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In a back-to-the-future bet on its energy policy, the British government announced a long-elusive $26 billion deal on Monday to build the first new nuclear power station in Britain since 1995.

Britain has been gripped by growing worries about its future power supplies, with supply falling and prices rising.

Mr. Davey said that Britain would need to replace about 60 percent of its generating capacity “in a relatively short time,”

a closer look at the forces that drive the relentless pace at elite companies suggests that — however much the most sought-after employers in the country may be changing their official policies — brutal competition remains an inescapable component of workers’ daily lives. In some ways it’s getting worse.

the basic problem is that the rewards for ascending to top jobs at companies like Netflix and Goldman Sachs are not just enormous, they are also substantially greater than at companies in the next tier down. As a result, far more people are interested in these jobs than there are available slots, leading to the brutal competition

Grueling competition remains perhaps the defining feature of the upper echelon in today’s white-collar workplace.

Putin’s Pre-U.N. Charm Offensive: Fake or Breakthrough?

Moscow think tanks believe the carefully planned and staged remarks were meant to send two important signals to the West before Putin’s meetings at the United Nations General Assembly later this month: First, he is ready to freeze the war in Eastern Ukraine, and secondly, he wants to join the West in the fight against ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, in Syria.

The man asked Putin when the leader would go ahead and turn Donbas, as eastern Ukraine is called, into a part of Russia, as happened with Crimea.

many modern Conservatives intuitively base their analysis of the world on a philosop

hy is that anathema to my worldview. Their view is that if you take a responsible, measured, well-reasoned approach to the world things will work out. Failure is thus a sign that you have not done that. My sense is that this is fundamentally crap.

Suffering is inevitable and the best one can say is that it hasn’t happened to me – yet. Bad things happen because badness is the natural state of the world. If something good ever happens count yourself lucky and be aware that this too shall pass. Thus, I see our proper mission as easing pain, where we can, to the extent we can, the best we can. This is best done up close and personal where you are mostly likely to quickly notice if your efforts to help are actually doing harm. It is best done with a respect and reverence for the power of self-organizing systems, spontaneous order and the resilience of natural equilibria. Its best done slowly, and in baby steps, building upon the wisdom of the past. And, most importantly it is best done with humility, knowing that in all cases that, “but for the grace of God pure heartless luck, there would go I” Its this last part that I think many modern Conservatives miss in their conviction that everything would be okay if it were for those meddling Liberals. Everything would not be okay. It never will be. If we do our best it might, and I mean might, be a little bit better.

Stimulus size is not the key factor in determining how quickly a country emerges from recession. The U.S. tried big, but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.

the Germans have built on their advantages. They effectively support basic research and worker training. They have also taken brave measures to minimize their disadvantages. As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets.

American policy makers have done little to maximize their model’s natural advantages or address its problems. Indeed, they’ve only made the short-term thinking problem worse, with monetary, fiscal and home-ownership policies encouraging even more borrowing and consumption.

That some — even now — are honoring secession, with barely a nod to the role of slavery, underscores how divisive a topic the war remains, with Americans continuing to debate its causes, its meaning and its legacy.

“our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”

When Southerners refer to states’ rights, he said, “they are really talking about their idea of one right — to buy and sell human beings.”

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward. Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in s

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

In the realm of power, as in the domain of the bond vigilantes, you’re fine until you’re not fine—and when you’re not fine, you’re suddenly in a terrifying death spiral.

With unemployment seemingly stalled out at around 7 percent in the aftermath of the Great Recession, with the leak of thousands of National Security Agency documents making news almost daily, with the continuing stories about the erosion of privacy in the digital economy, “Who Owns the Future?” puts forth a kind of universal theory that ties all these things together.

unlike most of his fellow technologists, he eventually came to feel that the rise of digital networks was no panacea.

On the contrary: “What I came away with from having access to these varied worlds was a realization that they were all remarkably similar,” he writes. “The big players often gained benefits from digital networks to an amazing degree, but they were also constrained, even imprisoned, by the same dynamics.”

It would, with zigzags and pauses, after huffs and hesitations, gradually integrate with the Western world.

Modernity would do its work, breeding openness and connectedness. Autocracy and crony capitalism would yield over time (maybe even a long time, but still) to more representative government in Moscow and law-based markets.

He has opted for confrontation with the West as the basis for Russian development and the consolidation of his own power.

what is wrong with us?

entire

We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

what about us "experts?" What have we learned? Are there really any significant new insights? Do we know much more today than we did a generation ago?

France uplifted the downtrodden people of Algeria and Indo-China

My generation was deeply influenced half a century ago by economists and mathematicians. We scholars all wanted to be - and particularly to show -- that we had mastered all the techniques of our professions as social scientists, that we could build models, make graphs, juxtapose trends, etc. After all, we were writing our learned books and essays for our academic colleagues and our paymasters, not for those we were describing. So, at least those who were paid by our government and its proxy think tanks often became, as the English say, "too clever by half." They and their counterparts in universities, after all, had to prove their "smarts" in order to get funded, promoted or kept on

economic historians reckon the question of whether the benefits of globalisation outweigh the downsides is more complicated than this. For them, the answer depends on when you say the process of globalisation started.

it is impossible to say how much of a “good thing” a process is in history without first defining for how long it has been going on.

Although Adam Smith himself never used the word, globalisation is a key theme in the Wealth of Nations. His description of economic development has as its underlying principle the integration of markets over time. As the division of labour enables output to expand, the search for specialisation expands trade, and gradually, brings communities from disparate parts of the world together

For the first time in nearly a month, Donald Trump looks mortal again.

the GOP frontrunner came away with just two wins that were both quite narrow, in Louisiana and Kentucky. He lost the Maine caucuses — his first defeat in the Northeast — and got blown out in

Kansas

Leaders Move to Convert Paris Climate Pledges Into Action

PARIS — Before the applause had even settled in the suburban convention center where the Paris Agreement was adopted by consensus on Saturday night, world leaders warned that momentum from the historic accord must not be allowed to dissipate.

With nearly every nation on Earth having now pledged to gradually reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases that are warming the planet

Five Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested in recent weeks on suspicion of supporting the Islamic State

suggested that the suspects may have intended to carry out an assault, though there did not seem to be evidence that their activities had coalesced into a concrete plot

Five of those arrested have since been charged with weapons violations and support for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL

Fed raises interest rates, citing ongoing U.S. recovery

The U.S. central bank's policy-setting committee raised the range of its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to between 0.25 percent and 0.50 percent, ending a lengthy debate about whether the economy was strong enough to withstand higher borrowing costs.

The Fed's policy statement noted the "considerable improvement" in the U.S. labor market, where the unemployment rate has fallen to 5 percent, and said policymakers are "reasonably confident" inflation will rise over the medium term to the Fed's 2 percent objective.

Though the law provided federal funding to fully pay for the expansion in 2014, 2015 and 2016, the aid is gradually phased down so states will ultimately pay 10% of the cost in 2020, a prospect many local lawmakers find worrisome, given doubts about the price tag

For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true

In context, it’s clear that Chief Justice Roberts means “The way to stop discrimination against any given race is to stop discriminating against all races.”

over the past 50 years, the idea that race should not matter in judgments of merit has become widely accepted among Americans. Affirmative action, however, denies this: When the purpose is sufficiently worthy, it’s right to prefer minority over majority applicants (and even to prefer some minorities over other minorities, such as Asian-Americans).

The closing of The Weekly Standard is being told as a Trump story, as all stories must be these days. The magazine has been critical of Trump, and so this is another example of the gradual hegemony of Trumpism over the conservative world. That is indeed the backdrop to what happened here.

But that’s not the whole story. In reality, this is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain some sense of intellectual standards. This is what happens when people with a populist mind-set decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning.

In that sense, the closing of The Standard resembles Chris Hughes’s destruction of the old New Republic. This is what happens when the commercial forces trying to dumb down the American media run into a pocket of people trying to resist those forces