Group items tagged

The heat is unrelenting in the middle of a December day in eastern Sudan. It's hard to find any shade in this arid landscape. It's mostly dust and boulders — and, for now at least, it is the temporary home of tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees who have crossed the border to flee the fighting in their country.

Last month, the Ethiopian government launched a military offensive against a rebellious regional government. The ensuing conflict has killed hundreds, and almost 50,000 Ethiopians have crossed the country's northwestern border into Sudan. It's a refugee crisis that is straining the humanitarian infrastructure in the country. The United Nations refugee agency has appealed for $150 million to help cope with the situation.

"[Militias] were slaughtering people with knives and machetes," she says.

It was a playing field on which we were expected to pay the North Koreans not to do dangerous things, and that is not a sound basis for a policy.

When Bush won the presidency, talks [with North Korea] ceased immediately. The criticism that comes from the Clinton camp is that there was no continuity in policy.

I honestly don't see how, looking back, the architects of that agreement can hold the Bush administration culpable for behavior that, in retrospect, should make us reconsider whether the original Framework Agreement was a sensible idea.

The refugees the world forgot

For Dadaab is the largest refugee camp in the world. If it was a city, it would be one of Kenya's largest.

Abdula and his family fled Somalia's brutal civil war for Dadaab in 1994. The 26-year-old has been living here since childhood and knows little else.

The unrest started with a rumor of black-on-white crime: Black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering on the city’s south bluffs had allegedly killed white policemen attempting to arrest an African American soldier.

Although much has changed since the end of the Civil War, the fact remains that political violence undermines the democratic process even where civil-rights protections are supposedly in place.

Ulysses S. Grant would carry Memphis’s Shelby County in two presidential elections aided by African American men, to whom the state extended voting rights in 1867,

We all now know that Trump’s rise has been fueled by the alienation and anger of the country’s white working class. That cohort has seen its incomes stagnate, cities crumble and dreams vanish. But Vance gets underneath the data and shows us what these impersonal forces mean to actual people. He describes the abandoned children, the poor work habits, the drug abuse, the violence, the rage. But he does it with sympathy and love.

For Vance, the problem is ultimately cultural, one of values, attitudes and mores. “We hillbillies must wake the hell up,” he writes, and “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what can we do to make things better.”

His own life story — coming from low expectations, dysfunctional relationships and persistent poverty to end up a graduate of Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley executive — demonstrates that grit can conquer all.

Britain gained 333,000 people through immigration in 2015 — a near-historic high — in figures that will fan the debate in Britain about newcomers ahead of a vote next month on whether the country should remain in the European Union.

Prime Minister David Cameron has long promised to reduce net migration below 100,000. His failure to do so gives ammunition to EU “leave” campaigners.

With less than a month to go before the vote, the figures also give the “leave” camp ample opportunity to attempt a change in the terms of the debate, which so far has revolved around dire warnings of the shock such an exit would have on the economy.

Nearly four-fifths of white evangelical voters plan to cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump despite his multiple marriages, lack of piety and inconsistency on the issues they care about most, a new poll has found.

Support for Mr. Trump among white evangelicals is even stronger than it was four years ago for Mitt Romney

Some influential evangelical leaders have joined the “Never Trump” camp, while others have pledged support for Mr. Trump. More came on board after he wooed about 1,000 of them in a closed-door meeting in New York.

At least 12,472 refugees and migrants have arrived on Europe's shores since the beginning of 2017, according to the UN refugee agency -- only slightly less than the 12,587 Syrian refugees admitted by the US in all of last year.

The UK government recently announced it was halting a program to resettle lone refugee children, after 350 had been brought to Britain. Campaigners had hoped that 3,000 children would benefit from the scheme, introduced last year.

In November 2016, the Home Office issued new guidance barring unaccompanied refugees from Afghanistan, Yemen and Eritrea older than 12, who were living in the now-demolished "Jungle" camp at Calais in northern France, from entering the UK if they have no family there.

the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

REYHANLI, Turkey — When the wounded arrived at the Red Crescent hospital in Idlib at the start of the Syrian uprising — opponents of President Bashar al-Assad who had been shot or beaten by government troops — military police ordered the doctors to just let them die.

Ammar Martini and his colleagues refused.

“This I could not do,” said Martini, a successful surgeon from an affluent family. “I treat all people, of any origin. They are human, and I am a doctor.”

On the eve of negotiations to end the conflict in South Sudan, rebel forces on Wednesday seized major sections of the city of Bor, giving them a strategic foothold for a possible march toward the capital and transforming the banks of the White Nile into an impromptu camp for the tens of thousands of people who have fled the fighting.

With estimates of as many as 70,000 people seeking refuge here, the area outside Bor has quickly become a focal point of the humanitarian crisis enveloping the country.

Miyong G. Kuon, news media coordinator for Mr. Machar, said in a telephone interview that forces loyal to Mr. Machar were “fully in control of Bor.”

Wilson told me the new proposed evolutionary model pulls the field “out of the fever swamp of kin selection,” and he confidently predicted a coming paradigm shift that would promote genetic research to identify the “trigger” genes that have enabled a tiny number of cases, such as the ant family, to achieve complex forms of cooperation.

In the book, he proposes a theory to answer what he calls “the great unsolved problem of biology,” namely how roughly two dozen known examples in the history of life—humans, wasps, termites, platypodid ambrosia beetles, bathyergid mole rats, gall-making aphids, one type of snapping shrimp, and others—made the breakthrough to life in highly social, complex societies. Eusocial species, Wilson noted, are by far “the most successful species in the history of life.”

Summarizing parts of it for me, Wilson was particularly unsparing of organized religion, likening the Book of Revelation, for example, to the ranting of “a paranoid schizophrenic who was allowed to write down everything that came to him.” Toward philosophy, he was only slightly kinder. Generation after generation of students have suffered trying to “puzzle out” what great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes had to say on the great questions of man’s nature, Wilson said, but this was of little use, because philosophy has been based on “failed models of the brain.”

HONG KONG — Dozens of prominent members of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement gave themselves up for arrest in a show of defiance on Thursday after the police swept through a protest camp, tearing down tents, posters and speakers’ platforms that had given voice to anger over the government’s restrictive election plans.

At a press conference late Thursday evening, the police said they had arrested 209 people at a sit-in at the protest site, and four more away from the encampment.

They also collected identity card information from 909 people who departed after the area was sealed off in the early afternoon, and reserve the right to take legal action against them later, said Cheung Tak-keung, the police’s assistant commissioner for operations.

French authorities were racing Sunday to hunt down any potential accomplices to the wave of terror attacks unleashed in Paris as the investigation widened beyond this nation's borders.

A French man believed to be directly involved in Friday's massacre in Paris is on the run and the subject of an international manhunt, French security officials said Sunday evening.

Investigators said the man rented a Belgian-registered black Volkswagen Polo, which was allegedly used and abandoned by the hostage-takers who killed at least 89 people inside a Paris concert hall. advertisement He was identified by officials as Salah Abdeslam, 26, from Brussels.

Isis is indoctrinating children from birth through an extremism-based education similar to that taught by the Nazi regime in a bid to create a generation "more lethal than themselves", a study has revealed.

The report, Children of Islamic State, outlines how indoctrination by Isis through schools and training camps - which sees children encouraged to watch public executions, hold up decapitated heads and carry out killings - has been influenced by elements from Nazi Germany.

"Elements from Nazi Germany can be glimpsed in the systematic indoctrination of children through schools and training camps in IS. The concepts used by the Nazis are perfectly applicable to the Islamic State.

At first, the attack had all the hallmarks of a typical Boko Haram assault. Armed fighters stormed a town on the border with Nigeria, shooting every man they saw.

Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group terrorizing this part of the world, is on the hunt — for food.

After rampaging across the region for years, forcing more than two million people to flee their homes and farms, Boko Haram appears to be falling victim to a major food crisis of its own creation.

The first planeload of Syrian refugees from camps in Jordan and Lebanon will arrive in Canada on Thursday,

Another such aircraft will arrive in Montreal on Saturday, he told legislators.

The Liberal government plans to resettle 10,000 refugees from Syria’s four-year-old civil war by the end of the year and a further 15,000 by the end of February.

Bringing Syrian refugees to the U.S. has become an especially contentious issue. In Canada, however, they're being welcomed with open arms.

Roughly 600 Syrians from refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon will arrive by plane in Canada this evening. They're the first of 25,000 Syrians the new Canadian government wants to resettle by the end of February.

Toronto's major newspaper, the Toronto Star, gave them an emotional welcome on the front page of Thursday's edition. It reads, in part: "You're with family now. ... "You're in Canada now, with all the rights and protections and possibilities that confers. "You'll find the place a little bigger than Damascus or Aleppo, and a whole lot chillier. But friendly for all that. We're a city that cherishes its diversity — it's our strength. Canadians have been watching your country being torn apart, and know that you've been through a terrifying, heartbreaking nightmare. But that is behind you now. And we're eager to help you get a fresh start."

THE big debates in macroeconomics have never been polite. I suppose it's understandable that this is the case; after all, the stakes are high

I disagree with Mr Cowen that the topic is too important to become politicised.

, politics is how we resolve lots of really important, really difficult issues. One could indeed argue that the problems we face are the worse because there has been too little politicisation.