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Secretary of State John Kerry said at a news conference in the United Arab Emirates that the Obama administration was not in a “race” to strike a deal.

In the past, the agency has questioned whether the Gachin mine, which produces yellowcake uranium for conversion to nuclear fuel, is linked to Iran’s military. The heavy-water plant at Arak could produce plutonium, which can be used in a weapon, and a key concern is that once the plant is operational, it would be all but impossible to destroy it without running the risk of spreading deadly plutonium. Western officials noted that the agreement gave the atomic agency access to the heavy production plant but not the nuclear reactor, which is under construction there.

lack of in-depth information and inspections of the heavy-water plant have been a particular worry to the West. French officials went further and indicated that they wanted construction halted altogether at the facility, and that Iran’s failure to agree to that was one reason the French were reluctant to endorse a broader deal with Iran this weekend.

The agreement on Monday comprised a four-paragraph statement and six bullet points in an annex of issues to be tackled within the next three months.

“Managed access” is a term used by the United Nations agency to denote the ground rules for inspections that permit host countries to protect information they consider to be proprietary or secret, such as military technology, while still allowing inspectors to garner data they require, officials said.

The satellite towns that ring Dhaka — a maze of shoddy constructions and fetid streams — bring to mind William Blake’s dark Satanic mills, not equitable development. The leather industry has turned Hazaribagh, an area in Old Dhaka, into the fifth-most polluted place in the world, according to the environmental watchdog Blacksmith Institute. Yet industrialization is a proven step toward economic growth. According to the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, few if any countries have achieved first-world economic status without it.

says Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate: “In terms of many typical indicators of living standards, Bangladesh not only does better than India, it has a considerable lead over it.”

The Defense Department spent $486 million to buy the fleet of 20 Italian-made G222 military transport planes for the Afghan Air Force, but the agency terminated the program in 2013 because of problems with performance, maintenance and spare parts that kept the aircraft grounded.

Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.

"Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."

Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.

"I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."

The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.

Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.

Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.

Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.

Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.

Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.

Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.

Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.

The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.

Bitter fighting over the law last summer propelled state senator Wendy Davis into the national spotlight, and she is now running for Texas governor on the Democratic ticket.

The last restriction under the law goes into effect Sept. 1. All clinics that provide abortions at that point must have upgraded their facilities to ambulatory surgery centers. Busby says many can't afford it and more will close.

"This would basically force all the clinics to become mini-hospitals," Busby said. "They have to have hallway widths a certain length, and a janitor's closet, male and female locker rooms, which is completely unnecessary — and a bunch of other regulations that are really not appropriate or do anything to increase the safety of one of the safest procedures in the country."

The requirement took effect last November. This week marks the first anniversary of the state law that started it all.

Busby said abortion is already one of the safest office-based medical procedures, with a complication rate of less than .05 percent.

Busby predicted that after September only six or eight places will be left in Texas to get an abortion, unless a lawsuit stops the new requirement from going into effect.

Whole Woman's Health is part of that lawsuit. The group previously had six reproductive health clinics in Texas but had to close two of them over the past year, Busby said.

It may have to close an additional three clinics that don't meet the new surgical center specifications, in Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio. It would be left with just one, in San Antonio, that meets the new requirements.

Busby noted there are now no clinics that provide abortions in all of East Texas or in the Rio Grande Valley. She said the one clinic left in El Paso could close soon.

In Houston, the newly built headquarters of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast does fulfill the ambulatory surgical center requirements, so it will remain open. But the status of smaller clinics remains unclear.

President Barack Obama praised the deal as "the most ambitious climate change agreement in history." "Beautiful," added French president Francois Hollande. "I used to say we must," commented Christiana Figueres, the United Nation's climate chief. "Today, we can say we did!"

The agreement commits the world to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." That's an ambitious goal here in 2015, which is expected to be the hottest year on record, amid the three hottest decades on record.

Finally, the agreement pledges a minimum of $100 billion a year for developing countries to adapt to the ravages of our already overheated climate. That's an acknowledgement of the vast inequities of climate change: The fact that the richest, most powerful countries have done the most to cause climate change, yet suffer the least as a result. advertisement

But there's a whole lot of bad news in this agreement as well: It's vague. It's aspirational. And critics say it's several orders of magnitude away from being enough to avert a crisis in the decades ahead.

"The Paris Climate Agreement is not a fair, just or science-based deal," said Erich Pica, president of the eco-watchdog group Friends of the Earth. "The result is in an agreement that could see low-lying islands and coastlines swallowed up by the sea, and many African lands ravaged by drought."

The announcement comes on a day when the United Nations' nuclear watchdog is expected to announce whether Iran is in compliance with a July deal to restrict its nuclear program.

"Based on an approval of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the general interests of the Islamic Republic, four Iranian prisoners with dual nationality were freed today within the framework of a prisoner swap deal," the semi-official Iranian FARS news agency quoted the office of the Tehran prosecutor as saying.

Rezaian was detained by Iran in 2014 and eventually charged with espionage and other crimes, according to the Washington Post.

Hekmati was detained in 2011, weeks after arriving in Iran to visit his grandmother, according to his family's website. The former Marine infantryman and Arabic and Persian linguist was accused of espionage and other charges in 2012.

He appeared on Iranian television and said he was working for the CIA in a confession her mother and the U.S. State Department has said was forced and fabricated.

The punishment was later overturned, but Hekmati was later convicted of "cooperating with hostile governments" and sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to a website set up by his supporters.

Abedini, an Iran native and convert to Christinanity, was arrested in 2012 and convicted the next year on charges of attempting to undermine the Iranian government. He had been sentenced to eight years in prison.

The American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based group dedicated to protecting religious and constitutional freedoms, reported that Abedini has endured torture during his imprisonment and was beaten by fellow prisoners in June.

Abedini's wife, Naghmeh Abedini, said in the statement that the release was "an answer to prayer."

The releases appear to leave unresolved the fate of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent and CIA contractor who disappeared after visiting Iran in 2007. As described in Iranian media, the deal does not appear to include Levinson, who is not Iranian-American.

“The problem was not the merger itself,” Antonio Di Pietro, then the minister of infrastructure and transport, said in a statement, “but concession rules that are too favorable toward the motorway operator, so much so that they led to the bad habit of automatic tariff hikes.”

The government approved a new law to encourage efficiency and lower tolls, except it never took effect. In 2008, the center-left government fell. The new conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, took power and amended the new law to stipulate annual increases in tolls right through to the end of the contract

Though it aided all of Italy’s toll road operators, Autostrade, the biggest, was the biggest beneficiary.

Beyond fixing blame for the bridge collapse, a central question of the Morandi tragedy is what happened to safety inspections. The answer is that the inspectors worked for Autostrade more than for the state.

For decades, Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company, has performed inspections on the bridge. If nominally independent, Spea is owned by Autostrade’s parent company, Atlantia, and Autostrade is also Spea’s largest customer. Spea’s offices in Rome and elsewhere are housed inside Autostrade.

One former bridge design engineer for Spea, Giulio Rambelli, described Autostrade’s control over Spea as “absolute.”“They even approve promotions inside of Spea,

Such potential conflicts are prohibited in other countries where Autostrade operates. In Chile, for instance, regulations block a private toll operator from hiring a company it owns to conduct inspections, according to Mariana Rocha, a spokeswoman at the country’s Ministry of Public Works.

Mr. Fonderico, the administrative law professor from Luiss Guido Carli University, said the ministry actually lacked the expertise to carry out its oversight role, particularly on a bridge as vexing as the Morandi. Over time, he said, the government behaved more like its first priority was cooperating with Autostrade, rather than regulating it.

Though the relationship between Autostrade and the government is now defined by pure hostility, a divorce is unlikely.The reason? If the company’s contract were terminated early, the state would need to pay Autostrade the remaining value of the contract, a sum that could exceed $17 billion.“The company would take the state to court,” Mr. Ponti said, “and it would win.”

Boeing correctly reports that the company itself does not directly fund super PACs (which are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money). Doing so would be a violation of the contributor ban. However, it has ways around this

The company’s PAC may give up to $5,000 to a candidate’s campaign committee or use its funds for any other “lawful purpose” — which includes unlimited contributions to super PACs or “dark money” nonprofit groups as well. Last cycle, the company’s PAC gave $250,000 to the Mitch McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund; $250,000 to Karl Rove’s dark-money group, One Nation; and $250,000 to the dark-money group American Action Network.

There is also, in effect, another even larger loophole for contractors looking to influence national politicians: the inaugural committee for a president-elect. Because inaugural committees are technically not connected to the political campaign, “all bets are off,

Boeing gave a million dollars to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee

Coca-Cola and other multinational food companies, operating through a group called the International Life Sciences Institute, cultivated key Chinese officials in an effort to stave off the growing movement for food regulation and soda taxes that has been sweeping the west.

in China, ILSI is so well-placed that it runs its operations from inside the government’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. In fact, when asked to comment on the studies, the ministry emailed a statement not from a government official but from ILSI’s China director.

The close relationship with the highest government health policymakers goes significantly beyond what the companies have been able to achieve in the West.

Professor Popkin was not involved in the study, but he has spent decades working in China to help the country develop nutrition guidelines and food policy — efforts he said were often thwarted by well-placed officials aligned with ILSI.Given his experience, he said Professor Greenhalgh’s findings were not surprising. “Over the course of several decades, Coke and ILSI have worked to prevent any kind of food policy that would benefit public health,” he said. “What they’ve been doing in China is insidious.”

the industry efforts have been wildly successful, in part because China lacks a free media or watchdog organizations that might have been critical of the relationship.

In just a few decades, China has gone from a nation plagued by food shortages to one buffeted by soaring obesity and chronic diseases tied to poor diet. More than 42 percent of adults in China are overweight or obese, according to Chinese researchers, more than double the rate in 1991. In Chinese cities, nearly a fifth of all children are obese, according to government surveys.

“The key is that no matter what Cola-Cola or other beverage companies say, these drinks are just a product,” he said. “No one is being forced to buy them.”

These groups, he said, support and publicize scientific studies whose results sometimes muddy the waters on contentious issues like smoking or alcohol and soda consumption.“They often cherry pick data in ways that mislead while portraying these issues as so terribly complex that nothing can be done,” he said.

As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!

The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright

There were also roasted-beet salads with honeyed goat cheese, and dessert trays (panna cotta, cheesecake, tartlets featuring raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries) that formed a pretty assemblage of reds, whites, and blues. There were dinner plates featuring both monkfish and filets of beef: the surf and the turf, the this and the that, entrees suggesting that, despite the evidence to the contrary, it is possible to have it both ways. There was Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian American social activist who was imprisoned for nearly three years for those activities, speaking passionately, via a prerecorded video, about her ordeal—and the journalistic work that led to her liberation. There were journalism awards presented to reporters who cover the White House. There were announcements of the recipients of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association scholarships—the college students who may come to serve as the next generation of White House correspondents. “This night is about you, and what you’ve accomplished,” Talev told them.

If one person can eclipse an entire evening’s worth of celebration—the military show, the scholarships, the awards, the urgent discussion of the profound necessity of press freedom—that’s a good sign that something should change about the evening. There’s the Correspondents’ Dinner as an event, and the Correspondents’ Dinner as a norm; both would benefit, at this point, from scaling back to become something smaller, more intimate, more meaningful—less about celebrity, less about comedy, and more about journalism. A smaller dinner would be more boring, definitely, but also more in line with journalism’s own best vision of itself: as a watchdog, as a safeguard, as an extension of the curiosity of the American people.

Until 2001, deals worth more than $15 million had to be reported to the antitrust authorities. That year, the threshold was raised and indexed to economic growth, and is now $90 million.

For transactions involving few tangible assets such as in technology and pharmaceutical startups, the threshold is $360 million.

after the 2001 changes, the number of merger notifications dropped 70% and the number of mergers that didn’t require notification jumped nearly 50%

Before the change, around a third of merger investigations involved deals worth less than $50 million. After the change, the number of such deals investigated fell to close to zero.

between 1997 and 2017 more than 4,000 acquisitions of kidney dialysis centers were proposed. About half were above the reporting threshold, and in 265 cases, the FTC required divestitures to resolve competition concerns

Among the half below the threshold, the FTC required just three divestitures. Two companies controlled about 31% of facilities in 1997. By 2016, two companies, DaVita Inc. and Fresenius Medical Care , controlled 77% of facilities

his preliminary results suggest the numbers of nurses per technician decline and patients per hemodialysis machine rise at facilities acquired in mergers below the reporting threshold. That, he said, could be evidence of reduced quality of care, though he acknowledged it could also reflect increased efficiency.

22% of markets for physicians are highly concentrated (according to federal guidelines), and they got that way mostly via acquisitions too small to be reported.

pharmaceutical companies often halt development of competing drugs at startups they acquire, especially when the acquisition is just small enough to escape antitrust reporting requirements.

Carlson has regularly said similar words. He’s used “invasion” rhetoric nine times on his show this year, according to liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, including describing a surge of migrants at the southern border as “an invasion, and it’s terrifying.

Carlson has also warned that immigrants could “replace” Americans — an echo, critics say, of the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that also motivated the deadly March attack in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 51 people at mosques.

Carlson framed his argument around the idea that few Americans belong to explicitly white supremacist groups, like the KKK.

But experts say white supremacist mass killers are more likely today to be radicalized in online forums like 8chan, where the alleged El Paso killer reportedly posted his manifesto, than at organized rallies with white hoods

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said the agency had arrested about 100 domestic terrorism suspects in the previous nine months, and most were tied to white supremacist beliefs.

There has been a sharp decline in the number of new onshore windfarms since the block was put in place by David Cameron in 2016. The rollout of new onshore wind capacity fell to its lowest level since 2015 last year, prompting warnings that the UK risked missing its climate targets.

The chief executive of Scottish Power, Keith Anderson, said the decision to back onshore wind was “one of the first clear signs that the government really means business” on reaching its climate targets.

Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said governments “should not allow today’s crisis to compromise the clean energy transition”.

Gareth Davies, comptroller and auditor general of the NAO, criticised ministers in his report for failing to lead on the issue of water sustainability. He said personal water consumption had risen every year for the past five years.

The report said during the past five years water companies had made little or no progress in reducing water consumption and cutting leakage.

The NAO urged the government to monitor progress on the water suppliers’ pledge to reduce leaks by at least 15% by 2025

Defra should work with other government departments to reduce water consumption by large public sector users, such as hospitals and schools. The NAO said Defra should also better understand how willing the public were to pay higher water bills in order to improve water infrastructure.

“The recently published National Framework for Water Resources sets out a bold vision for bringing together consumers, businesses and industry to safeguard the future of our water resources while ensuring that our natural environment is protected for future generations.”