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e went to his 400 hives one morning and found most of them empty. Queen bees remained, but worker bees had vanished.

what worries them is a gradual, steady shrinkage of the honeybee population over the years.

Where annual bee losses were once in the range of 5 percent to 10 percent, they are now more on the order of 30 percent. The fear is that this dying-off is too great for the country’s ever-expanding agricultural needs.

Leaders in California and Arizona acknowledge that their states have failed to adequately account for overlapping supplies of surface water and groundwater. And it’s not hard to appreciate why: Doing the water math properly would mean facing the fact that there is even less water available than residents have been led to believe. Acting on that grim jolt of reality would mean changing laws governing traditional water rights or forcing farmers and cities to accept even more dramatic cuts than they already face.

California still doesn’t require that water pumped from underground be measured at all, much less factored into an overall assessment of total water resources; it’s merely an option under a new law signed last Septembe

California’s new groundwater legislation does require local water authorities to come up with sustainable groundwater plans, but they don’t have to do that until 2020, and they don’t have to balance their water withdrawals until 2040.

calculations based on Arizona’s own water accounting suggest that demand could outpace its existing water supply in less than a decade. But its laws still don’t require an accurate joining of its surface water and groundwater supplies.

“If you don’t connect the two, then you don’t understand the system,” he said. “And if you don’t understand the system, I don’t know how in the hell you’re going to make any kind of judgment about how much water you’ve got to work with.”Until state officials do, it seems unlikely that there will be any real solution to managing the Southwest’s strained water resources for the future.

So fierce was the pushback by the agriculture industry against any regulation of underground water that the new law, somewhat perversely, explicitly barred any attempt by the state to count the groundwater withdrawals as coming from one overall water supply until local agencies had at least 10 more years to come up with — and implement — their plans.

Europeans, with two 20th-century experiences of cataclysmic societal fracture, are bound to the idea of social solidarity as prudent safeguard and guarantor of human decency.

The French see the state as a noble idea and embodiment of citizens’ rights. Americans tend to see the state as a predator on those rights.

To return from Europe to the United States, as I did recently, is to be struck by the crumbling infrastructure, the paucity of public spaces, the conspicuous waste (of food and energy above all), the dirtiness of cities and the acuteness of their poverty.

It is also to be overwhelmed by the volume and vital clamor of American life, the challenging interaction, the bracing intermingling of Americans of all stripes, the strident individualism.

In his intriguing new book, “The United States of Excess,” Robert Paarlberg, a political scientist, cites the 2011 Pew survey as he grapples with these divergent cultures. His focus is on American overconsumption of fuel and food

Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are about twice those of the other wealthy nations of the 34-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. American obesity (just over a third of American adults are now obese) is running at about twice the European average and six times the Japanese.

A resource-rich, spacious nation, mistrustful of government authority, persuaded that responsibility is individual rather than collective, optimistic about the capacity of science and technology to resolve any problem, and living in a polarized political system paralyzed by its “multiple veto points,” tends toward “a scrambling form of adaptation” rather than “effective mitigation.”

Whether it comes to food or fuel, they don’t want measures where “voting-age adults are being coerced into a lifestyle change.”

Individualism trumps all — and innovation, it is somehow believed, will save the country from individualism’s ravages.

Rather than cut back, they prefer to consume more — whether fuel or food — and then find ways to offset excess.

With the strong policy measures needed to control excess consumption — taxes, regulations and mandates — blocked, political leaders are “tempted to shift more resources and psychological energy toward the second-best path of adaptation,

Easier, and potentially more profitable, to develop drought-resistant farm crops or improve coastal protection systems than tackle global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

His conclusions are pessimistic. The world should not expect America to change. Its response to overconsumption is inadequate.

On global warming, the country adapts but does not confront, content “to protect itself, and itself alone.”

On obesity, it shuns the kind of coordinated policy action that will help the less fortunate, particularly disadvantaged minorities.

most economists see global trade as a win-win proposition, but resource limitation turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest. “The faster China grows, the higher grain prices go, the more people in China or India who upgrade to meat, the higher the tendency for Africa to starve,” he said.

Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution, which “partially removed the barriers to rapid population growth, wealth and scientific progress.” That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries, but now, ready or not, the age of cheap hydrocarbons is ending. Grantham’s July letter concludes: “We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability. The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable.”

“E.D.F. is educating people that dealing with climate change will be good for the economy and job creation. One of Jeremy’s insights is that we can make headway on the market side because higher commodity prices will enforce greater efficiency.”

When he reminds us that modern capitalism isn’t equipped to handle long-range problems or tragedies of the commons (situations like overfishing or global warming, in which acting rationally in your own self-interest only deepens the harm to all), when he urges us to outgrow our touching faith in the efficiency of markets and boundless human ingenuity, and especially when he says that a wise investor can prosper in the coming hard times, his bad news and its silver lining come with a built-in answer to the skeptical question that Americans traditionally pose to egghead Cassandras: If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?

Grantham believes that the best approach may be to recast global warming, which depresses crop yields and worsens soil erosion, as a factor contributing to resource depletion. “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change,” he said. “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.”

“Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan,” he said, “but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”

Grantham, the public face of a company that manages more than $100 billion in assets, the very embodiment of a high-finance insider in blue blazer and yellow tie, has serious doubts about capitalism’s ability to address the biggest problems facing humanity.

Grantham says that corporations respond well to this message because they are “persuaded by data,” but American public opinion is harder to move, and contemporary American political culture is practically dataproof. “The politicians are the worst,” he said. “An Indian economist once said to me, ‘We have 28 political parties, and they all think climate change is important.’ ” Whatever the precise number of parties in India, and it depends on how you count, his point was that the U.S. has just two that matter, one that dismisses global warming as a hoax and one that now avoids the subject.

Grantham, who says that “this time it’s different are the four most dangerous words in the English language,” has become a connoisseur of bubbles. His historical study of more than 300 of them shows the same pattern occurring again and again. A bump in sales or some other impressive development causes people to get excited. When they do, the price of that asset class — South Sea company shares, dot-coms — goes up, and human nature and the financial industry conspire to push it higher. People want to hear good news; they tend to be bad with numbers and uncertainty, and to assume that present conditions will persist. In the financial industry, the imperative to minimize career risk produces herd behavior.

So it’s news when Grantham, who has built his career on the conviction that peaks and troughs will even out as prices inevitably revert to their historical mean, says that this time it really is different, and not in a good way. In his April letter, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” he argued that “we are in the midst of one of the giant inflection points in economic history.” The market is “sending us the Mother of all price signals,” warning us that “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”

here’s the short version: “The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”

When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”

Grantham is taking the Malthusian side in an ongoing debate about growth and commodity prices­. The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities.

He’s an impassioned environmentalist not only for the usual reasons but also because he believes humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. “This commodities thing may turn out to be the most interesting call of my career,” he told me. “I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.”

“Whether the stable population will be 1.5 billion or 5 billion,” he said to me, “the question is: How do we get there?”

How, though, does Morris quantify which civilisation was dominant at any given point in history? This is where the book distinguishes itself: by martialling massive amounts of archaeological evidence, Morris is able to plausibly estimate the relative size, resource base and military capacity of each core at regular intervals throughout post ice-age history. The tables and graphs in the book make mountains of research about diet, city size and population makeup instantly available to the reader, and argue extremely convincingly that Europe’s favourable position can indeed be traced back to the small time differential in the invention of agriculture, combined with a more congenial natural environment.

The fatal synergy between human and natural disasters eradicated perhaps one-third of the human population.

What happened in the 17th century suggests that altered weather conditions can have catastrophic political and social consequences. Today, the nation’s intelligence agencies have warned of similar repercussions as the planet warms

One consequence of crop failures and food shortages stands out in French military records: Soldiers born in the second half of the 1600s were, on average, an inch shorter than those born after 1700, and those born in the famine years were noticeably shorter than the rest.

In the 17th century, the fatal synergy of weather, wars and rebellions killed millions. A natural catastrophe of analogous proportions today — whether or not humans are to blame — could kill billions. It would also produce dislocation and violence, and compromise international security, sustainability and cooperation.

Unlike malnutrition crises elsewhere in the world, this one has not been connected to specific food shortages or crop failures. In addition, parents are not showing up malnourished, even when their children are.

His colleague Dr. Khan blamed another problem. “The main cause of malnutrition in Afghanistan is lack of breast feeding,” he said. “They see beautiful pictures of milk cartons, and they think it’s better.”

In addition, where women commonly have many children, often with less than a year between them, it is difficult for mothers to provide enough nourishment, by breast or bottle. Ahmed Wali, the 2-year-old Bost Hospital patient with kwashiorkor, is the ninth of 10 children of his mother, Baka Bebi, who is in her mid-30s. She weaned him onto powdered milk mixed with stream water as soon as she could.

Poverty is another factor. In Afghanistan, the poverty line is defined as a total income sufficient to provide 2,100 calories a day to each family member. Some 36 percent of Afghans are below that threshold, according to the Health Ministry.

In 2013, Unicef raised its target for providing therapeutic foods to severe acutely malnourished Afghan children, to 52,144 from 35,181. Therapeutic foods are specially made for the severely malnourished, who have difficulty digesting normal food.

“Managing a feeding system is difficult; there is a long way for Afghanistan to go,” he added. “But even countries like Sri Lanka, with an outstanding health system, are still struggling to manage therapeutic feeding supplies.”

Cases of acute severe malnutrition are running at more than 100 a month, including five to 10 deaths, at Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, and such cases have doubled since 2012, said Dr. Aqa Mohammad Shirzad, who is in charge of pediatric malnutrition programs there.

Each of the hospital’s 17 beds for severely malnourished patients has at least two patients, and some have three. The malnutrition intensive care ward there has an incubator that does not work, one suction pump and oxygen bottles, for respiratory masks, propped up without stands or proper connection

A 5-year-old boy who weighs less than 20 pounds was being treated recently on a bench because the infusion line would not stretch to a bed. Two window panes nearby were missing glass.

Then there are the erotic novels, ranging from the mildly sensuous to the highly explicit. One series presents the books with their original titles and adds: “The Wild and Wanton Edition.” These are pastiche, using Austen’s prose but suddenly veering off into most un-Austen-like descriptions of what really went on.

The continued life of the Jane Austen industry must have a secret. At the heart of it is probably the simple, persistent appeal of romance.

Austen is far from superficial. Although her books are set exclusively within the confines of a certain class, she provides a fascinating picture of the ways of that slice of society and the confines within which its members, particularly women, are obliged to live. She is also extremely funny, able to paint the foibles of characters with a dry wit that has dated very little. Her books are intimate and compelling. She has a voice that somehow seems to chime even with a modern sensibility. She is, in essence, timeless.

The seemingly tongue-in-cheek site states "Show your support to all countries attacked by ISIS, add all their flags to your Facebook profile photo."

Upload your photo, click "convert," and voila! A mash-up of 17 different countries' flags will automatically be pasted over your picture. 

Charlotte Farhan's refusal to change her picture went viral when she posted the following caption: "“If I did this for only Paris this would be wrong,” she wrote. “ If I did this for every attack on the world, I would have to change my profile every day several times a day.” Now folks only have to change it this one time, if they so choose.

Though initial backlash focused on the Lebanon attacks, "All Flags" has broadened the support to every country victimized by ISIS. That way no one can be offended about someone else's Facebook profile picture.

Here's what the site says: Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Cameroon, Bahrain, Russia, France, Egypt, Algeria, Afghan, Libya, Chad, Kenya. The country list is based on our research. We are not experts, so please help us complete the list. Contact us and we'll add them.

We urgently need to get help to these areas to make sure people have enough food and water."

weather phenomenon largely became a part of the public vernacular during the 1997 El Niño. It caused devastating flooding in the western U.S. and drought in Indonesia

Many think Mr Cunha could be next. His name has cropped up repeatedly in the context of the affair.

A charismatic populist, Mr Collor’s main sins were a failure to quash hyperinflation—and

tion—and

Brazil has been here before. In 1992 Fernando Collor, Brazil’s first directly elected president after two decades of military rule, was impeached over corruption two years into his term (he was subsequently cleared of the charges on a technicality). A charismatic populist, Mr Collor’s main sins were a failure to quash hyperinflation—and,

Ms Rousseff appears finally to have grasped that budgetary belt-tightening is the first step to recovery. But, like Mr Collor, she lacks the skill to negotiate Brasília’s fragmented political landscape.

And Ms Rousseff will no doubt be more adamant than ever that she is not stepping down of her own accord, as some in the opposition had been hoping. Responding calmly to Mr Cunha, she spoke of her “indignation”.

Sadly, the furore will divert Brazilian politicians’ already scattered attention away from fixing the country’s many problems, starting with the ballooning budget deficit. History may judge this to be Mr Cunha’s greatest sin.

Despite becoming the top instructor at an institution that billed itself as a university, he didn’t have a background in education or even, according to his story, a college degree.

When he was hired in 2008, he was already a convicted felon—for aggravated assault, recent depositions in the Trump University case reveal. And according to 2011 divorce filings in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Harris threatened to kill his ex-wife and tried to have her Range Rover repossessed the day after she filed for a restraining order.

The school, which has been defunct since 2011, is currently the subject of two class-action lawsuits in California and a $40 million suit brought by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General from New York.

Trump University began in earnest on May 23, 2005, a for-profit venture with a website, TrumpUniversity.com, and a collection of courses—on entrepreneurship, real estate, and marketing—available on CD-ROM for $300 a pop.

From the outset, Trump University’s roster of brainy professors was a selling point. In a promotional video

Sonny Low, who paid $25,000 for a Trump mentorship in 2010, reported that Nowlin didn’t even “appear knowledgeable” about real estate or investing, according to one class-action lawsuit against Trump University.

Attendees were required to sign a waiver promising not to sue the company if they later faced legal troubles, the Enquirer reported.

Students started with a $1,495 three-day seminar, before some instructors, according to court papers, goaded them into buying mentorship packages totaling up to $34,995.

The lawsuits against Trump University claim some pupils, encouraged to increase their credit limits and to max out their credit cards, paid twice as much.

Trump decided to go in another direction, according to Schank. There would be no more online courses, no more lectures from ivy league professors, no more books—just seminars, with speakers like Harris

On social media, he posed for photos in a plush, white bathrobe on a manicured lawn, flanked by a shiny silver Hummer and Mercedes-Benz. He told students they could live like him, too, and vowed to teach them to earn $25,000 a month, according to court filings.

At some point, Harris was also employed by Armando Montelongo Seminars, a venture similar to Trump University and also facing lawsuits from disgruntled students who claim they were scammed.

Across parts of northeastern Nigeria and border regions like the Far North, trade has come to a halt and tens of thousands of people are on the brink of famine, United Nations officials say

The hunt for food appears to be part of what is pushing Boko Haram deeper into Cameroon, according to an American State Department review of attacks in the first few weeks of this year.

A military campaign by Nigeria and its neighbors has chased fighters from villages they once controlled. Now, officials contend, the militants are left to scrounge for food in the sparse Sambisa Forest during the dry season, or go out raiding for whatever they can find.

But while some elements of Boko Haram may be battered, fighters still manage to carry out devastating attacks, the results of which are on full display at the hospital in Maroua, the capital of the Far North. Shrapnel and burn victims from recent attacks across various towns recuperate together.

Recent joint operations by the Cameroonian and Nigerian militaries have captured and killed numerous fighters and seized suicide belts, weapons and equipment for making mines. Officials hope to squeeze the fighters from both sides of the border so they have nowhere left to run.

The mass displacement caused by Boko Haram — and by the sometimes indiscriminate military campaign to defeat it — has left 1.4 million people in the region without adequate food supplies, the United Nations says.

In the Far North of Cameroon, this time of year is a moonscape of bone-dry river beds and clouds of dust so thick they look like misty fog. The region is moving into the so-called lean season, the in-between months when the fruits of the previous harvest are being depleted and next year’s crop is not yet ready.

Despite the influx of new people, officials closed the town’s market out of fear that it would be attacked. Boko Haram had struck a satellite village just days before. Residents now worry that the market will remain shut for weeks.

The food crisis is part of broader economic devastation in the area, adding to the burdens on Cameroon at a time when it is hosting thousands of refugees fleeing a religious war in nearby Central African Republic.

Even a religious leader who attends births and marriages in the Minawao Refugee Camp said the refugees needed to go home.

The United Nations accused Cameroon of sending tens of thousands of refugees back to Nigeria at the end of last year. The government has since said it would involve the United Nations in any plans involving the refugees’ return.

Tourism has plummeted in Cameroon, which has such diverse ecosystems and a range of wildlife that it refers to itself as Little Africa. Guides who once led visitors to see lions and elephants in Waza National Park in the north now scrape by with occasional work building new homes in the Minawao Refugee Camp

Donald Trump likes to boast that he put the topic of immigration on the map in the Republican campaign. While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, he has certainly owned the issue, with his condemnation of undocumented Mexican migrants and calls to build a wall on the US-Mexican border and temporarily prevent all Muslims from entering the US.

In what can only be considered a significant break with Republican orthodoxy, Donald Trump has repeatedly defended Planned Parenthood, saying that the organisation performs important medical services (although he agrees with his competitors that they shouldn't get US government funding). He says he's now anti-abortion, although he backed legalisation for many years.

But gene drive technology is so powerful that leading researchers have urged scientists in the field to be cautious. A warning published in August in the prestigious journal Science, by teams in the UK, US, Australia and Japan, said that while gene drives have the potential to save lives and bring other benefits, the accidental release of modified organisms “could have unpredictable ecological consequences.”

They call on scientists to ensure that experimental organisms cannot escape from their labs, be released on purpose, or even find their way out accidentally in the event of a natural disaster. Researchers should also be open about the precautions they take to prevent an unintended release, they said.

In the latest study, mosquitoes were engineered to carry genes for antibodies that target the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. When released into the wild, researchers believe the modified insects will breed with normal mosquitoes and pass the anti-malarial genes on to their young, making an ever-increasing proportion of future generations resistant to the malaria parasite.

In lab tests, the modified mosquitoes passed on their anti-malarial genes to 99.5% of their offspring, suggesting that the procedure was incredibly effective and efficient. To track which insects inherited the antibody genes, the scientists added a tracer gene that gave carriers red fluorescent eyes.

A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.

a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.

One way in which this will be particularly troublesome for livestock producers will be that crops grown for feed will be refocused on biofuel sources.

"The people we met in Madaya were exhausted and extremely frail," Singer said. "Doctors were emotionally distressed and mentally drained

No plans to evacuate the starving

He spoke after U.N. convoys had finally arrived in Syrian towns to deliver food to malnourished residents

"Let me be clear: The use of starvation as a weapon of war is a war crime," he said. "All sides -- including the Syrian government, which has the primary responsibility to protect Syrians -- are committing this and other atrocious acts prohibited under international humanitarian law.

The starvation here is no act of God -- not the result of drought or flooding or crop failure.

"The people we met in Madaya were exhausted and extremely frail," Singer said. "Doctors were emotionally distressed and mentally drained, working 'round the clock with very limited resources to provide treatment to children and people in need. It is simply unacceptable that this is happening in the 21st century.

Workers for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, met him

The UNICEF team screened the children they found in the hospital. They found 22 children under the age of 5 suffering from malnutrition, according to a statement Friday from Hanaa Singer, the organization's representative in Syria.

The use of starvation as a weapon in Syria is "a war crime," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday.

In al-Fouaa and Kefraya, two towns in the country's northwest, about 20,000 have been suffering under a rebel blockade, said Dibeh Fakhr,

Thursday evening, delivering desperately needed food and humanitarian supplies to residents, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

"We now meet the families to talk about their needs," he said on Twitter.

Earlier Thursday, the Madaya-bound convoy of 44 trucks arrived on the outskirts of the city, in a mountainous area 25 kilometers

More than 250,000 Syrians -- mostly civilians -- have been killed, according to the United Nations. About 10.5 million Syrians have fled their homes

"One minute, 32 seconds — ha! I beat you by one second!" a triumphant Margarita Maluchenkova, an 18-year-old with crimson-tinted hair,

They absently point the muzzle at other club members seated around a table watching the practice

I like handling guns, though it's more interesting when they are loaded,"

She believes Russia stands tall in the world.

Clubs such as Our Army have been cropping up across Russia at a fevered pace amid heightened tensions with the West and with former Soviet republics that have defected from Moscow's orbit.

heir year of compulsory military service.

he military has been experiencing a renaissance in recent years as the government spends billions to modernize and looks to its upcoming conscripts to fend off Western enemies the Kremlin sees as encroaching on Russian borders.

Support from the Kremlin — and Putin — has elevated the image of the military profession, she says.

"You should know your enemy, and, make no mistake, we do consider the Western world an enemy, especially America. That is the most dangerous threat to our future."

"We don't teach hatred, though hatred can be a powerful force," he acknowledges.

Russia has every single one of these features in place," Trudolyubov says. "Being healthy and sporting is good for everyone — there's no argument about that. But in what context does it develop?"

"It used to be that those newly inducted into the army learned how to use a Kalashnikov or drive an armored vehicle in basic training.

when the demoralized Soviet Red Army was mired in a costly and unwinnable war in Afghanistan and military careers were a sentence to poverty and hardship. Respect for the armed services continued to decline after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

It's a normal and natural process when young people understand that the state gives them a free education and the means to make a living, and for that they pay a debt to society by serving in the army.

Vladimir Putin is a star in the eyes of Russian children," she says.

he Crimea gambit has brought the wrath of the democratic world down on Russia in the form of sanctions that have blacklisted dozens of senior Kremlin officials and cronies and deepened an economic crisis brought on by fallen oil prices.

At the Our Army clubhouse, the teens count off into two squads for assault training, the "twos" taking a synchronized step forward, heads snapping to the left, eyes fixed on an unseen point in the distance.