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Javier E

Opinion | The Millionaires Are Fleeing. Maybe You Should, Too. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • When a country begins to fall into economic and political difficulty, wealthy people are often the first to ship their money to safer havens abroad. The rich don’t always emigrate along with their money, but when they do, it is an even more telling sign of trouble.
  • Since 2013, New World Wealth, a research outfit based in South Africa, has been tracking millionaire migrations by culling property records, visa programs, news media reports and information from travel agents and others who cater to the wealthy.
  • In a global population of 15 million people each worth more than $1 million in net assets, nearly 100,000 changed their country of residence last year.
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  • In most countries it is fair to assume that any millionaire exodus is composed mainly of locals, and not foreign investors, because the wealthy classes will be dominated by citizens or longtime residents.
  • In 2017, the largest exoduses came out of Turkey (where a stunning 12 percent of the millionaire population emigrated) and Venezuela. As if on cue, the Turkish lira is now in a free fall.
  • matched the flight from the stagnant and sanction-battered economy of Russia, which also lost 2 percent of its millionaire population.
  • Until 2016, Britain had a sizable influx of millionaires every year, but the flow suddenly reversed last year with a net exodus of 3,000, amid fears that as Britain exits the European Union, London will fade as a financial capital. It did not help that in 2017 the government raised taxes on foreigners who buy property.
  • On the flip side, slowing outflows can be a welcome sign, and in 2017 the biggest shift for the better came in that caldron of anti-rich hostility, France.
  • Stunningly, India in 2017 suffered a net loss of 7,000 members, or 2 percent, of its millionaire population. That exodus came despite global optimism about India’s growth prospects
  • France had long been seen as the anti-Britain, a left-leaning bastion of prying bureaucrats and high taxes that scared off the wealthy, despite the charms of Paris. But the growing exodus of millionaires peaked in 2016 with a net outflow of 12,000, then slowed sharply to just 4,000 last year.
  • n the worst cases, bouts of capital flight can gain momentum until the value of the currency collapses, plunging the nation into crisis. Balance of payments records show that 10 of the last 12 major currency crises, dating back to the Mexican peso meltdown of 1994, began when residents started sending money abroad, which was typically two years before the currency collapsed
  • Right now, this forensic accounting offers clear evidence of looming financial difficulty in only one major country: Turkey. Starting early last year, affluent Turks began effectively moving large sums of money out of the country
  • The losses for India, Russia and Turkey were gains for havens like Canada and Australia
  • joined lately by the United Arab Emirates. Owing largely to the stability and glitter of the most famous emirate, Dubai, the United Arab Emirates in 2017 had a net inflow of 5,000 millionaires, increasing the size of its affluent population by 6 percent, the largest gain in the world
Javier E

Suburbs Try to Prevent an Exodus as Young Adults Move to Cities and Stay - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A recent report on the suburb-dotted New York counties of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk, based on United States census data, found that those young people seem to be lingering longer in New York City, sometimes forsaking suburban life entirely.
  • Since 2000, Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk have experienced a drop in the number of 25- to 44-year-olds, with the declines particularly sharp in more affluent communities. Between 2000 and 2011, Rye, for example, had a 63 percent decrease in 25- to 34-year-old residents and a 16 percent decrease in 35- to 44-year-olds.
  • The greatest population losses, he said, were in “the least diverse communities with the most expensive housing, which happen also to be those that have almost no affordable multifamily housing.”
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  • One reason, he theorized, is that 20- and 30-somethings are having a harder time finding the full-time jobs they need to afford their homes and real estate taxes. Nationwide, he said, the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who own homes has declined sharply.
  • Unless downtowns become livelier, he said, the island’s “long-term sustainability” will be hurt because new businesses will not locate in places where they cannot attract young professionals.
  • the city is safer and more energized than it was a generation ago, and its allure has grown. Cities like Baltimore, Washington and Boston have also revitalized rundown or desolate neighborhoods.
  • But he said there is also survey data that seems to show “that younger adults are becoming more drawn to denser, more compact urban environments that offer a number of amenities within walking distance of where they live.” And, he said, more ethnically mixed communities — with more rental housing and immigrants — are gaining population.
  • His theory is that young people are marrying later and moving to the suburbs later. Others say that young people seem to be taking more time finding themselves, and are willing to flounder at home for a time, pushing the traditional arc of adult life into the future. Continue reading the main story 21 Comments “Parents used to be 35ish, now they’re 45ish,” Mr. McCormack said. “What we’re seeing is not so much an exodus as a later arrival.”
runlai_jiang

An exodus from Venezuela has prompted Latin America's biggest migration crisis in decad... - 0 views

  • Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.
  • In Venezuela, children are dying. People are starving and being persecuted. What they’re getting from us is a door in the face.
  • Nowhere is the crisis more acute than here in Colombia, where 3,000 troops are fanning out across the 1,400-mile border to contain an influx of Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy and an increasingly repressive socialist regime.
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  • In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.
  • y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.
  • Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.
  • Our migration levels are now comparable to Syria or to [the Rohingya going to] Bangladesh,”
  • leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country
  • Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.
  • Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.
  • bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.
  • The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands
  • Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.
  • They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”
  • The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.
  • Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.
  • “Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.
  • The operations are sending as many as 100 migrants a day back to Venezuela.
  • You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”
Javier E

Russians abandon wartime Russia in historic exodus - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
  • The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.
  • Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.
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  • The financial cost, while vast, is impossible to calculate. In late December, Russia’s Communications Ministry reported that 10 percent of the country’s IT workers had left in 2022 and not returned.
  • those remaining in the depleted political opposition also faced a choice this year: prison or exile. Most chose exile. Activists and journalists are now clustered in cities such as Berlin and the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia.
  • “This exodus is a terrible blow for Russia,” said Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who moved to Portugal after the invasion. “The layer that could have changed something in the country has now been washed away.”
  • the influx of Russians into countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have long sent immigrants to Russia, set off political tremors, straining ties between Moscow and the other former Soviet states. Real estate prices in those countries have shot up, causing tensions with local populations.
  • For many Russians choosing to flee, Armenia was a rare easy option. It is one of five ex-Soviet countries that allow Russians to enter with just a national ID — making it a popular destination for former soldiers, political activists and others needing a quick escape.
  • Given the shared religion and use of language, Russians typically do not face animosity or social stigma in Armenia. Obtaining residency permits is also straightforward, and living costs are lower than in the European Union.
  • Yerevan has attracted thousands of IT workers, young creatives and working-class people, including families with children, from across Russia. They have established new schools, bars, cafes and robust support networks.
  • n the courtyard of the “Free School” for Russian children, established in April, Maxim, a construction company manager, was waiting for his 8-year-old son, Timofey. The school started with 40 students in an apartment. Now, there are nearly 200 in a multistory building in the city center.
  • “I did not want to be a murderer in this criminal war,” said Andrei, who is being identified by his first name for safety reasons
  • Like the White Russian emigres of the Bolshevik era and the post-Soviet immigrants of the 1990s, many of those leaving Russia because of the war in Ukraine are probably gone for good.
  • The family has adapted seamlessly to Yerevan. Everyone around them speaks Russian. Maxim works remotely on projects in Russia. Timofey likes his school and is learning Armenian. Maxim said he is sure the family will not return to Russia.
  • Tanya Raspopova, 26, arrived in Yerevan last March, with her husband but without a plan, overwhelmed and frightened.Then she heard that another emigre was seeking partners to set up a bar, a space where Russian expats could come together, and she wanted to help. Tuf, named after the pink volcanic rock common throughout Yerevan, opened its doors within a month.
  • They started with a neon-lit bar and kitchen on the ground floor, which soon expanded into a small courtyard. Then they opened up a second floor, then a third. Upstairs there is now a recording studio, a clothing boutique and a tattoo parlor. On a Wednesday night in January, the place was packed with young Russians and Armenians singing karaoke, drinking cocktails and playing ping-pong. “We have since created such a big community, a big family,” Raspopova said. “Tuf is our new home.”
  • Thousands have chosen the UAE, which did not join Western sanctions and still has direct flights to Moscow, as their new home. Russians enjoy visa-free travel for 90 days, and it is relatively easy to get a national ID, through business or investment, for a longer stay.
  • The high cost of living means there are no activists or journalists. Dubai is a haven, and the go-to playground, for Russian tech founders, billionaires under sanctions, unpenalized millionaires, celebrities, and influencers.
  • Shortly after the invasion, conversations in Moscow’s affluent Patriarch Ponds neighborhood turned to the best Dubai real estate deals, said Natalia Arkhangelskaya, who writes for Antiglyanets, a snarky and influential Telegram blog focused on Russia’s elite. A year later, Russians have ousted Brits and Indians as Dubai’s top real estate buyers, Russian-owned yachts dock at the marina, and private jets zigzag between Dubai and Moscow.
  • Russians can still buy apartments, open bank accounts and snag designer leather goods they previously shopped for in France.
  • The UAE’s embrace of foreign business has lured a stream of Russian IT workers seeking to cut ties with Russia and stay linked to global markets. Start-ups seek financing from state-supported accelerators. Larger firms pursue clients to replace those lost to sanctions.
  • About a dozen people arrived to discuss opportunities in India, which has maintained ties with Russia despite the war. Most expressed bitterness about the Kremlin’s politics and a longing for Moscow when it was an aspiring global hub.
  • “The most important thing for me is to be able to develop international projects and to integrate my kids into a global community, so they grow up in a free environment,”
  • Andrei works as a delivery driver and shares a modest room with two other men in a shelter set up by Kovcheg, a support organization for Russian emigrants. “Before the war, I never followed politics, but after the invasion, I started reading about everything,” Andrei said. “I feel so ashamed about what Russia has done.”
  • “Every extra month leads people to get used to a different country,” she said. “They get a job there, their children go to school, they begin to speak a different language. The longer the war lasts — the longer the dictatorship in the country continues — the fewer people will return.”
  • the expats could become “a repository of relevant skills for a better, freer, modern Russia.” For now, though, Rojansky said, the outflow sends a clear message.
Javier E

A Long Obedience - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted to put Moses as a central figure on the Great Seal of the United States, they were not celebrating him as a liberator, but as a re-binder. It wasn’t just that he led the Israelites out of one set of unjust laws. It was that he re-bound them with another set of laws. Liberating to freedom is the easy part. Re-binding with just order and accepted compulsion is the hard part.
  • when you are creating a social order, the first people who need to be bound down are the leaders themselves.
  • Moses was to exemplify the quality of “anivut.” Anivut, Rabbi Norman Lamm once wrote, “means a soft answer to a harsh challenge; silence in the face of abuse; graciousness when receiving honor; dignity in response to humiliation; restraint in the presence of provocation; forbearance and quiet calm when confronted with calumny and carping criticism.”
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  • Exodus is a reminder that statecraft is soulcraft, that good laws can nurture better people.
  • the general vision is that the laws serve many practical and spiritual purposes.
  • The laws tame the ego and create habits of deference by reminding you of your subordination to something permanent. The laws spiritualize matter, so that something very normal, like having a meal, has a sacred component to it. The laws build community by anchoring belief in common practices. The laws moderate religious zeal; faith is not expressed in fiery acts but in everyday habits. The laws moderate the pleasures; they create guardrails that are meant to restrain people from going off to emotional or sensual extremes
  • The 20th-century philosopher Eliyahu Dessler wrote, “the ultimate aim of all our service is to graduate from freedom to compulsion.”
  • Exodus provides a vision of movement that is different from mere escape and liberation. The Israelites are simultaneously moving away and being bound upward.
jlessner

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson Joins Exodus of City Officials - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • FERGUSON, Mo. — The city’s embattled police chief, the focus of bitter complaints after a white officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager here last August, agreed to resign Wednesday, completing a near complete shake-up of the city’s most senior administrators.
  • In the week since the Department of Justice released a scathing report detailing how Ferguson used law enforcement to pad its coffers, often violating constitutional rights and disproportionately targeting blacks in the process, the city manager and Municipal Court judge have also stepped down, and the city’s court has been placed under state supervision.
  • Together with the chief, Thomas Jackson, the three officials were cited as central figures in the abuses found by the Justice Department.
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  • “To Ferguson residents, business owners and to the entire country, the City of Ferguson looks to become an example of how a community can move forward in the face of adversity,”
  • Chief Jackson, 58, will receive a year’s pay — about $96,000 — and a year of health insurance as severance, the mayor said.
aleija

Opinion | Er, Can I Ask a Few Questions About Abortion? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You know who really reduced abortion numbers in the U.S.? President Obama, with the Affordable Care Act.
  • Millions of American Christians are likely to vote for President Trump on Tuesday because they believe it a religious obligation to support a president who will appoint “pro-life” judges.
  • The National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention both backed a limited right to abortion in the early 1970s, and an article in The Baptist Press welcomed the ruling in Roe v. Wade for advancing “religious liberty, human equality and justice.” A 1970 poll found that about two-thirds of Southern Baptist pastors supported allowing abortion in cases such as rape, deformity or a risk to the mother’s physical or mental well-being.
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  • What mattered to “pro-life” Republicans — more than respect for norms or institutions — was getting justices confirmed who might overturn Roe v. Wade. And many support Trump, despite reservations about him, because their be-all issue is the unborn.
  • The biblical passage most relevant to abortion is perhaps Exodus 21:22: “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined.”
  • Abortion was legal in the United States up to the point of quickening (the fetal movements felt in the second trimester) until the 19th century, when states began to ban abortion.
  • So as Justice Barrett takes the court, I’m hoping that the rethinking among conservative Christians gains ground.
carolinehayter

With 'husbands' remark, Trump has sealed his fate with women (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • As President Donald Trump pleaded for the support of suburban women at a Michigan rally Tuesday evening (amidst a pandemic and economic crisis that have caused a mass exodus of women from the workforce), he argued that he deserved their votes because "we're getting your husbands back to work."
  • The implications here -- that he believes all women have or should have husbands and that workplaces are the province of men -- are so sexist and outmoded that they will likely alarm American women who have long become accustomed to inappropriate treatment from their commander in chief.
  • Biden's support among White women (the ones Trump is clearly angling for when he says "suburban") is 18 points higher than that of Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump four years ago. But, with these latest remarks, the President has probably put the final nail in his own reelection chances with many women voters.
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  • Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.
  • misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.
  • A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.
  • Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.
  • rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others
  • His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks
  • Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center
  • This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women
  • moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.
  • But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.
  • Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.
  • They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.
Javier E

Opinion | We Have Two Visions of the Future, and Both Are Wrong - The New York Times - 0 views

  • these fears can no longer be confined to a fanatical fringe of gun-toting survivalists. The relentless onslaught of earthshaking crises, unfolding against the backdrop of flash floods and forest fires, has steadily pushed apocalyptic sentiment into the mainstream. When even the head of the United Nations warns that rising sea levels could unleash “a mass exodus on a biblical scale,” it is hard to remain sanguine about the state of the world. One survey found that over half of young adults now believe that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”
  • At the same time, recent years have also seen the resurgence of a very different kind of narrative. Exemplified by a slew of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay the challenges we face and instead insists on the inexorable march of human progress. If doomsday thinkers worry endlessly that things are about to get a lot worse, the prophets of progress maintain that things have only been getting better — and are likely to continue to do so in the future.
  • liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between
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  • It is easy to understand the appeal of such one-sided tales. As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear and linear narratives on a chaotic and unpredictable reality; ambiguity and contradiction are much harder to live with.
  • To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.
  • Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality
  • If things are really getting better, there is clearly no need for transformative change to confront the most pressing problems of our time. So long as we stick to the script and keep our faith in the redeeming qualities of human ingenuity and technological innovation, all our problems will eventually resolve themselves.
  • We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously called it, between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. Such epochal shifts are inevitably fraught with danger
  • the great upheavals in world history can equally be seen “as genuine signs of vitality” that “clear the ground” of discredited ideas and decaying institutions. “The crisis,” he wrote, “is to be regarded as a new nexus of growth.”
  • Once we embrace this Janus-faced nature of our times, at once frightening yet generative, a very different vision of the future emerges.
  • we see phases of relative calm punctuated every so often by periods of great upheaval. These crises can be devastating, but they are also the drivers of history.
  • even the collapse of modern civilization — but it may also open up possibilities for transformative change
Javier E

Used to Hardship, Latvia Accepts Austerity, and Its Pain Eases - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.
  • Now its abrupt turn for the better has put a spotlight on a ticklish question for those who look to orthodox economics for a solution to Europe’s wider economic woes: Instead of obeying any universal laws of economic gravity, do different people respond differently to the same forces?
  • in Latvia, where the government laid off a third of its civil servants, slashed wages for the rest and sharply reduced support for hospitals, people mostly accepted the bitter medicine. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who presided over the austerity, was re-elected, not thrown out of office, as many of his counterparts elsewhere have been. The cuts calmed fears on financial markets that the country was about to go bankrupt, and this meant that the government and private companies could again get the loans they needed to stay afloat. At the same time, private businesses followed the government in slashing wages, which made the country’s labor force more competitive by reducing the prices of its goods. As exports grew, companies began to rehire workers.
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  • Economic gains have still left 30.9 percent of Latvia’s population “severely materially deprived,” according to 2011 data released in December by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, second only to Bulgaria. Unemployment has fallen from more than 20 percent in early 2010, but was still 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012
  • “I’m always asking people here, ‘How can you put up with this?’ ” said Juris Calitis, a Latvian-born Anglican chaplain whose family fled Soviet occupation in the 1940s and who returned when the Soviet empire crumbled. “It is really shocking,” added Mr. Calitis, who runs a soup kitchen at his church in Riga’s old town. Latvians, he said, “should be shouting in the streets,” but “there is an acceptance of hard knocks.”
  • In contrast to much of Europe, Latvia today has no tradition of labor activism. “What can you achieve in the street? It is cold and snowing,” said Peteris Krigers, president of the Free Trade Union Confederation of Latvia. Organizing strikes, he said, is nearly impossible. “It is seen as shameful for people who earn any salary, no matter how small, to go on strike.”
  • Also largely absent are the leftist political forces that have opposed austerity elsewhere in Europe, or the rigid labor laws that protect job security and wage levels. In the second half of 2010, after less than 18 months of painful austerity, Latvia’s economy began to grow again.
  • Since 2008, Latvia has lost more than 5 percent of its population, mostly young people, to emigration. The recent exodus peaked in 2010, when 42,263 people moved abroad, a huge number in a country of just two million now, according to Mihails Hazans, a professor at the University of Latvia.
  • Alf Vanags, director of the Baltic International Center for Economic Policy Studies here, is skeptical. “The idea of a Latvian ‘success story’ is ridiculous,” he said. “Latvia is not a model for anybody.”
  • A better and more equitable way out of Latvia’s troubles, he believes, would have been a devaluation of the currency, an option closed to Greece and 16 other countries that use the euro. Latvia kept its currency pegged to the euro, putting itself in much the same straitjacket as euro zone nations.
  • “You can only do this in a country that is willing to take serious pain for some time and has a dramatic flexibility in the labor market,” he said. “The lesson of what Latvia has done is that there is no lesson.”
Javier E

George Washington: The Forgotten Emancipator | History News Network - 0 views

  • Lafayette’s fate played a part in Washington’s decision to abandon plans that he had been formulating to free Mount Vernon’s slaves while he was president. It would have been a huge public statement of his disapproval of slavery. Washington decided American voters could not deal with such an explosive topic when they were already deeply divided between pro- and anti-French parties. But he remained determined to make this statement as soon as he thought it could be done without endangering the American union.
  • During Washington’s retirement years, an English visitor to Mount Vernon discussed slavery with him, off the record. The ex-president told him no man in the nation yearned to see black bondage disappear more than he did. “Not only do I pray for it on the score of human dignity,” he said. “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”
  • The news of Washington’s death fell like a thunderclap from on high across the entire nation. The loss was so huge, so absolute, it seemed to alter everything, from the nation’s politics to its confidence in the future. The fact that Washington had emancipated his slaves dwindled to a blip in the context of these other anxieties. His act of emancipation excited little or no comment.
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  • Part of the reason may have been the fact that the slaves all had to remain at Mount Vernon until Martha’s death. There was no opportunity for newspaper stories of an exodus to freedom. At least as important, Martha Custis Washington made no attempt to publicize the will. She did not agree with her husband’s decision. Even if she had been inclined to free her slaves, she lacked the power. Her first husband’s will had stipulated that all his slaves were to become the property of their surviving Custis descendants -- Martha’s four grandchildren.
  • A year later, Martha freed all Washington’s slaves unilaterally, and allowed them to leave Mount Vernon. She acted on the advice of Bushrod Washington, her husband’s nephew, who had become a Supreme Court justice. Martha had told him the freed blacks were becoming angry over the long delay in their emancipation.
marleymorton

NSA risks talent exodus amid morale slump, Trump fears - 0 views

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    The National Security Agency risks a brain-drain of hackers and cyber spies due to a tumultuous reorganization and worries about the acrimonious relationship between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump, according to current and former NSA officials and cybersecurity industry sources.
Javier E

Limbaugh's Advertiser Exodus Expands Exponentially | Media Matters for America - 0 views

  • Radio-Info.com reported on Friday that 98 advertisers have told Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates Rush Limbaugh's radio show, that they want to avoid advertising on Limbaugh's show and other programs with content "deemed to be offensive or controversial": The list includes carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm) and restaurants (McDonald's, Subway).
grayton downing

BBC News - Starved Syria civilians flee besieged Damascus suburb - 0 views

  • Thousands of Syrian civilians have finally been allowed to leave the besieged Damascus suburb of Moadamiya.
  • The exodus of civilians has been made possible by an apparent relaxation of a blockade by government forces.
  • The situation has become so desperate that earlier this month Muslim clerics issued a religious ruling allowing people to eat cats, dogs and donkeys just to survive.
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  • For months, the UN and other aid agencies have been calling for urgent help, fearing the worst for the people of Moadamiya.
  • "We didn't see a piece of bread for nine months,"
  • "We were eating leaves and grass."
  • Before Syria's civil war began in 2011, some 95% of children in the country were vaccinated against the disease, but now an estimated 500,000 children have not been immunised.
  • The disease has been largely eradicated in developed countries but remains endemic in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Javier E

Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education. It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience. Every conscientious American should read it.
  • Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.”
  • the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.
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  • Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.
  • The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below.
  • I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.
  • In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.
  • This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.
  • Ben.Lynch Augusta, Georgia 1 day ago I've followed Mr. Coates for sometime now and tend to agree with his viewpoints. As a white southern male who works in our segregated education systems, it took years for me to actually apprehend my day to day interactions with black children in poverty. For the longest time, I simply couldn't understand the behaviors I saw, the reactions, and at first I reacted with contempt, but then I began to understand little by little. I don't think I can express it to anyone here, let alone Mr. Brooks, but it is something that one only appears to get by letting it sink into your bones day after day, hour after hour. The conditions are terrible and promise to remain so for the rest of my career. My students know, even if they lack the rhetorical chops to express it, that the game is rigged, that what we sell, meaning America at large, to make ourselves feel better, to feel just, is demonstrably a false bill of goods that does nothing to solve the actual problems of their life. These students are so used to being crushed that they can't even begin to articulate that they are being crushed because it's simply how it is. Some suppose Mr. Coates is overly dour, overly negative, but he provides a necessary contrapuntal to those who assume that the arc of the universe inevitably bends toward justice. Struggle can and often does end in defeat. The wicked often sleep as well as the just and sometimes better. The sins of the fathers remain fixed around the necks of the sons and daughters.
Javier E

Putin and the Laws of Gravity - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A large number of Ukrainians wanted to hitch their economic future to the European Union not to Putin’s Potemkin Eurasian Union. This story, at its core, was ignited and propelled by human nature — the enduring quest by people to realize a better future for themselves and their kids — not by geopolitics, or even that much nationalism. This is not an “invasion” story. This is an “Exodus” story.
  • “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.” It ended because we invented bronze tools, which were more productive. The hydrocarbon age will also have to end with a lot of oil, coal and gas left in the ground, replaced by cleaner forms of power generation, or Mother Nature will have her way with us. Putin is betting otherwise.
  • there is something of a Moore’s Law now at work around solar power, the price of which is falling so fast that more and more homes and even utilities are finding it as cheap to install as natural gas. Wind is on a similar trajectory, as is energy efficiency. China alone is on a track to be getting 15 percent of its total electricity production by 2020 from renewables, and it’s not stopping there. It can’t or its people can’t breathe. If America and Europe were to give even just a little more policy push now to renewables to reduce Putin’s oil income, these actions could pay dividends much sooner and bigger than people realize.
Javier E

Man's Genome From 45,000 Years Ago Is Reconstructed - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia.
  • In December, they published the entirety of a Neanderthal genome extracted from a single toe bone. Comparing Neanderthal to human genomes, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues found that we share a common ancestor, which they estimated lived about 600,000 years ago.
  • They found that his DNA was more like that of non-Africans than that of Africans. But the Ust’-Ishim man was no more closely related to ancient Europeans than he was to East Asians.He was part of an earlier lineage, the scientists concluded — a group that eventually gave rise to all non-African humans.
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  • The Ust’-Ishim man’s genome suggests he belonged to a group of people who lived after the African exodus, but before the split between Europeans and Asians.
  • By comparing the Ust’-Ishim man’s long stretches of Neanderthal DNA with shorter stretches in living humans, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues estimated the rate at which they had fragmented. They used that information to determine how long ago Neanderthals and humans interbred.
  • Humans and Neanderthals interbred 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, according to the new data.
  • The findings raised questions about research suggesting that humans in India and the Near East dated back as far as 100,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that humans expanded out of Africa in a series of waves.
  • the new study offered compelling evidence that living non-Africans descended from a group of people who moved out of Africa about 60,000 years ago.Any humans that expanded out of Africa before then probably died out, Mr. Stringer said.
qkirkpatrick

World War One: How 250,000 Belgian refugees didn't leave a trace - BBC News - 0 views

  • The UK was home to 250,000 Belgian refugees during World War One, the largest single influx in the country's history. So why did they vanish with little trace?
  • Germany had invaded Belgium, forcing them to flee. The exodus had started in August and the refugees continued to arrive almost daily for months, landing at other ports as well, including Tilbury, Margate, Harwich, Dover, Hull and Grimsby.
  • Official records from the time estimate 250,000 Belgians refugees came to Britain during WW1. In some purpose-built villages they had their own schools, newspapers, shops, hospitals, churches, prisons and police. These areas were considered Belgian territory and run by the Belgian government. They even used the Belgian currency.
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  • "It was the largest influx of refugees in British history but it's a story that is almost totally ignored," says Tony Kushner, professor of modern history at the University of Southampton.
  • Within 12 months of the war ending more than 90% had returned home, says Kushner. They left as quickly as they came, leaving little time to establish any significant legacy.
  • "The events of 1939 to 1945 completely overtook the First World War in people's minds," says Sheffield. "There was a new wave of refugees to dominate the memory. So many things about the First World War were forgotten, all the nuances of the subject."
qkirkpatrick

Africa's role in WWI a forgotten chapter - Washington Times - 0 views

  • Thousands of miles from the battlefields of Europe, the armies of Britain and France clashed with imperial German forces in Africa’s deserts, cities and bush during World War I.
  • The 1914-18 war brought an end to German colonial rule in Africa, saw up to 2 million Africans sacrifice their lives for Europe and brought much social upheaval as cities grew to supply the war effort, hardening racial divisions.
  • “The First World War had a considerable impact on African colonies because European powers requisitioned their labor and their resources,” said historian Bill Nasson of the University of Cape Town.
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  • In World War I, France more than any other European power used African troops, including Senegalese riflemen who fought in the victorious battle to take the German colony of Togo. France also sen
  • Most Africans who participated in that war, however, were recruited or conscripted into labor units, as military service was considered risky — stoking fears that blacks “may get ideas beyond their station,” said World War I historian Albert Grundlingh of the University of Stellenbosch.
  • But it took close to 70 years for South Africa to pay homage to 700 black laborers who died when their ship, the Mendi, sank in the British Channel in 1917 on its way to France to help in the war effort.
  • Amid the battles, African cities were taking shape in the first big wave of black urbanization, driven by the demand for labor.
  • “It was the biggest migration of the early 20th century,” said Mr. Grundlingh, adding that the mass exodus to the cities planted the seeds of segregation, and eventually, black consciousness.
  • The end of German colonization in Africa saw France take over Togo, while a French-British coalition ruled Cameroon. Belgium got Rwanda and Burundi, leaving Tanzania to the British, and Southwest Africa went to South Africa.
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