Pyongyang’s third nuclear test which they say underscores a diversion of scarce funds towards weapons programs instead of coping with chronic food shortages.
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North Koreans Question Test Costs - 0 views
www.rfa.org/...costs-02122013181953.html
north question test costs korea policy economic culture economics crisis
shared by julia rhodes on 22 Feb 13
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the people are frustrated that precious resources are being diverted from efforts to address economic impoverishment, North Korean defectors and rights groups told RFA’s Korean service.
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“North Koreans cannot understand the nuclear test when they see hunger in the country,” Song said.
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“It’s unacceptable because there are many North Koreans starving to death while the authorities are wasting a lot of money—several hundred million dollars—on the test.”
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Pyongyang had spent U.S. $1.3 billion on its rocket program in 2012.
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he official estimated that the cost was the equivalent of 4.6 million tons of corn, which could have fed North Koreans for “four to five years
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The leadership change has created a stir at the lowest levels of the military,” said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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“Not only me, but many North Korean defectors in South Korea, knew that Kim Jong Un was young and had studied abroad, so we believed that he would be different from his father and grandfather [national founder Kim Il Sung] in terms of policy making,” she said.“But our initial hope has clearly not materialized, making us sad
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the regime was attempting to assuage the anger and fears of the North Korean people, who he said no longer trust their government
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“The reason for the test is to divert or soothe the people’s discontent over the malfunctioning of the regime. In order to do that they must find an enemy from outside,” Jang said.
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f North Korea’s Yanggang province, which borders China, told RFA that anger within the regime following the removal of several generals from the ranks of government during a broad political reshuffle had forced Kim Jong Un to test the device as an overture to the military
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“The North Korean regime has no consideration for human rights—it is only concerned with maintaining political power.”
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China’s Liaoning province said that the action is likely to affect North Korea’s trade with China, valued at U.S. $5.64 billion in 2011.
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it is surprising
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that North Korea conducted the test during the Chinese Lunar New Year [China’s most important holiday of the yea
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“I’m worried about the possibility that I might not get back money for the goods I gave to my North Korean counterparts on credit, because they are likely to say that the country is in a state of emergency and that they are unable to pay me back due to political reasons
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Why Palestinians can't make peace | New York Post - 0 views
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four Arabs who accepted an invitation for the holiday of Sukkot in the nearby Israeli settlement of Efrat on Thursday: The Palestinian Authority arrested them.
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The invite from Oded Revivi, the Israeli mayor, was intended to promote peace
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Can’t hurt to get to know the neighbors, can it?
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Except that the PA insists on boycotting the settlements — it won’t accept any Israeli presence outside the 1967 borders, no matter that it’s been half a century.
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On Sunday, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu took to Facebook to slam the arrests as “further proof of the Palestinian refusal to make peace”
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Sadly, it’s all par for the course for the PA — whose textbooks teach hatred of all Jews, whose laws reward Israeli-killing terrorists and whose leaders have spent decades silencing (often fatally) any Palestinian who dares work with Israel’s government.
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We recently had a debate regarding this conflict, so this is relevant to our class and it is a hot topic today
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Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela's Failing Hospitals - The New York Times - 0 views
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Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals
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“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.
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It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse.
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Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.
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At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water.
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The hospital has no fully functioning X-ray or kidney dialysis machines because they broke long ago. And because there are no open beds, some patients lie on the floor in pools of their blood.
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This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high.
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So without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood.
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In April, the authorities arrested its director, Aquiles Martínez, and removed him from his post. Local news reports said he was accused of stealing equipment meant for the hospital, including machines to treat people with respiratory illnesses, as well as intravenous solutions and 127 boxes of medicine.
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In a supply room, cockroaches fled as the door swung open.
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Ms. Parucho, a diabetic, was unable to receive kidney dialysis because the machines were broken. An infection had spread to her feet, which were black that night. She was going into septic shock.
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A holiday had been declared by the government to save electricity, and the blood bank took donations only on workdays.
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For the past two and a half months, the hospital has not had a way to print X-rays. So patients must use a smartphone to take a picture of their scans and take them to the proper doctor.
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Near him, a handwritten sign read, “We sell antibiotics — negotiable.” A black-market seller’s number was listed.
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The ninth floor of the hospital is the maternity ward, where the seven babies had died the day before. A room at the end of the hall was filled with broken incubators.
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The day of the power blackout, Dr. Rodríguez said, the hospital staff tried turning on the generator, but it did not work.
Theresa May's Swiss holiday will show her just how bad Brexit could be | Ian Birrell | ... - 0 views
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Breitbart's Man in Rome: A Gentle Voice in a Strident Chorus - The New York Times - 0 views
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Rushing to meet his wife at St. Peter’s Square, Thomas Williams walked past priests in black cassocks and said that the only thing he missed from his own decades of wearing a priest’s collar was “a real sense of helping people very directly.”
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“You know my history,” Mr. Williams, 54, said, referring to a past worthy of its own Breitbart headline. “I was looking to re-establish myself again.”
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He said his time in the public eye had made him extra sensitive to inflicting harm and he lamented the “horrible” Breitbart commenters.
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“Breitbart seemed like the exact opposite of everything I had been trained for and naturally tended towards,” the former priest said. “Which was help people understand each other, smooth over differences, show maybe you are not as far apart as you think.”
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Mr. Williams speaks adoringly of his son and accompanies him to therapy. He said he was “thrilled” to have his mother-in-law visiting for the holidays. He paints Roman street scenes for his wife and expresses appreciation for a “full life.”
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Generally, Mr. Williams said, Breitbart considered Pope Francis a challenge. “Challenging in the sense that they don’t love the guy,” he said, adding that Mr. Bannon, who declined to comment, was “suspicious” of Francis.
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Venezuela Drifts Into New Territory: Hunger, Blackouts and Government Shutdown - The Ne... - 0 views
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This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.
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In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week.
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The regional tensions came to a head last week when Mr. Maduro went on television to chide the Organization of American States, which has criticized Venezuela’s handling of the economic and political crises.
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Last week, protests turned violent in parts of the country where demonstrators demanded empty supermarkets be resupplied. And on Friday, the government said it would continue its truncated workweek for an additional 15 days.
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American officials say the multiplying crises have led Mr. Maduro to fall out of favor with members of his own socialist party, who they believe may turn on him, leading to chaos in the streets.
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Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates.
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Mr. Almagro responded with an open letter blasting the president, calling on him to allow the recall referendum his opponents are pushing this year to remove Mr. Maduro from office.
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Venezuela’s public schools are now closed on Fridays, another effort to save electricity. So Ms. González was waiting in line with her elder child at an A.T.M., while her husband watched over the other one at home.
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Venezuela’s government says the problems are the result of an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country.
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But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products.
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On a recent day in the downtown government center, pedestrians milled about, but nearly every building — including several museums, the public registry office and a Social Security center — was empty, giving the appearance of a holiday.
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Donald Trump's Christian Soldiers - The New York Times - 0 views
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Of all the reasons it once seemed unthinkable that Donald J. Trump might be the Republican nominee, one of the strongest was the G.O.P.’s reputation as the party of religious conservatives.
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Trump was a different kind of figure: Not merely lukewarm or unorthodox, but a proud flouter of the entire Judeo-Christian code — a boastful adulterer and a habitual liar, a materialist and a sensualist, a greedy camel without even the slightest interest in squeezing through the needle’s eye
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And yet: Despite his transparent irreligiosity, Trump has won easily across the South, one of the most religious portions of the country. Among both self-identified evangelicals and Catholics, he’s consistently polled as well as the evangelical Ted Cruz and the Roman Catholic Marco Rubio.
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This week two influential conservative Catholic scholars, Robert George and George Weigel, put out an open letter to their co-believers, urging them to reject Trump as “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.”
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some clarity is also needed about what it means, exactly, that Trump is winning religious voters.
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Trump is not the first choice of most active churchgoers. Indeed, active religiosity is (relatively speaking) one of the bulwarks against Trumpism, and his coalition is strongest among the most secular Republicans
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38 percent still described themselves as weekly churchgoers.
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As with the wider conservative coalition, Trump is heightening conservative religion’s internal contradictions and fracturing it along pre-existing fault lines
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Trump is losing the most active believers, but he’s winning in what I’ve previously termed the “Christian penumbra” — the areas of American society (parts of the South very much included) where active religiosity has weakened, but a Christian-ish residue remains.
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The inhabitants of this penumbra still identify with Christianity, but they lack the communities, habits and support structures that make the religious path (somewhat) easier to walk. As a result, this Christian-ish landscape seems to produce more social dysfunction, more professional disappointment and more personal disarray than either a thoroughgoing secularism or a fully practiced faith
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his occasional nods to religious faith — like, say, his promise to make store clerks say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” — are well tailored for voters for whom Christian identity is still a talisman even when an active faith is all but gone.
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among Americans who do still have an active faith, Trump has exploited the widening gap between what many conservative Christians assumed about the relationship between their country and their faith, and what the last 10 years or more of social and political change have revealed about the nation’s drift
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Evangelicals have for decades believed that the country was more conservative than not, more Christian than not. The bipartisanship on religious liberty and the civic faith of the country was conducive to that. Now they’ve woken up to a reality in the Obama years that this was a polite fiction.
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If this is really a post-Christian society, they seem to be thinking, then Christians need to make sure the meanest, toughest heathen on the block is on their side. So it makes sense to join an alliance of convenience with a strongman, placing themselves under his benevolent protection, because their own leaders have delivered them only to defeat.
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the lure of the strongman is particularly powerful for those believers whose theology was somewhat Trumpian already — nationalistic, prosperity-worshiping, by turns apocalyptic and success-obsessed.
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With the steady post-1960s weakening of traditional Christian confessions, the preachers of this kind of gospel — this distinctively American heresy, really — have assumed a new prominence in the religious landscape. Trump, with his canny instinct for where to drive the wedge, has courted exactly these figures
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he’s wooed televangelists and prosperity preachers, and pitched himself to believers already primed to believe that a meretricious huckster with unusual hair might be a vessel of the divine will.
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Which he is not, save perhaps in this sense: In the light of Trumpism, many hard truths about American Christianity — its divisions, its failures, its follies, its heresies — stand ruthlessly exposed.
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India's battle against three words that grant Muslims instant divorce - 0 views
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Farha's husband instantly divorced her last year by saying "talaq, talaq, talaq" in a fit of anger after their 10-year-old daughter had asked him for five rupees (seven cents) to buy some firecrackers for a holiday celebration.
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The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari - Commentators - The Independent - 0 views
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dubai globalization economics politics slavery history
shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 12
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the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.
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There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?
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Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.
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"There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.
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Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison." This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.
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The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."
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Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into Creditopolis, a city built entirely on debt. Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would be bust already, if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't pulled out its chequebook. Mohammed says this will constrict freedom even further. "Now Abu Dhabi calls the tunes – and they are much more conservative and restrictive than even Dubai. Freedom here will diminish every day." Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy"
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For Emiratis, this is a Santa Claus state, handing out goodies while it makes its money elsewhere: through renting out land to foreigners, soft taxes on them like business and airport charges, and the remaining dribble of oil. Most Emiratis, like Ahmed, work for the government, so they're cushioned from the credit crunch. "I haven't felt any effect at all, and nor have my friends," he says. "Your employment is secure. You will only be fired if you do something incredibly bad." The laws are currently being tightened, to make it even more impossible to sack an Emirati.
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What we see now didn't occur in our wildest dreams. We never thought we could be such a success, a trendsetter, a model for other Arab countries. The people of Dubai are mighty proud of their city, and rightly so. And yet..." He shakes his head. "In our hearts, we fear we have built a modern city but we are losing it to all these expats." Adbulkhaleq says every Emirati of his generation lives with a "psychological trauma." Their hearts are divided – "between pride on one side, and fear on the other."
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t is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.
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heikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American.
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Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive." Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. "We are building all these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone, and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it's all fine, they've taken it into consideration, but I'm not so sure."
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The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. "They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off." She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea.
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She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. "Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out," they said. She says: "The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!" There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's most famous hotels.
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Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.
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Financial, Economic and Money News - USATODAY.com - 0 views
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nvestors were expecting volatility in 2014, but this is ridiculous.While the overall stock market remains somewhat tranquil, beneath the quiet surface, some individual stocks are already giving their owners a sickening ride. Thursday was the latest day in a week full of some head-turning big drops in stocks, including consumer electronics seller Best Buy and skin treatment maker Nu Skin.
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Thursday closed down a bruising $10.74, or 29%, to $26.83, while Nu Skin, a seller of skin care products, was down $30.43, or 26%, to $84.80.
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Evidence of investors' low tolerance for disappointment. Best Buy's stock woes were triggered by reports of holiday sales that fell short of what analysts had predicted. The consumer electronics seller reported that sales at stores open at least a year fell 0.8% during the nine-week period ending Jan. 4. Investors were already turning negative on retailers following disappointing news from other retailers and consumer products sellers. Shares of at-home soda maker equipment maker, SodaStream and video game seller GameStop have seen their shares fall 22% and 19% this week on disappointing results.
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Such big drops are a reminder of how investors don't have any tolerance when stocks at large are hovering around their long-term average valuations. "Any company that misses in this environment is getting hurt big time," says Peter Cardillo of Rockwell Global Capital. "It's a question of investors not being forgiving."
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A Proud Nation Ponders How to Halt Its Slow Decline - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Today, however, Europe is talking about “the French question”: can the Socialist government of President François Hollande pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?
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At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years.
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France’s friends, Germany in particular, fear that Mr. Hollande may simply lack the political courage to confront his allies and make the necessary decisions.
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Today, at Nanterre, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are demanding that nothing change at all.
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as the European economy slowly mends, the French temptation will be to hope that modest economic growth will again mask, like a tranquilizer, the underlying problems.
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The French are justifiably proud of their social model. Health care and pensions are good, many French retire at 60 or younger, five or six weeks of vacation every summer is the norm, and workers with full-time jobs have a 35-hour week and significant protections against layoffs and firings.
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the question is not whether the French social model is a good one, but whether the French can continue to afford it. Based on current trends, the answer is clearly no, not without significant structural changes — in pensions, in taxes, in social benefits, in work rules and in expectations.
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the challenge in France seems especially hard, in part because of the nation’s amour-propre and self-image as a European leader and global power, and in part because French life is so comfortable for many and the day of reckoning still seems far enough away, especially to the country’s small but powerful unions.
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“The young people march now to reject all reforms,” he said. “We see no alternatives. We’re a generation without bearings.”
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The Socialists have become a conservative party, desperately trying to preserve the victories of the last century.
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There is nonetheless an underlying understanding that there will be little lasting gain without structural changes to the state-heavy French economy. The warning signs are everywhere: French unemployment and youth unemployment are at record levels; growth is slow compared with Germany, Britain, the United States or Asia; government spending represents nearly 57 percent of gross domestic product, the highest in the euro zone, and is 11 percentage points higher than Germany. The government employs 90 civil servants per 1,000 residents, compared with 50 in Germany.
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Hourly wage costs are high and social spending represents 32 percent of G.D.P., highest among the industrialized countries; real wage increases outpace productivity growth; national debt is more than 90 percent of G.D.P.
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In the World Bank’s ranking of “ease of doing business,” France ranks 34th, compared with 7th for Britain and 20th for Germany.
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Last year, France was ranked 28th out of the 60 most competitive economies in the world, according to the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. The United States was first. Even China, at 21, and Japan, at 24, outranked France.
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About 82 percent of the new jobs created last year were temporary contracts, up from 70 percent only five years ago, not the kind of full-time work that opens the door to the French middle class. That keeps nearly an entire generation living precariously, no matter how hard people study or work.
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France is the world’s fifth-largest economy, with strong traditions in management, science and innovation.
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The country retains plenty of strengths.
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The gap between rich and poor is narrower in France than in most Western countries, although it is growing.
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When the French work, they work hard; labor productivity, perhaps the single most important indicator of an economy’s potential, is still relatively high, if dropping. But with long holidays and the 35-hour week, the French work fewer hours than most competitors, putting an extra strain on corporations and the economy.
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Large French companies compete globally; there are more French companies in the Fortune 500 than any other European country. But the bulk of their employees are abroad, and there are few of the midsize companies that are the backbone of Germany.
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Ninety percent of French companies have 10 or fewer employees and fear expansion because of extra tax burdens and strict labor regulations.
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In poll after poll, the French insist that they want renovation and modernization, so long as it does not touch them. That is always the political challenge, and Mr. Hollande’s conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, is considered to have failed in his promise to make serious structural changes.
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One of Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers, Alain Minc, who tried to get him interested in Germany’s social market revisions, once admitted that Mr. Sarkozy was simply afraid to confront the unions and the social uproar that real change would provoke.
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There is a broad consensus that real social and structural renovation can be carried out only by the left. But that can happen only if Mr. Hollande, who has a legislative majority, is willing to confront his own party in the name of the future, as the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder did a decade ago with a series of legal modifications that now get much of the credit for Germany’s revival.
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shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 15
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Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...y-unbelievably-gets-worse.html
inequality analysis taxes redistribution international politics economics
shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 15
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Before the impact of tax and spending policies is taken into account, income inequality in the United States is no worse than in most developed countries and is even a bit below levels in Britain and, by some measures, Germany.
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However, once the effect of government programs is included in the calculations, the United States emerges on top of the inequality heap.
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our taxes, while progressive, are low by international standards and our social welfare programs — ranging from unemployment benefits to disability insurance to retirement payments — are consequently less generous.
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Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.
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And income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent.
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Conservatives may bemoan the size of our government; in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.
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Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.
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All told, social spending in the United States is below the average of that of the wealthiest countries. And other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics
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The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.
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, on the programmatic side, among the many meritorious aspects of the much-maligned Affordable Care Act are its redistributionist elements: higher taxes on investment income and some health care businesses are being used to provide low-cost or free health care to a projected 26 million Americans near the bottom of the income scale.
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more can and should be done — like raising the minimum wage nationwide and expanding the earned-income tax credit (a step supported by Republicans).
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Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.
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A Murky Road Ahead for Android, Despite Market Dominance - The New York Times - 0 views
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About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. Google’s once underappreciated side bet has become Earth’s dominant computing platform
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Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android.
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Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014
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Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business.
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How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android?
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Google is sanguine about Android’s prospects and said the company’s original vision for Android was never solely about huge profits. “The bet that Larry, Sergey and Eric made at the time was that smartphones are going to be a thing, there’s going to be Internet on it, so let’s make sure there’s a great smartphone platform out there that people can use to, among other things, access Google services
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The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means that much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices
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at the same time, given the increasing threats to Google’s advertising business, we might also wonder how long that largess can continue.
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A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly.
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even if hot Silicon Valley start-ups still create apps for iOS first, app makers in other parts of the world see Android as a surer path to the masses. “The reality is that folks like you should play a role in educating the Silicon Valley,” she said.
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Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China.
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Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps.
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The situation is especially painful for Google in China, the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market, where Google’s apps are blocked. Even in the rest of Asia, where many low-cost phone manufacturers do include Google’s apps on their phones, there’s growing interest in finding some alternative to Google’s version of Android. About 30 percent of Android smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2014 were actually modified, or forked, versions of the OS that may not be very hospitable to Google’s services, according to the firm ABI Research
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Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors — and has signed a “strategic partnership” with Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft — to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android.
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“We share services revenue with the phone makers — and today they get very little of that from Google,” said Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s chief executive. “There are very few companies in the world today that really like Google. Nobody wants Google to run the table with this game. So it’s a good time to be a neutral third party. We’re Switzerland, and we want to share that revenue with our ecosystem partners in a meaningful way.”
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in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google — losing the high-end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Xiaomi and Cyanogen.
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Three American teens, recruited online, are caught trying to join the Islamic State - T... - 0 views
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muslim terrorism recruiting internet social media islamist
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This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens — nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s, and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.
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Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State aggressively target youths as young as 14.
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“This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.
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Hamzah Khan grew up in a suburban American home with pretty shrubs out front and a basketball hoop in the back yard. He earned a Presidential Physical Fitness Award in the eighth grade and loved Naruto, the Japanese manga. He volunteered at his local mosque and represented Argentina in the National Model United Nations.
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The process is often called “cocooning” — shielding children from as much American culture as possible by banning TV, the Internet and newspapers and sending them to Islamic schools.
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Omer Mozaffar, a Muslim community leader who teaches theology at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Chicago, said many Muslim families appear to have sheltered their children from the culture around them.
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When Hamzah Khan was about 8 years old, the family got rid of the TV, because by then they had a computer with Internet access, which the parents carefully monitored. The children were allowed to watch cartoons and read news online, but they were not allowed to browse the Internet by themselves. “We didn’t want to expose them to adult stuff,” Zarine Khan said. “We wanted to preserve their innocence. We wanted to channel their intelligence into their studies and to becoming good human beings.”
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He said that since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, some Muslims have felt “under siege” in the U.S. communities where they live. “There’s a defensiveness that compels parents to pull their kids out of everything,” Mozaffar said. “A lot of parents feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to do, so they try to isolate their children.”
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“Parents send them less for the Islamic tutelage and more for the sense of protecting them,” Mozaffar said. “They think ‘American’ equals ‘immoral,’ and there’s a common belief that if it’s more strict, it’s more pious. This is something I have to preach against all the time.”
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The result is often that American Muslim children find themselves caught between two worlds. They are American, but they feel their parents and their religious leaders trying to steer them away from American culture.
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That can leave them vulnerable to those who promise something better, a place where they are celebrated for their religion. And, recently, that message has often come in the form of the network of anonymous, persuasive recruiters on social media who lure youth to join the Islamic State. Quadri calls them “Sheik Google.”
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The evening before the teens tried to fly away forever, Zarine Khan said, she and her daughter sat together putting henna dye on each other in celebration of the upcoming Eid al-Adha holiday.
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What Can Be Done About the Inefficiencies of Giving Gifts? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Deadweight loss is the mismatch between what a gift giver thinks a receiver wants and what the receiver actually wants. This, in Waldfogel's words, "is just the waste that arises from people making choices for other people. Normally I’ll only buy myself something that costs $50 if it’s worth at least $50 to me. When I go out and spend $50 on you though, because I don’t know what you like and what you need, I could spend $50 and buy something that would be worth nothing to you."
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Expanding this concept to the whole economy, a conservative estimate of deadweight loss is 10 percent (that is, the average gift receiver values a gift at 90 percent of its actual value). Given that Americans are expected to spend about $600 billion on holiday gifts this year, that would put the amount of deadweight loss at $60 billion.
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Did you get a gift this year you didn't like? Go ahead and return it or exchange it for something you do like—you'll be reducing deadweight loss.
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A School for Children-and Their Parents - 0 views
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This article focuses on the concept of fighting poverty by providing adults with schooling, while simultaneously educating their young children: Shortly before the year-end holiday break at Briya Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., Paige Reuber started her workday by helping a student finalize her health insurance application, which had been rejected on the first try. Then, later that afternoon, Reuber headed to the class in which she teaches some 20 adults English-language basics.
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Socialist History of International Women's Day | Al Jazeera America - 0 views
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Rights groups worldwide celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) on Sunday, as they commemorate women’s achievements and call for equality. But for an event championed by international nongovernment organizations and major global corporations, it may surprise some that IWD was borne out of the U.S. socialist movement in the early 20th century.
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In 1917, Russian women went on strike for “bread and peace” in protest of the deaths of more than 2 million Russian soldiers in the war, according to the U.N. They demanded the end of czarism and Russian food shortages. After the Russian Revolution, the day was declared a holiday in the Soviet Union. From there, it was primarily celebrated in communist countries such as China.
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Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013, with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose.
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Before the impact of tax and spending policies is taken into account, income inequality in the United States is no worse than in most developed countries and is even a bit below levels in Britain and, by some measures, Germany.However, once the effect of government programs is included in the calculations, the United States emerges on top of the inequality heap.
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And income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent.
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in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.
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That’s because our taxes, while progressive, are low by international standards and our social welfare programs — ranging from unemployment benefits to disability insurance to retirement payments — are consequently less generous.
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Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.
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Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.
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other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics. The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.
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Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.
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Day After Paris Attacks, Familiar Fear Grips a Wary New York - The New York Times - 1 views
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many felt less than safe, shaken by a sense that extremists had opened a new front in their assault on the most banal pleasures of modern city life. It was no longer enough to steer clear of the symbols of global finance and free expression that had been struck down earlier this century, they said. Danger was now lurking in their routines, stalking all their favorite urban diversions.
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Michael Weisberg, a judge who lives in Brooklyn, said he was on the subway halfway to the Holiday Train Show at Grand Central Terminal with his 3-year-old son when a thought prompted by the Paris attacks gripped him: Maybe he should have stayed home.Then he was struck by another notion.“I thought, ‘When does this all end?’ ” he said. “I never thought about that before.”