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The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington's decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is U.S.

By leaving intact and even enlarging the policies that his predecessor had inaugurated, President Barack Obama has handed these militarists an unearned victory. As they drag themselves from one "overseas contingency operation" to the next, American soldiers must reckon with the consequences. So too will the somnolent American people be obliged to do, perhaps sooner than they think.

The premise is that politics and economics are separate realms, and we are “creating a culture” of division by dragging politics into such things as economic transactions. One could hardly better encapsulate the reality we live under, where economics have completely replaced politics. That’s pretty much the definition of classical liberalism: true politics, where human values are disputed, are expected to be sublimated by economic transactions.

The winner is the corporation, which can now reap the profits of a society where no human value is allowed to be more important than a business deal. (If you question that orthodoxy, you’re likely to be labeled a “radical” or a “partisan,” or better yet, just “too political.”) This ideology owes its entire existence to the need for capitalists to keep human values out of the way of the market. Above all, it must keep politics a dirty word, because people who know what politics are and how to use them can cause trouble for capitalists very quickly.

our commercial and our political lives are already completely intermeshed, because under the current regime we basically only have commercial lives. The only political power to be had in the United States is money, and even if you don’t have enough to make a corporation hurt, how you consume is one of the few expressions of political will open to the average citizen. They may not have enough money to shake the economy, and may not even when pooled with a large group of like-minded people. But a visceral awareness that money is politics is an excellent first step toward the average person realizing his or her political agency and taking responsibility for it.

The typical American family's net worth plunged by 40 percent between 2007 and 2010, from $126,400 to $77,300, wiping out two decades of gains and thrusting the typical family's wealth back to 1992 levels.

median household wealth popped in the bubble and collapsed in the bust, as housing prices fell by 30 to 40 percent in the worst-hit metros, in California, Nevada, and Florida. In 2007, barely half of families surveyed by the Federal Reserve reported savings. Just as the boom made families feel richer, the financial shock made families feel poorer. And so falling housing prices led to falling wealth, which led to falling spending, which led to falling private sector revenue, which led to massive job cuts, which dragged down housing prices even further, and around and around we go.

this is why stimulus-supporters support stimulus. A nation that controls its currency and has low borrowing costs has not only an obligation but also an easy opportunity to step into the vicious cycle and erect a firewall -- either with (a) massive spending, (b) tax cuts, (c) lower interest rates, (d) higher inflation expectations, or (e) all of the above

No country in Africa, if not the world, has so thoroughly turned itself around in so short a time, and Kagame has shrewdly directed the transformation.

Kagame has made indisputable progress fighting the single greatest ill in Africa: poverty. Rwanda is still very poor — the average Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day — but it is a lot less poor than it used to be. Kagame’s government has reduced child mortality by 70 percent; expanded the economy by an average of 8 percent annually over the past five years; and set up a national health-insurance program — which Western experts had said was impossible in a destitute African country.

Progressive in many ways, Kagame has pushed for more women in political office, and today Rwanda has a higher percentage of them in Parliament than any other country. His countless devotees, at home and abroad, say he has also delicately re-engineered Rwandan society to defuse ethnic rivalry, the issue that exploded there in 1994 and that stalks so many African countries, often dragging them into civil war.

Critical negotiations between the embattled Ukrainian government and opposition leaders were thrown into disarray on Thursday when President Viktor F. Yanukovych went on sick leave, complaining of a respiratory infection.

But he has found himself caught between the competing demands of the protesters in the streets of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities and his allies in the Kremlin, who suspended the loan deal on Wednesday after disbursing only $3 billion.

Vitali Portnikov, an opposition journalist, suggested that rather than a virus, Mr. Yanukovych was falling prey to internal political pressures, perhaps losing power to a hard-line faction in his government, a development that could presage a coup d’état.

Mayhem gripped the center of the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday evening as riot police officers tried to drive two armored personnel carriers through stone-reinforced barriers in Independence Square, the focal point of more than two months of protests against President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

In the course of wild day of parries and thrusts by the protesters and the police, the authorities in Kiev reported nine people killed, including two police officers. It was the bloodiest day of violence since President Yanukovych spurned a trade deal with Europe in November and set of protests that began peacefully but have since involved occasional spasms of deadly violence.

A phalanx of riot police officers, backed by a water cannon, pushed through protesters’ barricades near the Ukraina Hotel and fired tear gas as they advanced toward the center of the square. People covered in blood staggered to a medical center set up in the protest encampment.

He displayed flashes of sardonic wit, anger and palpable disdain, especially toward the Americans and Europeans but also toward the leaders of a country, Ukraine, he made clear was a political neophyte, unable to govern itself.

paramount leader for more than 14 years, at last broke his studied silence on the political upheaval in Ukraine on Tuesday during a 66-minute news conference that sought to justify Russia’s actions and policies.

“The only thing we had to do, and we did it, was to enhance the defense of our military facilities because they were constantly receiving threats and we were aware of the armed nationalists moving in,”

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is being dragged back into the ring at the age of 85

Invitations to speak have come from Spain, Britain and China. He has won a prestigious education award. Curriculums developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation, which Mr. Hirsch created to disseminate his ideas, have recently been adopted by hundreds of schools in 25 states and recommended by the New York City Department of Education for teachers to use in their classrooms.

“This is a redemptive moment for E. D. Hirsch, after a quarter-century of neglect by people both conservative and liberal,”

In July 2011, a government inquiry found that the causes of the crash were complex but mundane: organizational negligence, poor pilot training, bad weather and the shoddy state of the airport at Smolensk. In short, the presidential plane should never have taken off that day.

Yet wild theories abounded: The Russians had produced the fog; a “vacuum bomb” had been set off; the plane had been dragged to the ground by magnets; several passengers had survived the crash but been finished off on the ground.

Poland’s liberal intelligentsia coined a phrase for this overheated paranoia: the “Smolensk religion.” Its doctrine was a singular, explosive mixture of Polish messianism and religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and a love of martyrdom. For followers of the faith, any rational argument about the crash was instantly transubstantiated into further proof of the assassins’ cunning.

Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.

The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.

arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too

As they moved through the isolated villages in this region in 1943, systematically killing men in a reprisal for an attack on a small outpost, German soldiers dragged Giannis Syngelakis’s father from his home here and shot him in the head. Within two days, more than 400 men were dead and the women left behind struggled with the monstrous task of burying so many corpses.

Mr. Syngelakis, who was 7 then, still wants payback. And in pursuing a demand for reparations from Germany, he reflects a growing movement here, fueled not just by historical grievances but also by deep resentment among his countrymen over Germany’s current power to dictate budget austerity to the fiscally crippled Greek government.

Estimates of how much money is at stake vary wildly. The government report does not cite a total. The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt.

if Uber and its ride-sharing competitors succeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see many small and midsize cities become transportation nirvanas on the order of Manhattan — places where forgoing car ownership isn’t just an outré lifestyle choice, but the preferred way to live.

“In many cities and even suburbs, it’s becoming much easier to organize your life car-free or car-lite,” said David A. King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University who studies technology and transportation. By car-lite, Dr. King means that instead of having one car for every driver, households can increasingly get by with owning just a single vehicle, thanks in part to tech-enabled services like Uber.

car-sharing services like Zipcar and bike-sharing services have already led to a significant net reduction of car ownership among users.

“I’ve told my six-year-old daughter, ‘Running for office is real simple: you just surgically disconnect your shame sensor,’” he said. “Because you spend every day asking people for money.

Starting with the attack on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law in 2003, opponents have won an accelerating series of victories against similar laws. The result has completely changed the world of campaign finance. Citizens United struck down limits on independent expenditures. SpeechNow made it possible for contributions to be largely hidden. Aggregate limits on personal contributions were swept away by McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014

For extremely wealthy donors who want to elect candidates and influence issues, their newfound power is a godsend. After spending $92 million on super PACs in 2012, Sheldon Adelson can summon any Republican candidate he wants and has their ears to discuss Israel, his pet issue.

What is wrong with the economies of the West—and with economics?

With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades—mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia—have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion—access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect.

The classical idea of political economy has been to let wage rates sink to whatever level the market takes them, and then provide everyone with the “safety net” of a “negative income tax,” unemployment insurance, and free food, shelter, clothing, and medical care

most — not all, but most — of what you’ve heard about Greek profligacy and irresponsibility is false. Yes, the Greek government was spending beyond its means in the late 2000s. But since then it has repeatedly slashed spending and raised taxes. Government employment has fallen more than 25 percent, and pensions (which were indeed much too generous) have been cut sharply. If you add up all the austerity measures, they have been more than enough to eliminate the original deficit and turn it into a large surplus.

So why didn’t this happen? Because the Greek economy collapsed, largely as a result of those very austerity measures, dragging revenues down with it.

And this collapse, in turn, had a lot to do with the euro, which trapped Greece in an economic straitjacket. Cases of successful austerity, in which countries rein in deficits without bringing on a depression, typically involve large currency devaluations that make their exports more competitive

There is a movie I’m looking forward to seeing when it comes to Washington. It seems quite relevant to America today

It’s about what can happen in a democratic society when politicians go too far, when they not only stand mute when hateful words that cross civilized redlines suddenly become part of the public discourse, but, worse, start to wink at and dabble in this hate speech for their advantage.

Later, they all say that they never heard the words, never saw the signs, or claim that their own words were misunderstood. But they heard and they saw and they meant.

what’s missing to turn poor places into rich places isn’t more information, money, technology, workshops, programs, evaluation or any of the other things that development organizations normally provide.  What’s missing are motivation and confidence.

What Matta means is that usually the obstacle to development is not that we don’t have the tools, but that we don’t use the tools we have. People drag their feet. The next step is someone else’s problem.  Budget approval takes forever.  The money disappears.  People won’t try because it never works.  The goal is too pie-in-the-sky. The parts aren’t available.  The bricks get stolen.  The project gets started and then the leadership changes and it sits, abandoned.   Every villager fumes:  nothing gets done around here.

“The biggest issue is that people don’t actually mobilize,” said Matta.  “The last mile is where solutions need to come together in specific ways.   We think we have part of the answer to the last mile problem.”

After years of watching his influence in Latin America slip away, Mr. Obama suddenly turned the tables this week by declaring a sweeping détente with Cuba, opening the way for a major repositioning of the United States in the region.

Washington’s isolation of Cuba has long been a defining fixture of Latin American politics, something that has united governments across the region, regardless of their ideologies. Even some of Washington’s close allies in the Americas have rallied to Cuba’s side.

“We never thought we would see this moment,” said Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who chided the Obama administration last year over the National Security Agency’s surveillance of her and her top aides. She called the deal with Cuba “a moment which marks a change in civilization.”

one of the satirical French newspaper's founding members is blaming the publication’s slain editor for provoking the attacks,

one of five staff members killed in last week’s shootings, for his stubbornness after publishing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, which was followed by the 2011 firebombing of the newspaper’s offices.

What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it?”

WASHINGTON — Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

While there is no evidence yet of any cable cutting, the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe. At the same time, the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War.

“I’m worried every day about what the Russians may be doing,” said Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy’s submarine fleet in the Pacific, who would not answer questions about possible Russian plans for cutting the undersea cables.