Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged truck

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Obama's Best-Kept Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-obamas-best-kept-secrets.html

energy auto standards efficiency education program

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • While I don’t know how Obamacare will turn out, I’m certain that my two favorite Obama initiatives will be transformative.
  • His Race to the Top program in education has already set off a nationwide wave of school reform, and his Race to the Top in vehicles — raising the mileage standards for American-made car and truck fleets from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 m.p.g. between now and 2025 — is already spurring a wave of innovation in auto materials, engines and software.
  • they are the future of progressive politics in this age of austerity: government using its limited funds and steadily rising performance standards to stimulate states and businesses to innovate better economic, educational and environmental practices.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • his races to the top in schools and cars are both based on one brutal fact: “The high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” as Stefanie Sanford, a senior education expert at the Gates Foundation, puts it. The only high-wage jobs, whether in manufacturing or services, will be high-skilled ones, requiring more and better education, and Obama’s two races to the top aim to produce both more high-skill jobs and more high-skilled workers.
  • Though never perfect, No Child Left Behind was still a game-changer for education reform because it gave us the data to see not only how individual schools were doing but how the most at-risk students were doing within those schools. Without that, educational reform based on accountability of teachers and principals could never start.
  • 46 states submitted reform blueprints — and only the 12 best won grants from $70 million to $700 million, depending on the size of their student populations — even states that did not win have been implementing their proposals anyway.
  • because 45 states and the District of Columbia adopted similar higher academic standards (known as the “common core”) for reading and math, “for the first time in our history a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi are now being measured by the same yardstick,” said Duncan
  • Obama’s doubling of vehicle mileage by 2025, led by his Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, it’s already driving more innovation in Detroit, as each car company figures out how it will improve mileage by 5 percent every year.
  • Yes, the costs for cars with higher miles per gallon will rise a touch, but the savings will be manyfold that amount. The Environmental Protection Agency projects families will save $1.8 trillion in fuel costs and reduce oil consumption by 2.1 million barrels per day by 2025, which is equivalent to one-half of the oil that we currently import from OPEC countries every day
rachelramirez

'Islamic State' Turning Into a Guerrilla Army, Top General Warns - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...la-army-top-general-warns.html

ISIS army politics US crisis policy

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • ‘Islamic State’ Turning Into a Guerrilla Army, Top General Warns
  • The capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq is now under assault. But ISIS isn’t going anywhere. Instead, the terror group is beginning to rebrand itself from a “caliphate” to an insurgency
  • It could well mean that there will be no “lasting defeat” of ISIS, even if it loses control of Iraq’s second-largest city, despite Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s claim of such a victory just four days ago
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Fighting that insurgency cost as much as $2 trillion, according to one estimate, and the lives of nearly 5,000 American troops
  • And it likely would fall to nascent Iraqi fighters, who just two years ago ditched their weapons and uniforms in Mosul, to repel ISIS and launch a counterinsurgency.
  • Volesky warned that such attacks in liberated areas are one reason the U.S. is advising the Iraqi and Kurdish forces charged with liberating Mosul to move deliberately. Fas
  • But there are alternatives. Al Qaeda, for example, has embraced local Sunnis, not terrorized them, allowing the group to return to areas and recruit members.
  • Iraqi and Kurdish forces are now as far as 20 miles outside Mosul’s city center. The U.S. military has said the operation could last anywhere from weeks to months.
  • After its defeat, ISIS said the promised apocalyptic battle would come at a later, unspecified date.
  • A series of attacks last week killed at least 55 people in Baghdad. And in July, at least 324 people died when a truck bomb struck a popular shopping area in central Baghdad, the deadliest attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.
  • But after two years of brutal reign, ISIS may not be able to attract Sunnis to its insurgency. Not after the terror group that robbed their cities, beheaded their citizens, and made crimes of smoking, shaving, and playing music.
  • But that timetable could shift. In the last week, ISIS has lost a number of key cities in a matter of days. And in those battles, the group appears to be on the defensive before abandoning territory altogether. Most notably, ISIS lost the Syrian city of
  • And it is possible that ISIS, in taking credit for bombings, is exploiting the frustration of other groups seeking to upend the current Iraqi government.
  • Or just as likely, the U.S. military is wrong. After all, last year, U.S. commanders forecasted an ISIS expansion in Libya, which instead flailed
alexdeltufo

Militants kill eight Egyptian police officers in a Cairo suburb - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-bfaf-ae539f235646_story.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • The police, all in plainclothes, were inspecting security in the southern Cairo suburb of Helwan early Sunday when four gunmen in a pickup truck attacked them, according to Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency.
  • The Islamic State said in a statement on Twitter that “a carefully selected group of the soldiers of the caliphate” c
  • t said the attack was to commemorate 1,000 days since Egyptian security forces massacred what human rights groups describe as hundreds of protesters in August 2013 at Rabaa Square in Cairo.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And others have railed against Sissi’s decision to hand over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.
  • These are the heroes of the police. Their blood is mixed with the dust every day, and they rise above all challenges,”
  • he security forces are accused of extrajudicial killings, torture and forced disappearances. Thousands of opponents of the regime have been jailed or placed under travel bans and other restrictions.
  • In October, the affiliate claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula that killed all 224 onboard.
Javier E

Why the Economy Doesn't Roar Anymore - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...doesnt-roar-anymore-1476458742

economic Policy history theory productivity golden age

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The U.S. presidential candidates have made the usual pile of promises, none more predictable than their pledge to make the U.S. economy grow faster. With the economy struggling to expand at 2% a year, they would have us believe that 3%, 4% or even 5% growth is within reach.
  • But of all the promises uttered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the course of this disheartening campaign, none will be tougher to keep. Whoever sits in the Oval Office next year will swiftly find that faster productivity growth—the key to faster economic growth—isn’t something a president can decree.
  • It might be wiser to accept the truth: The U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.
  • Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year
  • these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.
  • looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.
  • that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.
  • The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.
  • Many factors played a role in this achievement.
  • The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.
  • As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.
  • New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.
  • Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.
  • Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.
  • The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.
  • But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.
  • The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973
  • and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.
  • the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.
  • With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right
  • Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.
  • But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them
  • Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.
  • It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control
davisem

Jerusalem truck attack suspect may have supported ISIS, Netanyahu says - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by davisem on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • davisem on 09 Jan 17
     
    Two soldiers and a tour guide who is a colonel in the reserves shot and killed the attack suspect, whom they identified as 28-year-old Fadi Qunbar. Police have also arrested nine other suspects, including five of Qunbar's family members.
ecfruchtman

EPA: Fiat Chrysler used software to cheat on emissions tests - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...re-to-cheat-on-emissions-tests

shared by ecfruchtman on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 12 Jan 17
     
    The Environmental Protection Agency accused Fiat Chrysler Thursday of using software that enabled some of its diesel trucks to cheat on emissions tests. The news caused Fiat Chrysler's stock price to drop more than 13 percent in trading Thursday morning. Fiat Chrysler did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
sarahbalick

Syria conflict: IS 'destroyed helicopters' at Russian base - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-36368346

syria conflict helicopters

shared by sarahbalick on 25 May 16 - No Cached
  • Syria conflict: IS 'destroyed helicopters' at Russian base
  • New satellite imagery appears to reveal extensive damage to a strategically significant airbase in central Syria used by Russian forces after a reported attack by so-called Islamic State (IS).
  • Four helicopters and 20 lorries were destroyed in a series of fires inside the T4 base last week, the images from intelligence company Stratfor suggest
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • he Russian military has denied reports that it had lost helicopters at the base as a result of an IS attack.
  • "Burning of four Russian attack helicopters and 20 trucks loaded with missiles inside T4 airport in eastern Homs [province] as a result of a nearby fire," it said in an urgent report, leading to speculation that it could have been accidental.
  • 'Not an accident'
  • "What the imagery tells us is that first of all this was not an accidental explosion, as some of the rumours kept saying,
  • "It shows very clearly that there are several different sources of explosions across the airport, and it shows that the Russians took a quite a bad hit.
  • "An entire combat helicopter unit was wiped out - four helicopters in total
  • Mr Tack described Amaq's account as "very accurate", and suggested the helicopters and depot were destroyed by IS attacks.
  • In this case, we haven't seen any of those materials come out yet. One possibility is that by making the statement they were intending to claim it while not necessarily phrasing it that way."
  • The province of Homs stretches out into the Syrian desert towards Raqqa, the capital of the "caliphate" proclaimed by IS in 2014, and Deir al-Zour, on the way to the border with Iraq, he notes.
  • A Kurdish-Arab alliance has announced the launch of a military campaign against IS north of Raqaa.
  • The assault will be supported by air strikes from the US-led coalition bombing IS in Iraq and Syria, it added.
  • "The regime and the Russians are facing notable challenges in trying to disconnect those two.
redavistinnell

China to send nuclear-armed submarines into Pacific amid tensions with US | World news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...med-submarines-into-pacific-us

china pacific world world news

shared by redavistinnell on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • China to send nuclear-armed submarines into Pacific amid tensions with US
  • The Chinese military is poised to send submarines armed with nuclear missiles into the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arguing that new US weapons systems have so undermined Beijing’s existing deterrent force that it has been left with no alternative.
  • They point to plans unveiled in March to station the US Thaad anti-ballistic system in South Korea, and the development of hypersonic glide missiles potentially capable of hitting China less than an hour after launch, as huge threats to the effectiveness of its land-based deterrent force.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “Because China’s SSBNs [nuclear missile submarines] are in the South China Sea, the US navy will try to send spy ships in there and get close to the SSBNs. China’s navy hates that and will try to push them away,” Wu said.
  • Warheads and missiles would be put together and handed over to the navy, allowing a nuclear weapon to be launched much faster if such a decision was taken. The start of Chinese missile patrols could further destabilise the already tense strategic standoff with the US in the South China Sea.
  • China has been working on ballistic missile submarine technology for more than three decades, but actual deployment has been put off by technical failures, institutional rivalry and policy d
  • Behind the ominous warnings is growing concern in the People’s Liberation army that China’s relatively small nuclear arsenal (estimated at 260 warheads compared with 7,000 each for the US and Russia), made up mostly of land-based missiles, is increasingly vulnerable to a devastating first strike, by either nuclear or conventional weapon
  • The decision to deploy Thaad anti-ballistic interceptors in South Korea was taken after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, and the stated mission of the truck-launched interceptors is to shield the south from missile attack.
  • China is developing a similar missile but officials in Beijing fear that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is so small it could be almost completely wiped out without notice, with the few missiles launched in reprisal being destroyed in mid-air by US missile defences.
  • There seems to have been some discussion of moving to a “launch on warning” policy, to fire Chinese weapons before incoming missiles land and destroy them. That appears to be a minority view, however
  • The core aim is to have a second strike capacity that is “survivable” and “penetrative”. Submarines, on patrol in the ocean depths, fulfil the first requirement, they say.
  • Partly to help penetrate US missile defences, China has in recent months also started putting multiple warheads on its largest missile, the DF-5, another development that has set alarm bells ringing in the Pentagon, where some analysts view it as the first step towards a massive nuclear armament drive aimed at obliterating the US arsenal.
  • Evidence for China’s more “relaxed” approach is the length of time it took to deploy multiple warheads, two decades after developing the necessary technology. China has similarly taken decades to deploy nuclear missile submarines.
  • The slow pace has not just been for practical reasons. China’s guiding principle has been to have a capacity for “minimum means of reprisal” while minimising the chance of accidental or unauthorised launch.
  • However, to follow the British Royal Navy model – in which each Trident submarine commander has a signed letter from the prime minister in his safe, to open in the event of a strike on London – would entail a huge leap in the alert status of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, and a similarly huge delegation of responsibility to one of the armed forces.
sarahbalick

Afghanistan violence: Deadly bomb and gun attack hits Kabul - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-36079445

afghanistan violence bomb attack

shared by sarahbalick on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Afghanistan violence: Deadly bomb and gun attack hits Kabul
  • At least 28 people have been killed and 329 injured in a huge explosion in the centre of the Afghan capital Kabul, police and officials say.
  • It comes a week after it said it was launching its "spring offensive", warning of large-scale attacks.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Tuesday's bombing happened during the morning rush hour in Pul-e-Mahmud, a busy neighbourhood where homes, mosques, schools and businesses nestle close to the Ministry of Defence, other ministries and military compounds.
  • The blast shattered windows up to 1.6km (one mile) away.
  • "One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building,
  • "The second attacker engaged security forces in a gun battle before being gunned down,"
  • "It was as huge as in the morning," said Afghan MP Elay Ershad. "So everyone [is] scared of this situation."
  • Usually the Taliban does not say it is behind such attacks, which cause large numbers of civilian deaths. But today they did because the target was high-profile and it appears that, for them, hitting the target was worth the civilians killed and wounded.
  • The country has been at war for three decades, explosives are easily available and bomb-making skills are common.
  • "Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."
sarahbalick

Egypt protest after tea vendor 'killed by police' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-36084846

egypt protest tea vendor killed police

shared by sarahbalick on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Egypt protest after tea vendor 'killed by police'
  • Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of Egypt's capital, Cairo, to protest after a tea vendor was allegedly shot dead by police.
  • he unrest erupted after a policeman allegedly killed the man and wounded two others during an argument over the price of a cup of tea.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The policeman has been arrested
  • "the police are thugs".
  • One policeman opened fire, killing the vendor and wounding two passersby, it added.
  • "Security forces brought in two riot police vehicles and an armoured truck and the victim's family is here and pelting them with rocks,"
  • "Security forces are retreating and promising justice but the crowd is demanding police hand over the killer."
  • There were also riots in Ismailia and the southern city of Luxor after at least three people died in police custody in a single week in November.
anonymous

Bomber Tied to Al Qaeda Kills Dozens in Syrian City - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...syria.html

Middle-East Syria Terrorists Human-Rights Bombing

shared by anonymous on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 22 Oct 13
     
    BEIRUT, Lebanon - A suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with propane tanks at a crowded military checkpoint in central Syria on Sunday, killing more than 30 people, most of them civilians, in the second such attack by fighters linked to Al Qaeda in two days.
abbykleman

He who controls the sand: the mining 'mafias' killing each other to build cities - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...illing-each-other-build-cities

shared by abbykleman on 01 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 01 Mar 17
     
    In the dark of the night of 20 December, two Kenyan truck drivers met a blazing death. The men were loading up their vehicles at around 2am on the bank of the Muooni river, about 60 miles south-east of Nairobi, when a mob of local youths descended on them.
Javier E

Ban College Football? Breaking Down a Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/...ootball-breaking-down-a-debate

football brain injury

shared by Javier E on 11 May 12 - Cached
  • Two prominent writers argued for banning college football on Tuesday night at New York University’s Skirball Center as part of the Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates series. Their opponents were two journalists, who also happened to be former players.
  • Before hearing the arguments, audience members were asked their opinion, and 16 percent were for the resolution to ban college football; 53 percent were against. At the end of the night, 53 percent were for it and 39 percent against. The undecided vote had plunged from 31 percent to 8 percent.
  • Gladwell was not amenable to modifications, calling the idea that brain injuries could be minimized by better helmets or medical care “a fantasy.”“I’ve seen pictures of the brain scans of people with C.T.E.,” he said, referring to a trauma-induced disease, “and it looks like someone drove a truck across their brain.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • said he had “grave concerns” about concussions, but also denied the problem was as widespread or severe as Gladwell implied. Citing a study from the University of North Carolina, he said there were more direct fatalities in lacrosse, water polo and baseball than football, so why not ban those sports?
Javier E

The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari - Commentators - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

dubai globalization economics politics slavery history

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 12 - Cached
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "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.
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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"
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
julia rhodes

Syria Aid May Resume Despite Fears Over Where It Will Go - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ars-over-where-it-will-go.html

US history politics crisis policy syria aid fears terrorism rebel

shared by julia rhodes on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration is considering the resumption of nonlethal military aid to Syria’s moderate opposition, senior administration officials said on Thursday, even if some of it ends up going to the Islamist groups that are allied with the moderates.
  • The United States suspended the shipments last month after warehouses of equipment were seized by the Islamic Fron
  • some of the Islamists fought alongside the Free Syrian Army in a battle against a major Al Qaeda-affiliated rebel group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Restoring the aid, they said, would send a message of American support at a time when opposition groups are threatening to boycott a Jan. 22 peace conference out of concern that it will only serve to tighten Mr. Assad’s grip on power and discredit them at home.
  • Aid would continue to be funneled exclusively through the Supreme Military Council, the military wing of moderate, secular Syrian opposition.
  • Among the questions now being debated at the White House and the State Department, officials said, is how to ensure that the aid flows only to vetted organizations, and whether Islamist groups that receive any of it could be compelled to pledge that they will not work with Al Qaeda.
  • The administration has signaled a willingness to talk to the Islamic Front, but an effort to arrange a meeting in December was rebuffed by the group when the White House opted to send two midlevel State Department officials rather than the ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford.
  • While analysts said a decision to resume aid may encourage opposition groups to attend the peace conference, it would be far short of what is necessary to salvage the meeting — known as Geneva II but set to be held in Montreux, a nearby Swiss city.
  • Opposition groups are scheduled to meet on Jan. 17 to decide whether to attend the conference. But the meeting’s stated goal — to chart a political transition in Syria — seems more elusive than ever, given the recent military gains made by Mr. Assad’s forces.
  • Still, as other experts noted, the aid in question includes food rations and pickup trucks, not tanks and bullets. None of it is likely to change the trajectory of the conflict, which some experts said had fallen into a kind of “territorial equilibrium,” in which neither the rebels nor Mr. Assad’s forces have much to gain from further fighting.
julia rhodes

Iraqi Tribes to Take Lead in Falluja Fight, U.S. Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-retake-control-us-says.html

iraqi tribes fight u s US history politics crisis policy economic obama culture

shared by julia rhodes on 06 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The Iraqi Army is planning to cordon off a key Sunni city now occupied by jihadists so that Sunni tribes can lead the mission to secure it one neighborhood at a time
  • Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said in a weekly address on Wednesday that “the battle is about to end in Anbar.” But Mr. McGurk told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that General Austin had been urging “patience and planning.”
  • As described by American officials, the Iraqi plan reflects a recognition that having the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army mount a frontal assault on a Sunni city that has long been wary of outsiders could lead to an especially violent round of urban warfare and fan sectarian tensions.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • On Jan. 26, Mr. McGurk said, the militant group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, captured about a dozen Iraqi soldiers near Falluja, paraded them through the city in a truck flying the black flag of Al Qaeda, then videotaped their execution the next day.
  • In 2004, American forces took control of Falluja from insurgent forces at a considerable cost in American lives. After the “surge” of American troops in 2007 and 2008, American officials portrayed the city as something of a success story.
  • American officials have been pressing the Maliki government to build ties with the tribes by giving them the same benefits that Iraqi soldiers receive and promising to integrate them into the security forces.
  • Another challenge is a military one. When Mr. Maliki’s forces took Basra in 2008, they did so with the help of American air power. But the Obama administration has not offered to assist the Iraqi forces that are preparing to retake Falluja with American-operated drones or airstrikes.
Javier E

Americans Least Green-And Feel Least Guilt, Survey Suggests - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...inable-science-consumers-world

green international comparative guilt responsibility culture survey sustainability

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Americans are the the least likely to suffer from "green guilt" about their environmental impact, despite trailing the rest of the world in sustainable behavior, according to a new National Geographic survey.
  • "In our culture of consumption, we've sort of been indoctrinated to believe that we can buy ourselves out of environmental problems," said Whan, who's based in Toronto, Canada, another country ranked low in the survey."But what people need to realize is that the sheer volume of consumption is relevant as well."
  • the Greendex report explored environmental attitudes and behaviors among 17,000 consumers in 17 countries through an online survey that asks questions relating to housing, transportation, food, and consumer goods
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • This year Americans ranked last in sustainable behavior, as they have every year since 2008. Just 21 percent of Americans reported feeling guilty about the impact they have on the environment, among the lowest of those surveyed.Yet they had the most faith in an individual's ability to protect the environment, at 47 percent.
  • Consumers in India, China, and Brazil led the pack, with Greendex scores in the high fifties. Paradoxically, many Indians, Chinese, and Brazilians reported feeling the most guilt about their environmental impact and had the least confidence that their individual actions can help the environment.
  • the findings suggest that those with the lightest environmental footprint are also the most likely to feel both guilty and disempowered
  • Americans also ranked last in the area of transportation. According to the Greendex report, Americans were the most likely to report regularly driving alone in a car or truck (56 percent) and the least likely to use public transportation (7 percent).They were also the least likely to bike or
  • One area where Americans scored well was in the area of purchased goods, with U.S. respondents (31 percent) saying that they prefer to buy "used" or "pre-owned" products over new ones.
  • Americans are also above average when it comes to recycling (69 percent) but are surpassed by Canadian, British, German, and Australian consumers
  • more than half of all consumers in almost all the countries surveyed reported eating beef—one of the most environmentally intensive food sources—once or more per week. Argentines reported eating the most beef (61 percent), as opposed to 35 percent of Americans and 9 percent of Indians.
  • Chinese consumers eat the most vegetables: 63 percent eat them every day, versus just 37 percent of Americans.
  • Germans are the biggest consumers of bottled water, with two-thirds reporting that they drink it daily. And Spaniards are now the biggest consumers of seafood,
  • t it might also be due to a well-known effect in sociology called the social desirability bias, in which respondents often say what is socially desirable than stating their true feelings and actions, said Darnall."It's not a surprise that consumers believed they were environmentally responsible," she said. "Consumers want to respond in a socially desirable way, and there is a lot of research that suggests they're not going to respond very honestly about their less socially acceptable behaviors."
Javier E

With Dry Taps and Toilets, California Drought Turns Desperate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nia-drought-tulare-county.html

drought california Water

shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • she has not had running water for more than five months — nor is there any tap water in her near future — because of a punishing and relentless drought in California
  • In the Gallegos household and more than 500 others in Tulare County, residents cannot flush a toilet, fill a drinking glass, wash dishes or clothes, or even rinse their hands without reaching for a bottle or bucket.
  • For months, families called county and state officials asking what they should do when their water ran out, only to be told that there was no public agency that could help them.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “Nobody knows where to go, who to talk to: These aren’t people who rely on government to help,” said Donna Johnson, 72, an East Porterville resident whose own well went dry in July. As she began learning that hundreds of her neighbors were also out of water, she used her own money to buy gallons of water, handed them out of her truck and compiled a list of those in need. County officials rely on her list as the most complete snapshot of who needs help; dozens are added each day.
  • State officials say that at least 700 households have no access to running water, but they acknowledge that there could be hundreds more, with many rural well-owners not knowing whom to contact.
  • “We will give people water as long as we have it, but the truth is, we don’t really know how long that will be,” said Andrew Lockman of the Tulare County Office of Emergency Services. “We can’t offer anyone a long-term solution right now. There is a massive gap between need and resources to deal with it.”
Javier E

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

amazon lifestyle career workplace

shared by Javier E on 18 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
  • The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”
  • his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.
  • Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working.
  • Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
  • “Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,”
  • At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath them.”
  • In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime
  • “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders
  • mazon, though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority. Compensation
  • As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,”
  • perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (
  • According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.
  • Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.
  • But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.
  • As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects
  • Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.
  • many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster.
  • A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500
  • To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do:
  • Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.
  • Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.
  • many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue
  • The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat
  • Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.
  • David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.
  • Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.
  • Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.
  • “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
  • A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
  • A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
  • Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.
  • In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. A
  • “One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”
  • Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed.
  • By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.
  • just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.
  • “Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”
Javier E

The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...election-super-pac-donors.html

funding election campaign oligarchy influence political rich

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.
  • Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign
  • Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs.
  • In marshaling their financial resources chiefly behind Republican candidates, the donors are also serving as a kind of financial check on demographic forces that have been nudging the electorate toward support for the Democratic Party and its economic policies. Two-thirds of Americans support higher taxes on those earning $1 million or more a year, according to a June New York Times/CBS News poll, while six in 10 favor more government intervention to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly seven in 10 favor preserving Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are.
  • The donor families’ wealth reflects, in part, the vast growth of the financial-services sector and the boom in oil and gas, which have helped transform the American economy in recent decades. They are also the beneficiaries of political and economic forces that are driving widening inequality: As the share of national wealth and income going to the middle class has shrunk, these families are among those whose share has grown.
  • Most of the families are clustered around just nine cities. Many are neighbors, living near one another in neighborhoods like Bel Air and Brentwood in Los Angeles; River Oaks, a Houston community popular with energy executives; or Indian Creek Village, a private island near Miami that has a private security force and just 35 homes lining an 18-hole golf course.
  • More than 50 members of these families have made the Forbes 400 list of the country’s top billionaires, marking a scale of wealth against which even a million-dollar political contribution can seem relatively small. The Chicago hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, for example, earns about $68.5 million a month after taxes, according to court filings made by his wife in their divorce. He has given a total of $300,000 to groups backing Republican presidential candidates. That is a huge sum on its face, yet is the equivalent of only $21.17 for a typical American household, according to Congressional Budget Office data on after-tax income.
  • “The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want,” said Ruy Teixeira, a political and demographic expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
  • The accumulation of wealth has been particularly rapid at the elite levels of Wall Street, where financiers who once managed other people’s capital now, increasingly, own it themselves. Since 1979, according to one study, the one-tenth of 1 percent of American taxpayers who work in finance have roughly quintupled their share of the country’s income. Sixty-four of the families made their wealth in finance, the largest single faction among the super-donors of 2016.
  • instead of working their way up to the executive suite at Goldman Sachs or Exxon, most of these donors set out on their own, establishing privately held firms controlled individually or with partners. In finance, they started hedge funds, or formed private equity and venture capital firms, benefiting from favorable tax treatment of debt and capital gains, and more recently from a rising stock market and low interest rates
  • In energy, some were latter-day wildcatters, early to capitalize on the new drilling technologies and high energy prices that made it economical to exploit shale formations in North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Others made fortunes supplying those wildcatters with pipelines, trucks and equipment for “fracking.”
  • The families who give do so, to some extent, because of personal, regional and professional ties to the candidates. Jeb Bush’s father made money in the oil business, while Mr. Bush himself earned millions of dollars on Wall Street. Some of the candidates most popular among ultrawealthy donors have also served in elected office in Florida and Texas, two states that are home to many of the affluent families on the list.
  • the giving, more broadly, reflects the political stakes this year for the families and businesses that have moved most aggressively to take advantage of Citizens United, particularly in the energy and finance industries.
  • The Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and even Mr. Bush have argued for tax and regulatory shifts that could subject many venture capital and private equity firms to higher levels of corporate or investment taxation. Hedge funds, which historically were lightly regulated, are bound by new rules with the Dodd-Frank regulations, which several Republican candidates have pledged to roll back and which Mrs. Clinton has pledged to defend.
  • And while the shale boom has generated new fortunes, it has also produced a glut of oil that is now driving down prices. Most in the industry favor lifting the 40-year-old ban on exporting oi
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 161 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page