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Contents contributed and discussions participated by rachelramirez

rachelramirez

Hillary Clinton's Defeat Could Set Back Women In Politics - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • Will Hillary Clinton's Defeat Set Back Women In Politics?
  • Clinton may serve as a political role model for some young women, while others may feel alienated by her brand of liberal feminism.
  • “I think the defeat has the potential to set back female candidates’ emergence,” said Jennifer Lawless, the director of American University’s Women and Politics Institute. "Women are less likely to think they have thick enough skin to endure the rigors of the campaign trail
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  • The attacks Clinton faced may prompt other women to think twice about a run for public office, especially if her experience convinces them the political arena is not a level playing field for men and women.
  • “If the likelihood of winning now seems even lower, women may reach a point where they believe the costs do not balance out the rewards.”
  • The fact that Clinton has amassed a considerable lead in the popular vote may also serve as a source of hope for women with political aspirations. At the very least, that suggests she was not repudiated by the electorate.
  • Research from Christina Wolbrecht and David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame suggests that young women are more likely to express interest in political activism when they see other women running for office.
  • The extent to which Clinton’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency dissuades or encourages other women to run for office, or engage in politics in other ways, may ultimately depend on the way her candidacy is mythologized.
rachelramirez

Donald Trump's conflicts of interest | The Economist - 0 views

  • Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest
  • outraged suspicion is mounting that the Trump Organisation could morph into a vast global network of cronyism.
  • Paul Krugman, a left-of-centre economist, has suggested that the Trump family could reap $10bn while its patriarch is in office.
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  • Half of the group’s entire worth consists of five buildings: Trump Tower and two other Manhattan buildings, and passive stakes in two offices in New York and San Francisco that are controlled by Vornado, a real-estate trust that is entirely separate.
  • Trump Inc is worth perhaps $4bn, with $490m of annual revenue. Were it listed it would be the 833rd-largest firm in America by market value and 1,925th by sales
  • If Trump family members are to make a second fortune in the next four years, they will have to reinvent a mediocre firm.
  • The Trump Organisation could now profit from the presidency in two ways. First, the profits of existing assets could rise
  • What has risen fast is the volume of rooms sold in the group’s hotels, which is up by an average of 40% in 2016.
  • Mr Trump owed over $120m to Deutsche Bank according to his 2015 filing. If new Trump projects are subject to claims of conflicts and cronyism, global banks that are exposed to litigation and congressional hearings in America may not stump up.
  • But it is less clear that his firm’s value will soar.
  • Trump Inc’s value could stagnate or fall.
rachelramirez

The mood in Havana | The Economist - 0 views

  • The mood in Havana
  • “Whatever you feel about Fidel, he was always there,”
  • The government has banned all public music performances during the nine-day official mourning period, a directive that has enveloped Havana in gloom.
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  • They will be buried in Santiago on December 4th.
  • The body of the former president was cremated in a private ceremony in Havana. His ashes are to be displayed for two days in the capital.
  • Raúl, who took over as president in 2006, will lead a rally in Havana on November 29th. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is expected to attend; China’s president, Xi Jinping, may also come.
  • Raúl will, for the first time, govern on his own, perhaps for two years or so. He has said he will step down as president in 2018 but might remain chief of the Communist Party.
  • Raúl moved to alleviate them with a programme of cautious economic reforms.
rachelramirez

Will economic populism lead Democrats to victory? Senate results should make us skeptic... - 0 views

  • Will economic populism lead Democrats to victory? Senate results should make us skeptical.
  • Interestingly enough, in two of those crucial Midwestern states that flipped to Trump, Democratic Senate candidates campaigned on economically populist platforms — but they did notably worse than Hillary Clinton.
  • Meanwhile, the two Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races who outperformed Clinton the most both self-consciously presented a moderate image rather than running as liberal firebrands.
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  • it is surely at least worth noting that the two Senate candidates most identified with that strategy who ran this year did worse than Hillary Clinton despite her much-discussed weaknesses, and the two Senate candidates who tried hardest to frame themselves as moderates did better than her in their respective states.
rachelramirez

Dow Closes Above 19000 for First Time - WSJ - 0 views

  • Dow Closes Above 19000 for First Time
  • . It was Nov. 4 when the blue-chip index last closed below 18000. Since then, a rally following the U.S. presidential election has benefited, in particular, the shares of industrial companies and banks, bolstering the Dow.
  • In January, worries about slowing economic growth in China and its possible spillover effects sent the blue-chip index to its worst-ever five-day start to a year.
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  • The strength in the recent rally belies the lack of clarity about the policy implications of a Trump administration, some analysts say.
  • The dollar—which had rallied for 10 consecutive sessions through Monday as investors bet on U.S. growth—inched higher again Tuesday.
  • show a 94% probability that the Fed lifts rates next month, according to data from CME Group.
  • Some of that selling pressure eased Tuesday. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 2.319% from 2.335% Monday. That compares with a close of 1.867% on Election Day.
rachelramirez

U.S. Can't Find ISIS Prisoners - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • THE DISAPPEAREDU.S. Can’t Find ISIS Prisoners
  • Iraq’s security forces have allowed the U.S. military to interview fewer than “a handful” of detained fighters under Iraqi control since the Mosul offensive began in mid-October, a U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast.
  • Iraqi officials have said hundreds of ISIS fighters have died so far in the three-week-long battle; U.S. officials estimate a smaller number have fled.
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  • In contrast, the U.S. military during its last war in Iraq had access to thousands of Iraqi prisoners—and the intelligence they provided. But observers said the lack of detainees this time around reflects an ISIS eager to fight. And it shows the limits of a war in a city littered with bombs and tunnels, and home to hundreds of thousands of civilians.
  • You can’t do these capture operations in the middle of the urban warfare. It’s too dangerous
  • In the war against ISIS in Mosul, the number of fighters detained is the dog that doesn’t bark. ISIS repeatedly has urged its troops to fight to the death, declaring anything short of that punishable by execution.
  • Human Rights Watch offered a more troubling explanation for the lack of reported detainees, saying it believes that Iraqi and Kurdish forces have detained “at least 37 men from areas around Mosul and Hawija suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State” and that government officials have not allowed those detainees to make outside contact.
  • To be sure, both Iraqi and Kurdish forces have arrested hundreds of fighters but what it is less clear is how many have remained in custody.
  • There are international rules for the treatment of prisoners of war but each nation decides how to treat its own criminals. And therefore it is up to the Iraqi government if it will expend resources to bring a case against a prisoner through its tenuous court system.
  • When roughly 100 ISIS fighters launched a surprise attack last month on the Iraqi city of Rutbah, for example, half the ISIS fighters involved were killed in the 36-hour battle, U.S. Air Force Col. John Dorrian told The Daily Beast.
  • There could be more ISIS detainees in the weeks ahead, as Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters start the block-by-block clearance of Mosul, Pentagon officials said, as it will be much harder for ISIS militants to flee in that urban environment. Iraqi security forces and Kurdish Peshmerga forces first reached the city borders last week.
  • The U.S. troops joining local forces in the push against Mosul are only there in an advisory role, Pentagon officials have said.
rachelramirez

How much do we hate our 2016 options? Mitt Romney would win in a landslide. - The Washi... - 0 views

  • x How much do we hate our 2016 options? Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.
  • “What if President Obama were able to run for a third term?” and “What if Mitt Romney had run?” are fun questions to ask but don’t actually tell us how they would be doing if they had run. The most popular politician, after all, is a politician who is neither seen nor heard from. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and the poll numbers rise, as they say.
  • The poll asked about a hypothetical matchup between Romney and Hillary Clinton, and Romney led by 10 points, 50-40. As our colleague Dave Weigel would say, “Whoa, if true.”
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  • Back in March, Bloomberg pollster Selzer and Company tested Romney’s favorable ratings and found that he was nearly 2-to-1 in the negative: 58 percent unfavorable versus just 32 percent favorable. That's even worse than most of Trump’s numbers this year.
  • Despite being largely out of public view in recent years, you see, Romney is still an unloved figure in American politics
  • This poll will surely lead a few Romney die-hards/NeverTrumpers to pine — or rather, continue pining — for a 2016 campaign in which Romney was the Clinton alternative rather than Trump.
rachelramirez

Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation - The New ... - 0 views

  • Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation
  • Officials are scrutinizing the agent, Andrey Baranov, for bribery and corruption, according to several people familiar with the case who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
  • The investigators are looking into whether Mr. Baranov conspired with American marathon organizers — including New York City Marathon officials — to allow athletes using banned substances to compete in their events.
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  • Mr. Baranov has not been charged with any crimes, and he has in the past been depicted as a whistle-blower who exposed cheating and corruption in track and field.
  • The investigation is part of the Department of Justice’s broader inquiry into doping schemes that have already led to penalties against scores of Russian athletes and officials.
  • Grigory Rodchenkov, the former longtime head of Russia’s antidoping laboratory, had told The Times that the Russian government ran an elaborate program to help the country’s athletes use banned, performance-enhancing drugs and go undetected.
  • three dozen Eastern Europeans disciplined in recent months, after retests of their urine samples from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games.
  • United States law enforcement officials have focused on the agents behind those athletes, and the money they may have routed through American banks
  • Mr. Baranov told sports ethics investigators in 2014 that Ms. Shobukhova had been subjected to extortion and paid half a million dollars to top track and field officials to conceal her doping violations, enabling her to compete in the 2012 Olympics
  • The New York City Marathon spokesman said that no Russian athletes were registered to run on Sunday, in keeping with guidelines from global officials who have barred Russian athletes from competition.
rachelramirez

Obama Criticizes F.B.I. Director: 'We Don't Operate on Incomplete Information' - The Ne... - 0 views

  • Obama Criticizes F.B.I. Director: ‘We Don’t Operate on Incomplete Information’
  • President Obama criticized the decision by his F.B.I. director to alert Congress on Friday about the discovery of new emails related to the Hillary Clinton server case, implying that it violated investigative norms and trafficked in innuendo.
  • “We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”
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  • The president did not mention the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, by name, but it was clear Mr. Obama was referring to him.
  • Mr. Obama’s comments were somewhat surprising since he weighed in on the investigation last year before the F.B.I. had determined that neither Mrs. Clinton nor her aides would face charges for mishandling classified information that was found on the secretary of state’s private email server.
  • Mr. Obama took a sharper tone than his press secretary, Josh Earnest, who said on Tuesday that the White House did not have an official position on Mr. Comey’s decision.
rachelramirez

Jury acquits militia that occupied Oregon wildlife refuge - but the saga is far from ov... - 0 views

  • Jury acquits militia that occupied Oregon wildlife refuge — but the saga is far from over
  • In a stunning conclusion to a five-week trial, a jury acquitted seven defendants who faced a slew of conspiracy and weapons charges related to their armed takeover of a wildlife refuge earlier this year.
  • U.S. marshals tackled the attorney for the group’s leader and used a Taser on him.
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  • Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who led a group of armed militia members as they occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon in what they claimed was a protest against federal land management
  • The Bundy brothers, along with their father, Cliven, still face an array of felony charges in Nevada for another armed standoff with federal agents in 2014.
  • Mumford was reportedly taken into custody, cited for both failure to comply with a federal lawful order and disturbance, and released with orders to return to federal court in January.
  • It’s exceedingly rare for federal prosecutors to lose one case during a trial, let alone seven at once.
  • an FBI agent testified that the agency found 16,636 rounds of ammunition and nearly 1,700 spent shell casings, according to the Associated Press.
  • Ammon Bundy even compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. when he took the stand in his own defense.
  • Jurors for the case were pulled from across Oregon, which may have helped the Bundys since many parts of the state are rural, conservative, and distrustful of the federal government. One of the jurors was even dismissed for bias during deliberations
  • the timing of the verdict with recent events in North Dakota, where Native American tribes have been protesting against the construction of an oil pipeline. Violence erupted on Thursday when riot police descended on the demonstration and tried to clear out the protesters, after hundreds of arrests a few days before. Others claimed the acquittals were proof of a double standard in the U.S. justice system that benefits white men like the Bundys
  • But the fallout of Thursday’s not guilty verdict could have troubling implications for the rise of paramilitary groups in the United States.
  • militias operating along the U.S.–Mexico border, more than 275 such groups are believed to be operating in at least 41 states
rachelramirez

Exclusive: Tim Kaine condemns "cryptic" FBI probe of new Clinton emails - VICE News - 0 views

  • Kaine slams FBI
  • Tim Kaine sharply criticized FBI Director James Comey Friday for the handling of information related to the renewed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Kaine called the announcement “cryptic” and questioning the timing, just 11 days before Election
  • this is very, very troubling
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  • In a letter to several leaders in Congress, Comey announced a renewed investigation into the home email server Clinton used while secretary of state after discovering pertinent emails “in connection with an unrelated case.”
rachelramirez

Even Trump's Kids Haven't Donated to His Campaign - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • Even Trump’s Kids Haven’t Donated to His Campaign
  • With less than two weeks until the election, Donald Trump has amassed an impressive army of small donors, fueling his bid with individual contributions of $200 or less. But noticeably absent from the list of contributors is basically anyone with the last name Trump, many of the surrogates who represent The Donald on national television, and members of his own campaign staff.
  • On Sept. 7, 2016, Eric Trump appears to have contributed $376.20 listed only as “meeting expense: meals.”
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  • Ben Carson, another staunch Trump defender, gave Mitt Romney $1,000 in April 2012 but nothing to Trump this cycle.
  • t. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency director turned Trump warm-up act, has not given the candidate a dime. Neither has Governor Chris Christie
  • Many of Trump’s surrogates, who have been generous in previous campaigns, this year have kept their wallets closed to The Donald.
  • Ivanka Trump, who previously contributed to Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2007 and 2008 respectively, does not appear to have given to her father.
  • And contributions below $200 are not required to be reported by presidential campaigns.
  • The kind of anything goes rule when it comes to donations applies evenly to both candidates in the race and some of Clinton’s team is not on record providing contributions either.
  • However, Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta appears to have given $2,700 on April 16, 2015. And Chelsea Clinton gave her mother’s campaign $2,700 on Jan. 21, 2016. There are also documented contributions from newly-appointed Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook, and former strategist for President Obama David Axelrod.
  • One major Clinton surrogate who is noticeably absent from her extensive list of contributors is billionaire Mark Cuban who has been a public thorn in Trump’s side.
  • And by September, Trump had paid his own businesses around $8.2 million, comprised of rent, food, and facilities and payroll for corporate staffers. He even used tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations to buy copies of his own book.
  • Meanwhile, Trump is still asserting that he will invest $100 million in his own campaign
rachelramirez

ERP for OCD Works, But It's Expensive and Hard to Find - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The Only Cure for OCD Is Expensive, Elusive, and Scary
  • She can’t resist picking up litter whenever she spots it; the other day she cleaned up the entire parking lot of her apartment complex. Each night, she must place her phone in an exact spot on the nightstand in order to fall asleep.
  • Since then, a succession of therapists have failed to help her. They’ve told her, “I don't really know how to treat this,” she said. Or, they talked to her about the possible source of her troubles.
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  • there are no psychologists who specialize in exposure and response prevention, the specific kind of therapy she and many others with OCD require in order to break their crippling thought cycles.
  • At its worst, OCD can compel people to spend hours each day rehearsing an intricate mental dance they feel powerless to end.
  • Along with medication, exposure and response prevention, or ERP, therapy is the gold-standard treatment for people with OCD. It is radically different from more traditional talk therapy, which excavates patients’ childhoods or past relationships for clues to their present-day problems.
  • a person is forced to confront their obsessive thoughts relentlessly. The goal is to make the sufferer so accustomed to their obsessions that they no longer feel tempted to engage in soothing compulsions.
  • Because the symptoms can be entirely mental, it can take years for either patients or therapists to recognize OCD for what it is.
  • ERP teaches people, “these thoughts are meaningless, you need to learn to ignore them.”
  • some studies estimate it takes OCD sufferers 17 years to find proper treatment from the onset of symptoms. Seeking certain forms of talk therapy can make them worse, not better. In the meantime, some experience symptoms so debilitating they are confined to their homes.
  • Most moderate OCD cases get at least partly better if the patient receives two or three months of ERP.
  • There is no mandatory number of hours that psychologists must spend training in either cognitive-behavioral therapy or ERP, said Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. Bufka did not know what percentage of psychotherapists provide ERP, but she suspects it’s “small.”
  • Between 3 and 7 million Americans suffer from OCD at some point—a substantial number, but still far fewer than the vast multitudes who seek therapy for anxiety and depression.
  • People obsessed with not offending God might hold a satanic ritual. Those assailed by persistent (and baseless) fears they will molest their siblings might read the incest tome Flowers in the Attic.
  • Access to ERP therapists is compounded by the already profound shortage of psychotherapists in rural areas. More than half of U.S. counties have no mental-health professionals at all.
  • ERP specialists might feel no need to take insurance, since they are so rare they often have no shortage of clients, Szymanski, of the International OCD Foundation, pointed out.
  • But the treatment was so expensive it contributed to the family’s decision to sell their house.
rachelramirez

Clinton eyes Biden for secretary of state - POLITICO - 0 views

  • Clinton eyes Biden for secretary of state
  • Joe Biden is at the top of the internal short list Hillary Clinton’s transition team is preparing for her pick to be secretary of state
  • According to the source, they’re strategizing about how to make the approach to the vice president, who almost ran against her in the Democratic primaries but has since been campaigning for her at a breakneck pace all over the country in these final months.
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  • , as will a concern within Clinton’s circle and throughout the current White House that Donald Trump’s campaign has created lasting damage to America’s relationships around the world.
  • In August, he traveled to Latvia to assure NATO allies that America’s commitment to them will hold, despite Trump’s questioning of the alliance’s value and worries especially within the Baltic region about Russian aggression.
  • They both lost to Obama in the 2008 primaries and went on to serve together in his administration — and though they had regular lunches and a warm personal relationship, feelings became rougher as her 2016 run came into focus and the chances of his running again faded.
  • But she’d also be choosing someone with whom she repeatedly clashed as secretary of state, with the vice president often playing the skeptic while she supported more aggressive action.
  • Among the names most discussed: former undersecretary of state Wendy Sherman, the point person on the Iran deal and a favorite within the State Department; former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, who now heads the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Nick Burns, the former under secretary of state of political affairs under George W. Bush who’s been an active advocate for Clinton this year; Kurt Campbell, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs when she was in the job; Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state during Bill Clinton’s first term and a longtime friend of the Clintons who’s now the president of the Brookings Institution; and James Stavridis, the retired admiral who earlier this summer made it into consideration as the sleeper pick to be her running mate.
rachelramirez

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

  • ‘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
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  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
rachelramirez

Meet the Professor Whose 'Primary Model' Says Trump Has 87% Chance to Win - The Daily B... - 0 views

  • Five for FiveMeet the Professor Whose ‘Primary Model’ Says Trump Has 87% Chance to Win
  • “The model says Trump has between an 87 and 99 percent chance to be president,” he said.
  • But Norpoth has been right every single time he’s done this—five for five over the last 20 years.
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  • He uses data going back to 1912 that primarily has to do with two central tenets.
  • He’s a professor with an “excellent,” “phenomenal,” and “remarkable” prediction record, according to an amalgam of conservative media websites
  • First, the setting has to be ripe for a “change” election—where the party in power for an extended period of time appears ready to lose it. And second, the model substantially weights primary popularity for each candidate.
  • The model still shows a pretty narrow victory—52.5 percent to 47.5 percent for Trump.
  • “You saw this, for example, with Carter in ’76. He had no money, no endorsements. People said he didn’t have a chance. Nobody had a clue who he was going in,” Norpoth said.
  • “If he ultimately loses, it’s because he was unwilling to make the transition from the primary to the general election. He had a big message for change, but he couldn’t lay off of anyone who’s ever slighted him,” Norpoth said. “He’s had so many self-inflicted wounds.”
  • Richard Nixon, who once told Bob Dole to “run as far as you can to the right because that’s where 40 percent of the people who decide the nomination are. And to get elected you have to run as fast as you can back to the middle, because only about 4 percent of the nation’s voters are on the extreme right wing.”
  • Trump pulled into a virtual tie with Clinton in some poll averages.
rachelramirez

One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America
  • One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas.
  • “When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”
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  • As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.
  • The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On.
  • The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
  • He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.
  • HIV first started infecting humans somewhere in West Africa, having jumped into us from chimpanzees.
  • He also concluded that the virus must have arrived in the U.S. around 12 years before AIDS was formally recognized in 1981.
  • They reveal that HIV had spread from Africa to the Caribbean by around 1967, and had jumped into the U.S. by around 1971. It landed in New York City and began diversifying rapidly
  • By the time anyone noticed the first sign of AIDS in 1981, the virus had already hopped from coast to coast, and become genetically diverse.
  • This means that not only did Dugas not bring AIDS to America, but he didn’t spread it west either. He was a totally mundane part of a very unusual epidemic.
  • In 2010, evolutionary biologists used gene trees to prove that a man named Anthony Eugene Whitfield had knowingly infected many women with HIV. More recently, biologists used a pocket-sized DNA sequencer to track the evolution of Ebola in real-time, providing details about routes of transmission that helped to curtail the recent west African outbreak.
rachelramirez

The Middle East: Where Policy and Culture Collide - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How Should Culture Affect Foreign Policy?
  • Think of all the arguments about the so-called Sunni-Shia divide, the alleged millennia of conflict between these two Islamic sects that purportedly shape politics in the Middle East today, or the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington first wrote about in Foreign Affairs in 1993.
  • It strikes me that it is worth asking if the dynamic interaction between Western cultural preconceptions of the region and Middle Eastern predispositions is a reasonable explanation for Washington’s failures in the Arab world.
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  • It is hard to take arguments about culture seriously whey they are presented in their most extreme form because they often boil down to the noxious, self-serving claims of Islamophobes and Islamists alike.
  • It seems worthwhile, at least, when thinking about U.S. policy in the Middle East, to understand the way in which Western ideas—which many in the West believe to be universal—interact with the principles, ideals, and mythologies that make Middle Eastern societies tick.
  • Second, I am well aware of the dangers of cultural relativity. The Egyptian government has already employed this tactic in its efforts to deflect criticism of its appalling human rights record. Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has, for example, argued that human rights is a Western concept that does not necessarily apply in other cultural settings.
  • But again, I wonder if analysts are missing something when they avoid thinking about culture, specifically a political culture cultivated by the state.
rachelramirez

If The Media Investigated Hillary Like They Did Watergate, We Wouldn't Need WikiLeaks - 0 views

  • If The Media Investigated Hillary Like They Did Watergate, We Wouldn’t Need WikiLeaks
  • By September, though, the Post and New York Times were fully on board with the investigation, and the administration had gone into full cover-up mode. Even though the FBI had confirmed that the administration had conducted a political sabotage conspiracy, it was not enough to keep Nixon from being reelected in a landslide in November.
  • the “two lions of journalism” have little interest in covering the avalanche of revelations pouring forth against the Clinton campaign. Instead, both publications are working around the clock to bring the Democratic nominee to power.
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  • They’re going to keep digging dirt on Trump, and they’re going to continue to minimize, to the best of their ability, a story that may well have historic and damaging implications, both for the nation as a whole and our entire political system moving forward.
  • it is likely to forever damage the reputation of mainstream American journalism, and it most certainly will continue to encourage the American public to look elsewhere for the unvarnished truth.
  • There is no doubt that, whatever his reasons, if Putin is involved he is not acting on behalf of or for the benefit of the American people.
  • One thing is certain: reporters didn’t always adhere to standard journalism protocols when attempting to get to the bottom of this vital story.
  • It was also revealed that 18.5 minutes of tape had been erased. The furor that erupted from all corners, including the media, was enormous. It was considered one of the most reprehensible single acts in the history of American politics.
rachelramirez

Colombia Peace Deal Is Defeated, Leaving a Nation in Shock - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Colombia Peace Deal Is Defeated, Leaving a Nation in Shock
  • A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country’s largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a 52-year war suddenly uncertain.
  • A narrow margin divided the yes-or-no vote, with 50.2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49.8 percent voting in favor
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  • The surprise surge by the “no” vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union.
  • Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting.
  • “If ‘no’ wins, we won’t have peace, but at least we won’t give the country away to the guerrillas. We need better negotiations.”
  • The rebels had agreed to immediately abandon their battle camps for 28 “concentration zones” throughout the country, where over the next six months they would hand over their weapons to United Nations teams.
  • rank-and-file fighters were expected to be granted amnesty. Those suspected of being involved in war crimes would be judged in special tribunals with reduced sentences, many of which were expected to involve years of community service work, like removing land mines once planted by the FARC.
  • About 220,000 people were killed in the fighting, and six million were displaced. An untold number of women were raped by fighters, and children were given Kalashnikov rifles and forced into battle.
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