Group items tagged

“paid mercenaries.”

the details of this purported transaction with Saudi Arabia are murky

in which he bragged about war crimes, told blatant lies about the FBI, and said he feels no obligation to publicly detail the intelligence underpinning his decision to approve a military strike against an Iranian official that brought the country to the brink of war.

Trump has normalized gaslighting and authoritarian rhetoric to such an extent that this interview with Ingraham barely registered as a blip on the news radar.

The United States has not been directly involved in the illicit arms race. But it bears responsibility for the mess by bailing out of the conflict soon after Colonel el-Qaddafi was overthrown and killed

In any event, a major infusion of military support for the Government of National Accord by Turkey blunted Mr. Hifter’s offensive, leading to a cease-fire in October, the convening of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in November and the appointment of an interim administration.

Peace in Libya matters for reasons beyond its own sake. The country has huge reserves of oil, and the anarchy of the past decade has made it a prime jumping-off point for refugees seeking to flee to Europe across the Mediterranean. Shortly after leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama declared in an interview that the failure to plan for the aftermath of Colonel el-Qaddafi’s exit was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

The interests of the foreign powers range from avarice to influence, and given the vast resources they have invested in Libya, they no doubt stand ready to resume their meddling if the peace process collapses. But they also appear to appreciate that they and their clients have fought to a stalemate, and that reverting to their zero-sum game might be futile.

here’s a glimmer of hope.

id Dbeibah, a billionaire who was a close associate of Colonel el-Qaddafi, stands accused of buying the votes that gave him the job. The interim team and the cabinet it proposes need to survive a vote of confidence in a House of Representatives that is also split in two, one side based in Tobruk and the other in

This peace process is the best chance to date to put Libya together again. Libyans are thoroughly sick of the fighting, banditry and destruction that have plagued their country for a decade, and tired of the foreign powers and mercenaries who have spread death across the land, much of it through armed drones. The U.N. estimates there are now at least 20,000 mercenaries in Libya.

statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month praised Ms. Williams for her “creativity and tenacity” in facilitating the process, and declared that the United States “supports the Libyan vision of a peaceful, prosperous and unified Libya with an inclusive government that can both secure the country and meet the economic and humanitarian needs of it

However, there was one geographic factor that favored Eastern Europe's rulers after 1600.  That was the fact that Eastern Europe is next to Western Europe.  As a result, some influence from the West was able to filter in to the East.  In particular, Eastern European rulers would emulate their Western counterparts by adopting firearms, mercenary armies, and professional bureaucracies.  As a result, they were able to build strongly centralized states in the 1600's and 1700's.  This was especially true in three states: Austria-Hungary (the Hapsburg Empire), Brandenburg-Prussia in Germany, and Russia.

Russia’s major successful military operations under Mr. Putin — the defeat of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 — happened when the West was looking the other way. In both cases, the world was caught unawares and Russia could complete its designs without the threat of armed international opposition.

there’s no major domestic unrest and elections are two years away. Mr. Putin doesn’t require an expansionist escapade to either shore up his rule or distract the population from its troubles. War is a big red button that can be pushed only once. Right now, there’s no need.

instead of submitting, the United States went the other way and began arming Ukraine

why did Mr. Putin raise the stakes so high? The answer is simple: Afghanistan. The West’s disastrous withdrawal from the country in August signaled the United States’ waning appetite for entanglement abroad. Emboldened, Mr. Putin clearly decided it was a good time to press his case for a revision of the post-Cold War order.

he fell back on unpredictability. The more irrational his behavior, went the thinking, the more likely the United States would accept his demands.

The core request — that NATO deny membership to Ukraine — was silly in a different way. There was no chance of Ukraine becoming a member any time soon, ultimatum or not. But that was Mr. Putin’s point: By demanding something that was already happening, Mr. Putin aimed to claim a victory over the West.

The Ukrainian Army is much improved, having upscaled its equipment and preparations for a ground invasion, and the Russian troops deployed near the border are most likely insufficient to conquer the country. Because of its sheer bulk, the Russian Army might be able to advance: Quantity has a quality of its own, as Stalin reportedly said. But it would surely come at the cost of catastrophic losses in human life.

There is, perhaps, one certainty to hold on to: Mr. Putin will never start a war he’s likely to lose. So the only way to ensure peace is to guarantee that in a military confrontation, Mr. Putin would never win.

First, the Turks and Russians have too much to gain from staying in Libya. Second, they have little incentive to leave under current circumstances because the only power in the world that could potentially use its leverage to pressure Turkish and Russian forces to depart is the United States. It is unlikely for the US to play its cards in such a manner.

Washington is not interested in Libya, especially at this time when there are far more pressing problems – from Donbas to North Korea, to China and, above all, to the enormous internal problems that the Biden administration is facing,”

From Washington’s perspective, this is not necessarily problematic so long as the Wagner Group’s presence does not expand. Because of such concerns about the Russian force enlarging its footprint in Libya, the US sees the Turkish military’s presence in the polarised North African country as the best outcome that Washington could realistically expect.

“The only mechanism that the United States has is the Turkish presence. When the United States looks at Turkey it sees a NATO member.

The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike Washington that has taken a far more favourable stance towards Ankara’s role in Libya.

“The presence of Turkish forces there is of course considered detrimental to France’s interests, given the strategic alignment of Paris to Abu Dhabi and its support of the Eastern forces of General Khalifa Haftar in the 2019-2020 Tripoli offensive,”

“Economic competition must be also factored into these considerations, which help explain why after many years of a worrisome intra-European spat, Paris [which backed Haftar] and Rome [which backed the Government of National Accord] decided to come together, set aside their differences, and face outsiders expanding their influence in the Libyan arena.”

Beyond issues stemming from economic competition, there are security issues that give EU members reason to perceive the Turkish and Russian hard power in Libya as threatening national interests of European powers. “Finally, whoever controls the Libyan coast controls migration flows and this is a strategic issue that Brussels should not underestimate,” said Fasanotti.

If the US remains unwilling to throw its weight around in Libya and maintains its own perspectives on Turkish-Russian rivalry for influence that leads Washington to be more accommodating of Ankara’s Libya foreign policy than several of the US’s close European allies, these divisions could deepen.

People tend to forget the extent to which the last Republican administration was also characterized by cronyism, the appointment of unqualified but well-connected people to key positions

In particular, if you want some notion of what Trump governance is likely to look like, consider the botched occupation of Iraq. People who knew anything about nation-building weren’t wanted; party loyalists — and corporate profiteers — took their place. There’s even a little-known connection: Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the mercenary outfit that, among other things, helped destabilize Iraq by firing into a crowd of civilians.

Now the conditions that prevailed in Iraq — blind ideology, contempt for expertise, effective absence of any enforcement of ethics rules — have come to America, but in a far more acute form.

will happen when we face a crisis? Remember, Katrina was the event that finally revealed the costs of Bush-era cronyism to all.

Real crises need real solutions. They can’t be resolved with a killer tweet, or by having your friends in the F.B.I. or the Kremlin feed the media stories that take your problems off the front page. What the situation demands are knowledgeable, levelheaded people in positions of authority.

A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.

I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus

to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.

The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system

the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in.

every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!

There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making,

depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast.

When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”

While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies

the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house

fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students

It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row

the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster

The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify

The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus

But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses

the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today

during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light.

Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.

This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D. Bickel and Peter F. Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?

The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.

American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school.

Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten.

Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene

In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.

These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor

Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers

, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities

lawsuits began to pour in.

Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies.

For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members.

comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.

you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual

the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.

there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it.

these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.

But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem.

Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?

“I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance

, the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years

the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright

“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.”

the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.

So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?

I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.

the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.”

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance,” constitutional reform and U.N.-supervised elections within 18 months

parties will participate in the conference, while excluding those deemed as terrorist organizations 

“terrorists” and “mercenaries,” as well as the sectarian nature of many rebel factions on the ground.

use of shelling and aerial bombardment against civilians, safe and voluntary refugee transfer, and unfettered access for humanitarian agencies to besieged areas of Syria.

“useful” and that he is “looking forward to the active participation of relevant parties in the Geneva talks.”

“From the government’s point of view, they’re not keen on negotiations anyway,” Rabbani said.

The talks face another stumbling block in soaring tensions between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia,

Iran’s Shiite leadership has backed Assad, a member of the Alawite sect that is related to Shia Islam.

Last week, Saudi Arabia executed an influential Shiite cleric, enraging Iran and leading to a cutoff of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

an has similarly called for calm, while diplomatic efforts from Iraq and Oman continue to encourage a reconciliation between the two countries

Previous attempts at jump-starting peace talks have failed because of what was viewed as the government's intransigence regarding rebel participation.

don’t at all see that the proposed date is a realistic one, especially since on the ground there were no confidence-building measures,”

He cited the situation in Madaya, a town with an estimated population of 40,000 located 25 miles northwest of Damascus that has been besieged by pro-government forces since July.

“The issue of Madaya has become a key point. The Syrian cannot go to negotiations while Syrians are dying of hunger and cold,”

the Syrian government said it would allow aid to enter Madaya in the coming week.

In recent days, Madaya has become a media battleground for the warring parties in Syria.

he furor also has affected the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, an ally of the Assad government, which is accused of perpetrating what Madaya residents have described as a nightmare

Hateet also accused rebel fighters bunkered inside Madaya of holding civilians hostage, barring their exit from the town.

This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people’s relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home.

The same goes for today’s digital revolution. While often described as a second machine age, our current historical moment is better understood as a second industrious revolution. It has been underway for at least 40 years, encompassing the collapse, since the 1970s, of the relatively secure wage-work economy of the postwar era — and the rise of post-industrialism and the service economy.

Over these four decades we have seen an increase in the use of day laborers, office temps, management consultants, contract assemblers, adjunct professors, Blackwater mercenaries and every other kind of worker filing an I.R.S. form 1099. These jobs span the income ranks, but they share what all work seems to have in common in the post-1970s economy: They are temporary and insecure

In the last 10 years, 94 percent of net new jobs have appeared outside of traditional employment. Already approximately one-third of workers, and half of young workers, participate in this alternative world of work, either as a primary or a supplementary source of income.

services like Uber and online freelance markets like TaskRabbit were created to take advantage of an already independent work force; they are not creating it. Their technology is solving the business and consumer problems of an already insecure work world. Uber is a symptom, not a cause.

Today’s smartphone app is an easy way to hire a temp, but is it really that much easier than picking up a phone was in 1950?

shortly after World War II, a Milwaukee man named Elmer Winter founded Manpower, the first major temp agency, to supply emergency secretaries. But by the end of the ’50s, Winter had concluded that the future growth of Manpower was in replacing entire work forces

persuading companies to abandon how they operated was easier said than done, even though Winter could readily demonstrate that it would be cheaper. Few companies took him up on his offer. Higher profits were possible, but not as important, in the lingering wake of the Great Depression, as the moral compact between employer and employee

Big corporations had always had their critics, but no one before the ’70s would have thought that smaller companies would be better run than large ones. Large companies had resources, economies of scale, professional managers, lots of options. Yet terms like “small” and “efficient” and “flexible” would come to seem like synonyms. And with the rise of the lean corporation, work forces became expendable and jobs more precarious.

for the vast majority of workers, the “freedom” of the gig economy is just the freedom to be afraid. It is the severing of obligations between businesses and employees. It is the collapse of the protections that the people of the United States, in our laws and our customs, once fought hard to enshrine.

We can’t turn back the clock, but neither is job insecurity inevitable. Just as the postwar period managed to make industrialization benefit industrial workers, we need to create new norms, institutions and policies that make digitization benefit today’s workers. Pundits have offered many paths forward — “portable” benefits, universal basic income, worker reclassification — but regardless of the option, the important thing to remember is that we do have a choice.

The United States is in Syria mainly because of ISIS.

Iran is in Syria to protect the Assad regime, and also to use its proxies to menace its archenemy Israel from a neighboring country.

Prior to the rise of ISIS in 2014, the United States generally sought to contain the conflict, as efforts at international diplomacy failed to resolve it. The Obama administration advocated for Assad to step aside, but was reluctant to send weapons or funds to the rebels opposing him, out of fear that they would fall into the hands of Islamists and radical jihadists among them. In 2012, Obama also famously set a “red line” regarding chemical weapons, saying that their use would change his calculus on U.S. strategy there. But when Assad used sarin gas on civilians in 2013, Obama opted, instead of using force, for an agreement with Russia to destroy Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons. The U.S. started bombing Syria for the first time a year later, hitting not regime targets but targets associated with ISIS. It has continued bombing ever since.President Trump recently said the U.S. would leave Syria “very soon”—even as his military advisers were planning to send additional troops. By the time he spoke, the U.S. presence in the country had grown to some 2,000 troops; news reports say Trump wants them out within six months.Then came the suspected chemical attack of last weekend, to which Trump retaliated with strikes against the regime, as he did to a similar attack last year. This means the United States has once again expanded its mission beyond counterterrorism.

Russia is in Syria to protect the Assad regime from rebels it sees as terrorists, and project influence in the Middle East. Its military intervention in September 2015 ensured Assad would not only reverse his losses, but regain much of Syria. America’s scattershot approach to Syrian policy helped, as did the metastatic spread of ISIS that created a common enemy for both the pro- and anti-Assad camps.  

European countries like France and Britain are also in Syria because of ISIS. These countries’ policies have hewed largely to those of the United States

Saudi Arabia is in Syria—primarily by financing the rebellion—to oppose Iran.

Israel is in Syria to oppose Iran. For years, its border with Syria was its quietest frontier—despite its poor relationship with Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad. But Israel has watched Iran’s growing influence there with alarm.

Turkey is in Syria because of the Kurds.

Francis married Claude in May 1514 and, in October of the same year, Louis XII married the young and beautiful Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Had she conceived a son, all Francis' hopes would have been dashed. Yet, less than three months after his marriage, Louis XII was dead and the 20-year-old Francis was proclaimed king of France on January 1st, 1515

He inherited Charles VIII's claim to the Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily and most of southern Italy. He claimed certain territories along the ill-defined border between France, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, whose Habsburg overlord was the future emperor, Charles V. Francis also wanted the city of Tournai, conquered by Henry VIII in 1513, to be returned to France. For roughly 20 of his 32 years as king, Francis was preparing for war, active in it, or managing its consequences in expensive and convoluted diplomacy

Barely nine months after his accession, in September 1515, Francis conquered Milan, after defeating a Swiss mercenary army at the battle of Marignano

He secured this prominence through peace treaties and alliances, culminating in his inclusion in the 'Universal Peace' of 1518, agreed in the name of Pope Leo X but actually organised under the auspices of Henry VIII, who felt a keen and life-long rivalry with Francis

Francis had hoped to impress and intimidate Henry into committing himself as an ally against Charles V, whose power in Italy unnerved Francis

appreciated that securing and maintaining the support of interest groups, particularly the nobility, was vital to effective kingship

Francis was taken to Spain as the emperor's prisoner. France was left vulnerable to its enemies and to internal dissent, which Louise de Savoie, as her son's regent, had much to do to overcome while trying to secure Francis' release. She immediately sought the assistance of the English and sympathetic Italian states, who were wary of the immense power of Charles V in the wake of his triumph at Pavia

Disappointed by Charles V's lack of support for his own claim to France, Henry once more turned the tables on the emperor. A renewed Anglo-French alliance enabled Francis to repudiate the treaty of Madrid and led indirectly to a more acceptable agreement

Francis maintained peace with his English counterpart until 1542

He never finally secured Milan from Charles but he did, nevertheless, maintain his dynastic rights against the emperor's potentially overwhelming power. This he did in part by allying with the papacy, with various Italian states, with the heretical Henry VIII and with the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. These last two alliances scandalised Catholic Europe, but keeping Charles' enemies close for as long as he could assisted Francis in projecting royal power well beyond the borders of the French state throughout his reign

Another important factor in Francis' capacity to project this power was his widespread reform of crown fiscal administration after his return from Spain in 1526. These were prompted first and foremost by the need to pay huge debts incurred in the war and in securing peace with Henry and Charles

His sale of judicial offices set up long-lasting difficulties for the monarchy

He made an ill-advised pre-emptive strike against imperial territory in the Netherlands and Spain in early 1521

Daily life there was never as elaborately choreographed under Francis as it would be under his successors. He is perhaps second only to Henry IV in his reputation for informality and spontaneity as a French king.

The 'big boy' had come close at times to ruining everything, but had also made France a power to be reckoned with and made his own mark on its history

Under Francis, the court of France was at the height of its prestige and international influence during the 16th century.

The Trastamarans and their French allies were routed at Nájera (April 3, 1367) by Edward the Black Prince, and Peter resumed his reign. Charles V sent Henry back to Spain with more French troops, and a long civil war ensued.

Exercising full sovereignty, he pursued a foreign policy sometimes at variance with his father’s. After concluding a secret alliance with Savoy for a partition of the Duchy of Milan, Louis, recently widowed, married Charlotte, daughter of Duke Louis of Savoy, despite Charles VII’s prohibition (1451).

Installed as Philip’s guest, Louis could acquaint himself thoroughly with the working of the great Burgundian state, the ruin of which he was later to seek.

His first act was to strike at Charles VII’s ministers.

Having already attacked Burgundy, Louis found himself facing a new host of enemies, including not only Charles the Bold, Edward IV, and Francis of Brittany but also, in the southwest, Charles de France, to whom Louis had granted the Duchy of Guyenne in 1469, Jean V d’Armagnac, and John II of Aragon, who hoped to recover Roussillon.

During the negotiations Charles learned of an insurrection in Liège, fomented by the French king’s agents.

Louis XI’s major preoccupation was with the princes and great vassals of the kingdom, who were ready to form alliances with one another or with England against him. Former officers of Charles VII stirred up hostility against the King’s new men; Jean II, duc de Bourbon, and Francis II of Brittany emerged as the leaders of the malcontent nobility; Philip the Good’s son and future successor, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, supported the King’s enemies; and the King’s own brother, Charles de France, at first duc de Berry, became a tool of the rebels.

After 1475 it remained for Louis to destroy the power of Burgundy.

by the Treaty of Arras (1482), Louis retained full sovereignty over the Duchy of Burgundy, Picardy, and Boulonnais and possession of Franche-Comté and Artois as the dowry of Margaret of Austria, daughter of Mary and Maximilian, fiancée of his infant son and heir, the future Charles VIII.

Louis regarded war as a precarious enterprise and made it only with reluctance, though he maintained the standing army that Charles VII had instituted.

After Charles the Bold’s death there was no one to prevent Louis from exercising a virtual protectorate over Savoy, where his sister Yolande was regent, and he made himself the arbiter of the affairs of northern Italy.

Putin also has options to be speaker of the Duma (parliament) or leader of its main party, United Russia, thereby exercising power behind the scenes in the manner of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party.

The accompanying, enforced resignation of the entire government, including the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, is Putin’s attempt to reset his administration before Duma elections next year. Analysts say he feared Medvedev’s unpopularity – he has been accused of corruption – was beginning to rub off on him.

Although these changes are dressed up as desirable constitutional reforms, they clearly serve one common purpose: establishing Putinism in perpetuity. By showing he has no intention of retiring, Putin hopes to nip a possible succession battle in the bud.

Yet it appears Putin does not want to emulate out-and-out dictators in other countries by making himself president-for-life – the path chosen by China’s Xi Jinping. He values a veneer of democratic legitimacy.

The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.

Putin is in cahoots with Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his campaign against pro-western Kurds in north-east Syria. More recently, he has inserted Russian mercenaries into the war in Libya, backing rebels against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.

And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?

The prospect of Putin prolonging and strengthening his nihilistic reign is a terrible one. Putin’s is the face of the enemy. Henceforth he must be recognised as such.

More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.

None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.

Libya has been wracked by conflict since the 2011 uprising which ousted long-time strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

According to the UN, the fighting has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more from their homes.

Libya remains a major transit and jumping-off point for sub-Saharan Africans hoping to make the crossing to Europe.

Individual European countries, at the same time, pursued their own, divergent interests in Libya, often at cross-purposes.But the entry of Russian proxies into the conflict last year and, more recently, Turkey’s pledge to send its own forces into the mix, meant Europe could no longer ignore the matter.

Washington is not very involved, and has just announced that it will sharply reduce the United States military presence in West Africa, intended to fight terrorism alongside the French, so the American influence will be further eroded.A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who altered his schedule to attend the high-level meeting, would urge three things: the continuation of a cease-fire; the withdrawal of all external forces; and a return to a Libyan-led political process facilitated by the United Nations.

Protesters have grown increasingly frustrated as the country has been unable to form a legitimate government for more than three months.

"The scene of confrontations, fires and acts of sabotage in Beirut Downtown is a crazy, suspicious, and unacceptable scene that threatens civil peace and warns of the most severe consequences," he said. "Beirut will not be an arena for mercenaries and deliberate policies to strike the peacefulness of popular movements."