonathan J. Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel more than 25 years ago, while Israel would free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and slow construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.Mr. Abbas, who had vowed not to seek membership in international bodies until the April 29 expiration of the talks that Mr. Kerry started last summer, said he was taking this course because Israel had failed to release the fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners.
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'The Half Has Never Been Told,' by Edward E. Baptist - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that “came in the first ships,” as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society.
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Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary).
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cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance.
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How Saudi Arabia's 79-year-old King Salman is shaking up the Middle East - The Washingt... - 0 views
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When King Salman became Saudi Arabia’s ruler this year, few people expected much change. He was 79 and reputedly in ill health
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But since taking the throne in January, Salman has shaken up Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy and the royal family’s succession plans.
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He has launched a bombing campaign against Shiite rebels in Yemen and increased support for rebels in Syria, signaling a more assertive role for an oil-rich kingdom that traditionally relied on the United States for security. Salman’s goal, analysts say, is to guard Sunni Muslims against what he sees as the growing influence of Shiite Iran.
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Fears of Shia muscle in Iraq's Sunni heartland - BBC News - 0 views
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Its fall was a massive blow to the Iraqi army, to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and to the US, who had encouraged his policy of relying on the official armed force
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Their action so deep inside the Sunni heartlands would raise fears of sectarian repercussions.
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But Sunni opinion is deeply split and troubled. Many are greatly concerned about the penetration into their areas of the Shia militias
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U.S. Adults Fare Poorly in a Study of Skills - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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American adults lag well behind their counterparts in most other developed countries in the mathematical and technical skills needed for a modern workplace, according to a study released Tuesday.
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even middle-aged Americans — who, on paper, are among the best-educated people of their generation anywhere in the world — are barely better than middle of the pack in skills.
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The study is the first based on new tests developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of mostly developed nations, and administered in 2011 and 2012 to thousands of people, ages 16 to 65, by 23 countries. Previous international skills studies have generally looked only at literacy, and in fewer countries.
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'Scandinavian Dream' is true fix for America's income inequality - Jun. 3, 2015 - 0 views
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Decades of deregulation and lowering taxes for the wealthy and businesses -- with the hope of it eventually benefiting the middle and working classes -- has created a chasm between the rich and everyone else, Stiglitz told CNNMoney.
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"Maybe we should be calling the American Dream the Scandinavian Dream," he told CNNMoney.
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"The choices we made got us here and we must now choose a new path," Stiglitz said last month, when he released his 37-point prescription for restoring the American Dream. The report, titled "Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy," was issued by the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank where he serves as chief economist.
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