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The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as

To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

Any caught trying to leave are put to death. At the same time, the government tries to encourage defectors, and runs rehab centres to help them re-enter society.

"We are not afraid to tell our stories. Ask us anything you want. You can take our photos and use our real names."

al-Shabab, which has been in existence for more than a decade and controls large parts of Somalia, imposing harsh rules and punishments. The group has set up a parallel administration, with ministries, a police force and a justice system. It runs schools and health centres, irrigates land and repairs roads and bridges, and needs people to carry out this work.

GOP group tells online donors: Give every month or 'we will have…

One person was killed and at least five others were wounded -- four of them critically -- in a shooting at an industrial park in Bryan, Texas, on Thursday afternoon, police said.

Officers responded to the scene but the shooter was gone by the time officers got there, Buske said.

The campaign arm of House Republicans is using an aggressive tactic to push online donors toward committing to monthly contributions, telling them that opting out of having the same amount automatically charged to their credit card or withdrawn from their bank each month is an act of disloyalty toward former President Donald Trump.

"We need to know we haven't lost you to the Radical Left. If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you're a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems."

"If you want Trump to run for President this is your LAST chance to FLIP the House," donors are told above another pre-checked box. "Change your Trump Victory Fund Status to ACTIVE now! Remain inactive = Republicans lose."

Pyongyang’s third nuclear test which they say underscores a diversion of scarce funds towards weapons programs instead of coping with chronic food shortages.

the people are frustrated that precious resources are being diverted from efforts to address economic impoverishment, North Korean defectors and rights groups told RFA’s Korean service.

“North Koreans cannot understand the nuclear test when they see hunger in the country,” Song said.

Police officers from Myanmar have told the BBC they fled across the border into India after refusing to carry out the orders of the military which seized power in a coup last month. In some of the first such interviews, more than a dozen defectors told us they escaped, fearing they'd be forced to kill or harm civilians.

The military is edgy. They are becoming more and more brutal." As we speak, Naing pulls out his phone to show me photos of the family he left behind - a wife, and two daughters aged just five and six months.

ey say they're part of a growing number of officials who are joining the pro-democracy, civil disobedience movement (CDM) in the country.

In July 2014, four months after Putin annexed Crimea, only 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Russia’s president, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Today, that figure is 37 percent.

A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it.

82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do.

e Syrian regime, angered the US and the Western-backed Syrian oppositi

The invitation to Iran, a key ally of the Syrian regime, angered the US and the Western-backed Syrian opposition.

The peace conference, due to begin on Wednesday, is the biggest diplomatic effort to end the three-year conflict. More than 100,000 people have been killed and millions more displaced in the war.

The government of President Viktor F. Yanukovych announced a tentative resolution on Friday to a crisis that has brought days of bloodshed to Ukraine. The agreement, which has yet to be signed, was announced after all-night talks with opposition leaders, Russian representatives and the foreign ministers of Germany, Poland and France.

Any deal that does not include the president’s departure, however, is unlikely to get very far with protesters and it was uncertain whether, in the event of a final deal, the protest movement’s political leadership could deliver the support of an angry base comprising many different groups and factions.

revious settlements and truces have broken down several times, though those previous deals were not reached with the high-level involvement of European Union and Russian mediators, as was the case in the overnight talks Friday. The statement from Mr. Yanukovych’s office said the talks had been “very difficu

How ISIS Is Recruiting Women in London

She asked Sally Jones—one of Britain’s most notorious ISIS defectors—for advice on Twitter, saying that her mother didn’t want her to wear the hijab.

She was soon being approached by other ISIS recruiters. “You need ticket money,” one wrote, in another direct message.

Recently liberated Ramadi citizens are telling media the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) tortured them and used them as human shields when Iraqi forces moved into the city.

The Islamic State forced out Iraqi forces in Ramadi in mid-May 2015. The militants stole weapons and captured the military headquarters. They then murdered anyone “loyal to the government.”

As Iraqi forces moved in during December, the Islamic State grew paranoid and used the civilians as human shields. One man said the militants forced people to remain in their houses and could only leave with permission.

I think ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

But I think that same upper class was unwise to abandon an aristocratic self-conception in favor of a meritocratic one

he attempted murder of Sergei Skripal has shed uncomfortable light on Britain’s vulnerability to foreign threats, some potentially emanating from foreign governments, against its sovereignty, security, citizens’ safety and laws.

was the plot intended, at least in part, to deliberately discredit and humiliate the British government? A handful of countries might have cause to do that. But only one or two possess the rare nerve agent, the sheer malice and the ruthless audacity evident in this case.

Past British bluster and prevarication weaken this country’s hand. After Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector, was murdered in London in 2006, politicians such as Theresa May, then home secretary, failed forcefully to pursue the state-sponsored Russian perpetrators, even after their identity was known.

A North Korean soldier has defected to South Korea at the heavily protected Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), South Korea's military says.

The soldier was shot and injured by his own military as he crossed to the South Korean side of the Joint Security Area in the village of Panmunjom. The defector has been taken to hospital. About 1,000 people from the North flee to the South each year - but very few defect via the DMZ.

North and South Korea are technically still at war, since the conflict between them ended in 1953 with a truce and not a formal peace treaty.

Selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups

The human mind, Clark and her colleagues wrote,was forged by the crucible of coalitional conflict. For many thousands of years, human tribes have competed against each other. Coalitions that were more cooperative and cohesive not only survived but also appropriated land and resources from other coalitions and therefore reproduced more prolifically, thus passing their genes (and their loyalty traits) to later generations. Because coalitional coordination and commitment were crucial to group success, tribes punished and ostracized defectors and rewarded loyal members with status and resources (as they continue to do today).

We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group — not even one’s own — is immune.

Mark Kramer, the director of Cold War studies at Harvard, said the study cast new light on “how widespread espionage was in the Manhattan Project.” It helps to reframe a long debate, he added, on the relative importance of American spies and Russian scientists to Moscow’s 1949 atomic breakthrough.

In an interview, Mr. Kramer said that the news of Mr. Seborer’s spying, combined with the known atomic thefts, “makes clear that Soviet weapon scientists were receiving a great deal of valuable information. Espionage, by pointing them in the right direction and avoiding false leads, helped them a lot more than they were willing to acknowledge.”

The identities of the other three Los Alamos spies have long been known. Klaus Fuchs, a physicist, was arrested in early 1950, shortly after the first Soviet detonation. His testimony led to a second spy, David Greenglass, a machinist, who was also taken into custody. Not until 1995 was the third spy, Theodore Hall, the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, identified publicly. By then he had moved to England and was never convicted of espionage.

Hibbing’s book, based on reporting, focus groups and surveys, is an attempt to understand what motivates the most enthusiastic Trump supporters.

The most ardent ones, he notes, are not economically marginalized, not submissive, not authoritarian, not religious or conventionally conservative. They have a strong concept that there is a core America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John Wayne, football and hunting.

They feel that core America is under existential threat from people they view as outsiders: immigrants, Chinese communists, cosmopolitan urbanites and people of color. They see themselves as strong and vigilant protectors, defending the sacred homeland from alien menace.

North Korea said on Friday that it would not participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic and moves by “hostile forces.”

Its no-show at the Beijing ​Games would deprive South Korea of a rare opportunity to establish official contact with the ​North.

the country’s Olympic Committee and its ministry of sports wished Beijing a successful Games even though “the U.S. and its vassal forces are getting evermore undisguised in their moves against China aimed at preventing the successful opening of the Olympics,”