Group items tagged

Ali was 16 years old and badly malnourished.Workers for UNICEF

The city is controlled by rebels and under siege by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

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.

Analysis Too late to stop Trump? As he glides, other candidates fall back in debate

Donald Trump sailed above the other candidates, who mostly engaged in round-robin fighting that left each of them wounded and him largely unscathed.

the sixth in a nomination contest that has defied predictions, left a GOP establishment that fears disastrous repercussions from a Trump nomination no closer to finding a way to head him off, with the first balloting now a little more than two weeks away.

The United States and European nations lifted oil and financial sanctions on Iran and released roughly $100 billion of its assets after international inspectors concluded that the country had followed through on promises to dismantle large sections of its nuclear program.

Five Americans, including a Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian, were released by Iran hours before the nuclear accord was implemented.

Early on Sunday, a senior United States official confirmed that “our detained U.S. citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left.”

The omnibus bill also funded sanctuary cities, illegal alien tax credits, and changed federal law to allow for a massive increase in low-skilled H-2B workers– an immigration expansion opposed by more than nine in ten GOP voters.

Yet neither John Boehner nor Eric Cantor joined Barack Obama to expand Muslim immigration in to the United States– a distinction which is uniquely Paul Ryan’s

After years of poisonous relationships, disgust and recriminations, something bizarre happened here: House Republicans found happiness. It’s too early to tell if it’s momentary or permanent, but House Republicans feel good about Speaker Paul Ryan’s push to develop new policies.

More than 650 criminal complaints have been filed by women in Cologne regarding that night, and more than 150 in Hamburg, including two cases of rape. A 28-year-old women named Katia said: “Suddenly I felt a hand on my bum, on my breasts, I was grabbed everywhere, it was horrific. I was desperate, it was like running the gantlet. Over the space of 200 meters, I think I must have been touched about 100 times.” Of the 50 suspects identified in Cologne, the bulk are from northern Africa, mostly from Morocco.

The news about the Cologne attacks resembled a bomb going off in slow motion, and its effects have been absorbed just as slowly, in less of a panic than a controlled shock.

First, the police in Cologne withheld information about the mass sexual assaults (the police chief later resigned). When the details started to emerge, journalists were reluctant to admit the mere possibility that refugees had been involved, although this was pretty obvious from various witness accounts early on.

The end of economic sanctions against Iran could shake up oil markets.

U.S. and European Union sanctions on Tehran were finally lifted on Saturday, restoring Iran's access to world's markets. Iran has been gearing up for this moment for months and could soon return to the top ranks of global oil producers.

Tehran is in a tricky position. The more oil it exports, the more likely prices will drop even more. Iran has relatively low production costs compared to other countries, but another slump in prices would put its plans at risk. The country desperately needs heavy investments in its out-of-date oil infrastructure

The United Nations says 42,000 people in the area are at risk of starvation. And they make up only a fraction of the 400,000 in similar situations in other towns -- and millions more struggling in hard-to-reach areas -- because of the country's civil war, which is about to mark its five-year anniversary. Millions more Syrians have become refugees abroad.When a conflict lasts this long, when reports about the suffering it is inflicting become a relentless wave of depressing news, and when the forces at play are this complicated, many people are tempted to turn

The truth is that this war is not about to end anytime soon. It is a conflict in which the various sides are fighting for power, for territory, for sectarian advantage, for religion and ideology, but one in which no one seems to be fighting for the interests of the Syrian people themselves.Killing civilians, starving them, is a now common military tactic in the Syrian war.

The United Nations says it wants "unimpeded humanitarian access" to reach everyone who needs help in Syria. The latest word from the Assad regime is that it will allow food convoys. But pressure must be exerted so he keeps his word, and prevents the crisis from reoccurring here or elsewhere. One convoy, as we have already seen, does not end the siege.Assad has laid siege to other places before, notably Yarmouk, a Palestinian camp, and Eastern Ghouta, in the suburbs of Damascus. Yet for some reason the plight of the residents never seemed to reach the level of international concern expressed over fighting in Gaza or the actions of ISIS.

Nordic nations have produced what is, by any metric, an impressive output of successful entrepreneurs, international businesses, and brands. Sweden has Ikea, H&M, Spotify, and Volvo, to name a few. From Denmark have come Lego, Carlsberg, and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Novo Nordisk. A Swede and a Dane co-founded the video calling service Skype. The core programming code of Linux—the leading operating system running on the world’s servers and supercomputers—was developed by a Finn. The Finnish company Nokia was the world’s largest mobile phone maker for more than a decade. And newer players like Finland’s Supercell and Rovio, creators of the ubiquitous video games Clash of Clans and Angry Birds, or Sweden’s Mojang, the publisher of the equally popular video game Minecraft, are changing the face of online gaming.

Nordic countries are well-ranked when it comes to helping facilitate starting a business. At the most basic level, what the Nordic approach does is reduce the risk of starting a company, since basic services such as education and health care are covered for regardless of the fledgling company’s fate. In addition, companies themselves are freed from the burdens of having to offer such services for their employees at the scale American companies do. And if the entrepreneur succeeds, they are rewarded by tax rates on capital gains that are lower than the rate on wages.

as capitalist economies the Nordic countries have proven that capitalism works better when it’s accompanied by smart, universal social policies that are in everyone’s self-interest.

His critics should not be content with protesting his cover-up of Khashoggi’s murder. They should not even be content with ending America’s complicity in the war in Yemen. The root of the problem is the Trump administration’s effort to escalate confrontation in a part of the world that desperately needs less of it. If Democrats gain power in Congress this fall, that’s the target at which they must take aim.

while I yield to nobody in my appreciation of the right’s fiscal fraudulence, I took its monetary hawkishness seriously. I thought that all those dire warnings about the inflationary consequences of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to fight high unemployment, the constant harping on the evils of printing money, were grounded in genuine — stupid, but genuine — concern.Silly me.

it is a shock to see so many conservative voices — including, incredibly, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal — echoing Trump’s demands.

It’s hard to overstate just how consistent and intense The Journal and others of like mind used to be in their attacks on easy money. Many commentators have noted that three years ago The Journal declared that low interest rates are bad for the economy. But that was minor compared with the newspaper’s pronouncements during the financial crisis. For example, it attacked and ridiculed Ben Bernanke for cutting interest rates in December 2008 — that is, at a time when the economy was in free fall, and desperately needed all the support it could get.

What’s at stake in 2018 goes beyond control of the House, Senate and statehouses, important as that is. Up for grabs as well is our basic understanding of how American politics works now.

If you’re a Democrat and you attribute Trump’s victory to conventional causes, you might tend to rely on conventional campaign tools this year: Bank on Trump’s historically low approval rating, plus the fact that the president’s party almost always loses House seats in his first midterms, stake out a broad anti-Trump message and get your voters to the polls.

If, however, you’re a Democrat and you have a different theory — that Trump won because he offered voters a combination of unabashed white identity politics and magical cures to economic woes — your job gets simultaneously easier and harder.

The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration.

The differences were particularly striking on race. For instance, a quarter of Trump voters who never attend church describe being white as “very important” to their identity; for the most frequent churchgoers voters, it was 9 percent. Among non-churchgoing Trump voters, only 48 percent had warm feelings toward black people, compared to 71 percent of weekly churchgoers; the same sort of pattern held for views of Hispanics, Asians and Jews.

their views of Muslims, interestingly, seemed to have been influenced by Trump’s own rhetoric, becoming more hostile between 2016 and 2017.

The specific challenge that posed for Northern Ireland was identified and baked into the commission’s negotiating mandate in May 2017. But in February 2019 Dominic Raab, a man who briefly led Brexit negotiations, and fancies himself as a potential prime minister, admitted he had not read the Good Friday agreement. It is only 35 pages long.

The prospect of Britain ending up in a customs union with the EU has been at the forefront of Brexit argument for nearly two years. On Monday around 50 Tory MPs attended a training seminar organised by colleagues on what a customs union is and how it works. At least they were curious. Breathtaking, wilful ignorance of facts has been a routine feature of the debate

Last week Boris Johnson told Telegraph readers that May should “drop the deal” and, in the next line, that she should “extend the implementation period to the end of 2021”. The implementation period is part of the deal. Drop one and you lose the other. Johnson is not stupid, but he has affected stupidity for so long that the difference no longer matters.

She turns out to be one of the most brilliant, if destructive marketeers in politics. “No deal is better than a bad deal”, a centrepiece of her Lancaster House speech in January 2017, was only ever meant by her to be a convenient figleaf, simultaneously keeping her Brexiteers loyal and convincing the EU that Britain had other options than to agree to compromise.

Where it has spectacularly worked, in May’s endless repetition of it and its gleeful adoption by the right-wing press, is that it has sunk deeply into voters’ consciousness, convincing those confronted with Brexit’s unavoidable tradeoffs and difficulties that we needn’t deal with all these tiresome Europeans and their realities

it was never in any way true. No-deal, in the sense of freedom and independence, is a mirage. It does not exist.

You sense, in some of the stories to emerge from these fraud charges, an odd form of intergenerational class conflict, in which wealthy people who did not grow up pampered (Loughlin is the child of a telephone-company foreman) are now trying to impose middle-class values (a good education is important) on superrich kids who see little use for them.

Many kids compete for elite college slots in an attempt to gain access to a higher social class, but some of these parents are surely seeking the opposite effect — a degree that suggests their kids are not simply coasting on their inheritance while cultivating vanity careers. They are heaping money on their progeny in an attempt to correct for how rich they are.

An underperforming, school-averse teenager is often content to attend a low-pressure state school with good parties; it’s his parents who are desperate to prevent this.

In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.

Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.

Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.

Thousands of people are fleeing Puerto Rico as the island remains without power and the death toll continues to climb more than a month after Hurricane Maria. Even for those who can afford plane tickets and get to the airport, there’s another hurdle: evacuating with pets.  Leaving the island with animals in tow has become a huge challenge, said Sarah Barnett of the Humane Society of the United States, which has workers on the ground in Puerto Rico. The pet owners Barnett has spoken with have been “hysterical” with worry, she said.

Some pet owners stayed, remaining in dire conditions to care for animals. Others had to make gut-wrenching decisions. Claudia, a single mother who left for North Carolina with her baby and two dogs, left her other three dogs with a friend. She’s now desperately trying to bring those dogs to the mainland, too.

“They’re inundated with people wanting to fly their animals out in cargo,” Barnett said. American Airlines is accepting a limited number of pets per flight as checked baggage, and United is transporting animals through its PetSafe program.  Delta did not reply to a query about whether it is flying pets in cargo, though it previously waived fees for pets flying in the cabin from Puerto Rico. JetBlue and Southwest never transport pets in the cargo hold, though they both fly a limited number of small pets in the main cabin. A JetBlue spokesperson told HuffPost the airline has waived all in-cabin pet fees for flights out of Puerto Rico through Nov. 15, and doubled the number of pets per flight from four to eight.

The Donald Trump-Kaiser Wilhelm Parallels Are Getting Scary

Historian Thomas Nipperdey once described Wilhelm as “superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success — as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday.”

But lately I’ve been struck by the parallels between POTUS 45 and the last Hohenzollern emperor: Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’m not the first person to notice the similarities

The Republican tax plan is a bit like having a baby to save a failing marriage.

With divisions roiling the party, the prospect of a once-in-a-generation bill to cut taxes on businesses and individuals increasingly appears to be the last, best hope for a fractured establishment desperate to find common ground and advance an effort it has long championed as the pinnacle of Republican orthodoxy.

a top House Republican said that changes to retirement savings were still being considered, even after Mr. Trump declared Monday that “there will be NO change to your 401(k).”

Even rock-star orthopedists here don’t have nurses helping them in their offices. The doctor changes his own examining table paper. His staff consists of two foul-tempered office assistants who make appointments, take payments and hand out prescriptions.

I am an accidental European. I developed breast cancer in 2009. With no continuing medical coverage in the United States, and in desperate need of it, I moved to Britain. Under the sponsorship of an acquaintance, I was granted “indefinite leave to remain” and received care through the National Health Service. When I moved to France four years ago, the French system quickly took over covering me.

I don’t live in the promotional brochure version of France those Americans are touring. France for me was not a vacation selection. Moving to Europe was a choice weighed against other, grimmer options for health care, which included the strong possibility of being bankrupted by cancer treatment and winding up at the mercy of New York State’s welfare system.