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jongardner04

Female migrants to Europe face violence, Amnesty says | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ace-violence-amnesty-says.html

female migrants

shared by jongardner04 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • LONDON –  Women and girl migrants coming into Europe face violence and sexual harassment at every stage of their journey, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
  • The vast majority of the migrants streaming into Europe are men, which leaves women particularly vulnerable, aid workers say. Women at camps reported having to use the same bathroom and shower facilities as men, and some said they did not eat or drink to avoid going to the toilet.
  • "One of the challenges we have been facing is that it is taking a long time for the international community, and by that I mean governments, to wake up to this crisis and to realize that it is not something that they can wish away," Jenny Becker, protection coordinator with the international Rescue Committee in northern Lesbos in Greece, told The Associated Press.
Javier E

Wilson Went to Paris to Bind America's Ties to the World. Trump Is There to Loosen Them. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-france-world-war-1.html

wilson paris internationalism America First trump world order

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • A hundred years after Woodrow Wilson’s triumphal arrival, another president who just lost unilateral control on Capitol Hill headed to Paris on Friday. But President Trump brought no idealism and found no rapturous crowds waiting. He plans to change the world, too — but in his case, to upend the international order that his long-ago predecessor helped build.
  • Where the 28th president traveled here at the dawn of a new era for the United States, intent on building a world based on cooperation and collective action, the 45th president has come determined to disentangle his country from the shackles of globalism that he believes has held it back
  • Wilson, a devoted internationalist, has given way to Mr. Trump, a self-declared “nationalist,” and the bookends of their two trips separated by 100 years tell the larger story of the dramatic forces that have transformed the United States and its place in the worl
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  • “He had an unshakable faith in the idea that what was best for the world would be best for the United States,” as Patricia O’Toole wrote in “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made,” her biography published this year. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has made clear that he believes if something is good for the rest of the world, it must be bad for the United States.
  • His “America First” approach has rewritten the compact between the United States and the countries it allied with in World War I and thereafter, leaving them to find their own way in this new era
  • Just last week, Mr. Macron called for the creation of a “true European army” because the continent can no longer depend on the United States. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” he said. “When I see President Trump announcing that he’s quitting a major disarmament treaty, which was formed after the 1980s Euro-missile crisis that hit Europe, who is the main victim? Europe and its security.”
  • “You can make the argument that the classical liberal world order has perhaps outlived its normal life span,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale historian. “Obviously, Trump is doing that kind of thinking — not in a manner that is very polite or very decorous for sure, but in a sense responding to the inner strains that have been building for a long time.”
  • Unlike Wilson, Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular in Europe. Only 27 percent of people in a 25-nation survey by the Pew Research Center had confidence in the American president to do the right thing in world affairs — and only 9 percent have such confidence in France. Mr. Trump cited the survey on the campaign trail this fall to prove that he has the United States’ interests at heart.
  • In effect, Mr. Trump’s every-country-for-itself philosophy is a return to 19th-century great power politics, one that its advocates call more realistic than Wilson’s naïve romanticism.
  • Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College, has argued that Mr. Trump is not an isolationist, as some see him, but is reinventing internationalism to take on American enemies like China, Iran and Russia in a more cleareyed way. “He appears determined to upend the international system as thoroughly and disruptively as he has upended American politics,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
  • Mr. Gaddis said internationalism remained the dominant force in the United States when there was still a Cold War and what is remarkable is that it lasted so long once that existential threat evaporated.
  • “I’m not surprised that some of these foundations have been shaken at this point,” he said. “I have no idea what is going to replace them. I’m not sure I like how it’s shaking. It’s a little too shaky, it seems to me.”
Javier E

America Soured on My Multiracial Family - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567994

adoption racism

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • There are three fundamental, complicating truths about adoption. First, every single adoption begins with profound loss. Through death, abandonment, or even loving surrender, a child suffers the loss of his or her mother and father. Second, the demographics of those in need of loving homes do not precisely match the demographics of those seeking a new child. Adoptive parents are disproportionately white. Adopted children are not. Thus, multiracial families are a natural and inevitable consequence of the adoption process. Third, American culture has long been obsessed with questions of race and identity
  • I’m an evangelical Christian, and ever since I was a young man, two Bible verses have tugged at my soul.
  • The first comes from the Book of James, and defines “pure” religious practice in part as looking after “widows and orphans in their distress.
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  • The second, from the Book of Galatians, declares an eternal truth: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
  • As a result, my wife and I not only felt called to adopt, but we believed that race was no barrier to unity for a family of genuine faith.
  • From the instant we saw her, we loved her with our whole hearts, but any adoptive family can tell you (indeed, any family at all can tell you) that love does not heal all hurts. There is pain that can last a lifetime.
  • overing just outside the frame—and sometimes intruding directly into our lives—is a disturbing reality. There are people who hate that our family exists. Actual racists loathe the idea of white parents raising a black child, and ideological arguments about identity raise questions about whether a white family’s love can harm a child of a different race. And, sometimes, people even question whether adoptive parents truly love their children, claiming that parents adopt to “virtue signal” or simply to ostentatiously demonstrate their open-mindedness.
  • In 2010, the year we adopted, The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson wrote an article that reflected the heartfelt views of countless adoptive families. It was the “noblest thing about America,” he said, that “we care for children of other lands who have been cast aside.” And what of multiracial families? His answer was our answer: “Instead of undermining any culture, international adoption instructs our own. Unlike the thin, quarrelsome multiculturalism of the campus, multiethnic families demonstrate the power of affection over difference.” There was a spirit of optimism, of hope that we could actually live the promise from Galatians, and in living that promise help change the nation we loved.
  • then came a backlash. Claims of cultural imperialism, wounded national pride, and rare, sad horror stories of exploitation or abuse soured foreign nations against American families. And at home, identity politics and even outright hostility against the Christian adoption movement triggered attacks from some on the left—attacks that were soon to be matched and exceeded by attacks from a racist right.
  • We quickly discovered that if you’re the white parents of an adopted black child, and you’re in the public eye at all, men and women will viciously criticize you for having the audacity to believe that you can raise your kid. At times, the criticism was direct and personal—most of it directed at my wife
  • Then, sometime around the summer of 2015, we began to notice a shift. The attacks on our family came less and less from the left, and increasingly from the so-called alt-right—a vicious movement of Trump-supporting white nationalists who loathe multiracial families. They despise international adoption. They call it “race-cucking your family” or “raising the enemy.”
  • They lifted pictures of my then-7-year-old daughter from social media and Photoshopped her into a gas chamber, with Donald Trump pressing the button to kill her. They put her image in slave fields. They found my wife’s blog and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead or dying African Americans. They made me wish for the days when the left came after us; at least progressive critics didn’t want my daughter to die.
  • White parents see racism directed at their black kids. Cruel people use social media to accuse parents of raising kids as fashion statements. Others lecture them on their inherent inability to meet the needs of children of color. The hate our family received may have been more prolific because of who we are, but that hate is real, it is part of American life, and it will find its way to all too many families that looks like ours.
  • In the years since we brought our daughter home, overseas adoption has plummeted—down 72 percent since 2005—and it’s not hard to see one of the reasons. A broken American culture inflicts itself on nations abroad and families at home, and attitudes shift
  • the idealism of 2010 is gone. Then, we thought our family reflected the future. Now we know that was naive. Now we know that while the promise of Galatians—the promise that we are “all one”—is true in the Kingdom of Heaven, in America it does not yet apply.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Why Trump Has Such a Soft Spot for Russia - 0 views

nymag.com/...ch-a-soft-spot-for-russia.html

trump foreign policy Great Power nationalism history

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • we know now that the whole Kabuki drama in which we keep asking when the GOP will resist this, or stop it, or come to its senses, is simply a category error. This is what the GOP now is. It’s an authoritarian, nationalist leadership cult, hostile to the global order.
  • Republican voters increasingly like Putin, and 71 percent of Republicans back Trump’s handling of Russia in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. A whole third of Republicans do not believe the Kremlin attacked our democracy in 2016, despite every single intelligence agency and the Republicans in the House saying so
  • This is not treason as such. It is not an attack on America, but on a version of America, the liberal democratic one, supported by one of the great parties in America. It is an attack on those institutions that Trump believes hurt America — like NATO and NAFTA and the E.U. It is a championing of an illiberal America, and a partnering with autocrats in a replay of old-school Great Power zero-sum politics, in which the strong pummel and exploit the weak
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  • The question for the rest of us, it seems to me, is whether Israel under this hard-right government should be viewed in the future as an ally for democratic forces, like Britain or France — or as something a little more complicated, like Hungary or Poland?
  • Here’s how a spokesperson for an Arab-Israeli lobby described it: “This law guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism and systemic inequality.” When you consider this move alongside the continuing settlement of the West Bank, where Palestinians have no rights to speak of, and are increasingly being sequestered into isolated Bantustans, it’s not a good look.
  • Trump is simultaneously vandalizing the West, while slowly building a strongman alliance that rejects every single Western value. And Russia — authoritarian, ethnically homogeneous, internally brutal, internationally rogue — is at its center. That’s the real story of the last week, and at this point, it isn’t even faintly news.
  • if I were an Estonian or a Montenegrin I’d be nervous, wouldn’t you? If I were a German, I’d be unnerved. If I were still British, I’d be very leery of door handles. There’s no Uncle Sam to look to for help anymore. The Americans are on the other side.
  • The post-1945 attempt to organize the world around collective security, free trade, open societies, non-zero-sum diplomacy, and multicultural democracies is therefore close to unintelligible to him. Why on earth, in his mind, would a victorious power after a world war be … generous to its defeated foes? When you win, you don’t hold out a hand in enlightened self-interest. You gloat and stomp. In Trump’s zero-sum brain — “we should have kept the oil!” — it makes no sense. It has to be a con. And so today’s international order strikes Trump, and always has, as a massive, historic error on the part of the United States
  • There’s nothing in it for him to like. It has empowered global elites over national leaders; it has eroded national sovereignty in favor commerce and peace; it has empowered our rivals; it has spread liberal values contrary to the gut instincts of many ordinary people (including himself); it has led the U.S. to spend trillions on collective security, when we could have used that wealth for our own population or to impose our will by force on others; it has created a legion of free riders; it has enriched the global poor at the expense, as he sees it, of the American middle class; and it has unleashed unprecedented migration of peoples and the creation of the first truly multicultural, heterogeneous national cultures.
  • He wants to end all that. He always hated it, and he never understood it. That kind of complex, interdependent world requires virtues he doesn’t have and skills he doesn’t possess
  • He wants a world he intuitively understands: of individual nations, in which the most powerful are free to bully the others. He wants an end to transnational migration, especially from south to north. It unnerves him. He believes that warfare should be engaged not to defend the collective peace as a last resort but to plunder and occupy and threaten. He sees no moral difference between free and authoritarian societies, just a difference of “strength,” in which free societies, in his mind, are the weaker ones. He sees nations as ethno-states, exercising hard power, rather than liberal societies, governed by international codes of conduct. He believes in diplomacy as the meeting of strongmen in secret, doing deals, in alpha displays of strength — not endless bullshit sessions at multilateral summits
Javier E

Robert Gilpin, R.I.P. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...robert-gilpin-r-i-p

international relations theory hegemony crisis decline us history

shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • international relations professor Robert Gilpin passed away
  • I became enamored with his ideas while in graduate school and have taught many of the books above in my classes on global political economy and international relations theory. Gilpin’s books offer an excellent intellectual history of how realists thought about the politics of the world economy
  • Gipin’s greatest work will always be “War and Change in World Politics.” Although written in 1981, the theory is perhaps more trenchant now than then. Gilpin offered his variant of hegemonic stability theory. This theory posits that a rising superpower has a strong incentive to structure the global rules of the game in a manner favorable to that state’s economy and polity. In return, however, the hegemon will provide the necessary global public goods to ensure that other states prosper in this system. Peace and prosperity can thrive when this kind equilibrium holds.
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  • Gilpin’s story of hegemonic decline, which was both detailed and prescient. He argued that over time, the costs to the hegemon of maintaining the status quo would rise relative to the benefits, for several reasons. First, the leading economy eventually hits a growth slowdown because of lagging innovation. Second, the cost of leading military technologies continues to escalate at the same time that an affluent population loses its “martial spirit.” Third, personal and public consumption supplant more productive forms of investment spending. Fourth, the shift of the economy into the service sector makes productivity gains that much harder.
  • Gilpin warned about the “corrupting influence of affluence” on the hegemon. See if this sounds familiar: Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this “corruption” (a term used in its classical sense to mean decay) is the generation in the minds of a dominant people of the belief that the world they (or, rather, their forebears) created is the right, natural, and God-given state of affairs. To such a people the idea that the world of their rule and privilege could be otherwise becomes inconceivable. The goodness and benefits of the status quo, as they know it, are so obvious that all reasonable men will assent to its worth and preservation. With such a state of mind, a people neither concedes to the just demands of rising challengers nor makes the necessary sacrifices to defend its threatened world.
  • The most widely cited book about hegemonic decline in the past century is Paul Kennedy’s “Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” I cite that book on a regular basis. But whenever I cite it about hegemonic decline, I always add Gilpin (1981). Because “War and Change in World Politics” preceded Kennedy’s masterwork by six years, and is in every way its equal.
anonymous

Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Group Opposing Nuclear Weapons - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nobel-peace-prize.html

nobel peace prize nuclear weapons history global

shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Group Opposing Nuclear Weapons
  • In a year when the threat of nuclear warfare seemed to draw closer, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to an advocacy group behind the first treaty to prohibit nuclear arms.
  • The group, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a Geneva-based coalition of disarmament activists, was honored for its efforts to advance the negotiations that led to the treaty, which was reached in July at the United Nations.
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  • “The organization is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement.
  • “Every year there should be at least one happy event to give us hope, and this was it.”
  • “an international legal prohibition will not in itself eliminate a single nuclear weapon, and that so far neither the states that already have nuclear weapons nor their closest allies support the nuclear weapon ban treaty.”
  • The treaty will go into effect 90 days after 50 United Nations member states have formally ratified it.
  • The United States, which with Russia has the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons, had said the treaty would do nothing to alleviate the possibility of nuclear conflict and might even increase it.
  • For nuclear-armed nations that choose to join, the treaty outlines a process for destroying stockpiles and enforcing the countries’ promise to remain free of nuclear weapons.
  • Under the agreement, all nuclear weapons use, threat of use, testing, development, production, possession, transfer and stationing in a different country are prohibited.
  • “I don’t think we have unrealistic expectations that tomorrow nuclear weapons will be gone,” Ms. Fihn said. “But I think this is really a moment to be really inspired that it is possible to do something.”
  • The committee instead intended to give “encouragement to all players in the field” to disarm.
  • Ms. Fihn was more direct in her appraisal of the Kim-Trump standoff and the anxieties it has raised. “Nuclear weapons do not bring stability and security” she told reporters. “We can see that right now.”
  • Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, told reporters that “there is no alternative” to nuclear parity to maintain world stability. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Proponents of the treaty have said that they never expected any nuclear-armed country would sign it right away. But they argued that the treaty’s widespread acceptance elsewhere would increase the public pressure and stigma of possessing nuclear weapons.
  • The same strategy was used by proponents of the treaties that banned chemical and biological weapons, land mines and cluster bombs.
  • Russia and China are equally opposed to the efforts to ban nuclear weapons through an international treaty.
  • But on this issue, the naysayers are in the clear minority.
Javier E

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hootings-us-international.html

guns debate international

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?
  • Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.
  • Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.
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  • The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.
  • Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American
  • Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
  • Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country
  • And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
  • If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
  • A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues
  • countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
  • Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country
  • Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
  • America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership
  • the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
  • They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
  • More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
  • From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.
  • But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.
  • In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.
  • By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.
  • In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.
  • This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s.
  • That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.
  • The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.
  • Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people
  • Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
  • The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.
  • The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.
  • After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
  • That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
  • “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
knudsenlu

The Missing Piece in Italian Politics: Women - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555260

italian politics history culture

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • I lived in Rome for many years but moved away in 2013. Maybe I’ve changed since then, maybe it’s the #MeToo moment, but coming back to Italy this time, what struck me most wasn’t the political chaos, the populism, the dysfunction, or even the beauty, since a person can get used to all that. It was the fact that there were barely any women playing leading roles in the election coverage.
  • As the returns came in, the main talk shows had all-male panels of experts. Some of the reporters in the field were women, and some of the interviewers, too. But men dominated the debate.
  • Is it really possible that in a country of 60 million people, there were barely any women weighing in on the results on the front pages of the country’s most prominent newspapers, and barely any woman there with regular political columns?
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  • I recently interviewed Sofia Ventura, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, about Silvio Berlusconi, and whether the image of women had improved in Italy since he had left power, after shaping a culture of trashy television. “The image of women hasn’t really improved in Italy. It’s still rare to find women who have authoritative roles in the media and political system. On the contrary, things have gone backwards,” she told me. “The evening talk shows are frightening,” she continued. “When they discuss politics and call on an authoritative voice, women are never called on.”
  • The #MeToo movement barely caught on in Italy, except coverage of developments in the States. Women were afraid to come forward in Italy for fear of being humiliated, excoriated, or sued for defamation. In the States, the #MeToo movement took off “because there was already a culture that allowed these people to be heard with respect,” the novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano told me. “Here, we’re so far behind that we still need to build that.”
  • In every country where populists have won, including the United States, it’s been followed by soul-searching about the role of the press in a democracy. Maybe it’s time for Italy to have the same debate.
knudsenlu

Bill Perry: America 'Blew the Opportunity' Stop Kim's Nukes - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555239

america opportunity nukes history

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • As South Korea’s national-security adviser told it on Thursday, Donald Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un this spring for one purpose only: to achieve the “permanent denuclearization” of North Korea. But according to one of the U.S. officials who came closest to striking that kind of deal, the president better lower his expectations. By a lot.
  • “I don’t think [the North Koreans are] going to want to negotiate giving up all their nuclear weapons,” he added. “But even if they did … I have no idea how we could verify it.”
  • The years since have brought a series of nuclear agreements that at times froze the North Korean nuclear program, but over the long term failed to prevent the North from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The achilles heel of many of these accords was the Kim government’s refusal to disclose all its nuclear activities and permit outside monitors to verify that those activities had ceased.
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  • Establishing safeguards against North Korea transferring nuclear components and technology to other states or non-state actors like terrorist groups would be difficult to verify but still worth pursuing in negotiations, Perry said. (North Korea has a history of proliferating missiles and other materials related to weapons of mass destruction.)
  • hile recognizing North Korea diplomatically and finally concluding the Korean War might seem like grand gestures, Perry argued that they are actually “easy and cheap” for the United States to implement—and, maybe most importantly, “reversible” in the event that North Korea reneges on its end of the bargain. The outcome Perry envisions is, as he put it, possible, desirable, and verifiable. It's also a far cry from the denuclearization of North Korea.
Javier E

Why Pfizer didn't report that its rheumatoid arthritis medication might prevent Alzheimer's - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html

medication alzheimer Research ethics medical

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • “I’m frustrated myself really by the whole thing,’’ said Clive Holmes, a professor of biological psychiatry at the University of Southampton in Great Britain who has received past support from Pfizer for Enbrel research in Alzheimer’s, a separate 2015 trial in 41 patients that proved inconclusive.
  • He said Pfizer and other companies do not want to invest heavily in further research only to have their markets undermined by generic competition. “Someone can pop up and say, ‘Look, I’ve got a me-too drug here,’ ’’ Holmes said, referring to the advent of generic versions of Enbrel. “I think that is what this is all about.’’
  • Drug companies often are criticized for extending the patent life of a drug — and winning new profits — by merely tweaking a drug’s molecule or changing the method of delivery into the body. But it is a “heavy lift’’ for a company to win regulatory approval to use a drug for a completely different disease, said Robert I. Field, a professor of law and health care management at Drexel University.
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  • Wagering money on a clinical trial of Enbrel for an entirely different disease, especially when Pfizer had doubts about the validity of its internal analysis, made little business sense, said a former Pfizer executive who was aware of the internal debate and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal Pfizer matters.
  • “Our patent laws do not provide the appropriate incentives,’’ Field said. Drug therapy for early Alzheimer’s “would be a godsend for American patients, so we should be doing everything we can as a country to encourage development of treatments. It’s frustrating that there may be a missed opportunity.’’
  • “It probably was high risk, very costly, very long term drug development that was off-strategy,’’ the former executive said.
  • “I think the financial case is they won’t be making any money off of it,’’ the second former executive said.
  • Drug companies frequently have been pilloried for not fully disclosing negative side effects of their drugs. What happens when the opposite is the case? What obligation does a company have to spread potentially beneficial information about a drug, especially when the benefits in question could improve the outlook for treating Alzheimer’s, a disease that afflicts at least 500,000 new patients per year?
  • A medical ethics expert argued that Pfizer has a responsibility to publicize positive findings, although it is not as strong as an imperative to disclose negative findings.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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oliviaodon

The Iran Nuclear Deal Is on an Unpredictable Course - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...559562

war iran

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • It now seems likely that Trump will end U.S. compliance with the nuclear deal on May 12, when the next deadline for extending sanctions waivers comes up. It is of course still possible that Trump will take advantage of European gestures—like an agreement to sanction ballistic-missile activity, vigorously enforce inspections, and seek a follow-on agreement—to claim to have “improved” the deal thanks to his negotiating prowess, but that remains a long shot. It was always fanciful to imagine that the Europeans were going to agree to make fundamental changes to the nuclear deal (as if it were somehow in their power to unilaterally revise it without the support of the other parties to the agreement, namely Russia, China, and Iran), which is why that approach always seemed to me to be a ploy to kill the deal and blame others for its demise.
  • There are scenarios being discussed in which Washington abandons the deal in May but it somehow survives.  For example, Trump could refuse to sign the sanctions waivers up for renewal, but agree to go easy on implementation, or give exemptions to firms in European countries who have signaled a willingness to work on a new deal.  I suppose anything is possible, but it’s hard to see how that works. Whatever public or private pledges Trump makes, few European companies are going to invest in Iran or buy Iranian oil if U.S. law requires them to be sanctioned for doing so, and it is hard to see Iran abiding by the deal indefinitely if it accepts all of its constraints but gets none of the benefits.
  • There’s also the risk that countries like China or India—or even some in the EU—ignore the new sanctions and continue to buy Iranian oil, which would mean that we’d have to risk a major international trade clash to try to enforce them, at a time when potential trade wars are already looming. And even if Trump surprises us and extends sanctions for another few months and the deal survives on life support, we would soon be back in the same place we are today, faced with a binary choice between accepting an unchanged deal and blowing it up. If anyone thinks Iran will just come back to the table to accept a “better deal” after the United States, alone, walks away from the current one, they have more faith in Tehran’s political flexibility than I do.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • One possible solution is that the credible threat of force can persuade Iran not to resume its nuclear program if the deal is killed. Bolton has of course explicitly advocated using military force to stop an Iranian bomb, and Pompeo as a member of Congress asserted it would not be difficult to take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities with military strikes. If Iran does resume its suspended nuclear activities or kick out inspectors, will they conclude the use of force is necessary?
  • Finally, there is the question of regime change, since that’s what many Iran hawks really think is necessary to solve not just the nuclear program but to ensure security in the Middle East.
oliviaodon

Albert Einstein on Nuclear War and Responsibility - The Atlantic - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...einstein-atomic-war

war US politics crisis

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • In November of 1947, Albert Einstein offered the United States and the international community advice on how to coexist under the looming threat of nuclear war. An excerpt from his article in The Atlantic, “Atomic War or Peace,” has been animated in the video above.
  • Today, as the Trump administration appears to be considering nuclear war with North Korea, Einstein’s words resonate once again. In his article, the German-born Nobel Prize-winner cautioned against fear-mongering, which he believed only increases international antagonism. Einstein did condone nuclear programs, but only as a necessary evil for deterrence; he believed the atomic bomb should never again be deployed.
  • “I am not saying that the United States should not manufacture and stockpile the bomb, for I believe that it must do so; it must be able to deter another nation from making an atomic attack when it also has the bomb,” Einstein said. “To keep a stockpile of atomic bombs without promising not to initiate its use is exploiting the possession of bombs for political ends….Unless there is a determination not to use [atomic bombs] that is stronger than can be noted today among American political and military leaders, and on the part of the public itself, atomic warfare will be hard to avoid.”
oliviaodon

The War in Syria Is Getting More Complicated - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...557990

war crisis

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • The Middle East is a “troubled place,” President Donald Trump said Friday night as he described his decision to use America’s “righteous power” in a retaliatory attack against government targets in Syria following a suspected chemical attack there.
  • Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seems to have won the civil war in his country—but that doesn’t mean peace is coming. In fact, the conflict seems to be escalating—fueled by the many outside powers who have joined the Syrian battlefield with interests of their own.
  • Over the seven years of Syria’s war, it has sucked in numerous other countries, who have attempted to shape the conflict with every tool from bombing to mercenaries to special operators to weapons shipments to money. The war has grown ever more complicated and more deadly over time, and Syria’s future is now largely being determined outside of its borders.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The United States is in Syria mainly because of ISIS.
  • Iran is in Syria to protect the Assad regime, and also to use its proxies to menace its archenemy Israel from a neighboring country.
  • Prior to the rise of ISIS in 2014, the United States generally sought to contain the conflict, as efforts at international diplomacy failed to resolve it. The Obama administration advocated for Assad to step aside, but was reluctant to send weapons or funds to the rebels opposing him, out of fear that they would fall into the hands of Islamists and radical jihadists among them. In 2012, Obama also famously set a “red line” regarding chemical weapons, saying that their use would change his calculus on U.S. strategy there. But when Assad used sarin gas on civilians in 2013, Obama opted, instead of using force, for an agreement with Russia to destroy Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons. The U.S. started bombing Syria for the first time a year later, hitting not regime targets but targets associated with ISIS. It has continued bombing ever since.President Trump recently said the U.S. would leave Syria “very soon”—even as his military advisers were planning to send additional troops. By the time he spoke, the U.S. presence in the country had grown to some 2,000 troops; news reports say Trump wants them out within six months.Then came the suspected chemical attack of last weekend, to which Trump retaliated with strikes against the regime, as he did to a similar attack last year. This means the United States has once again expanded its mission beyond counterterrorism.
  • Russia is in Syria to protect the Assad regime from rebels it sees as terrorists, and project influence in the Middle East. Its military intervention in September 2015 ensured Assad would not only reverse his losses, but regain much of Syria. America’s scattershot approach to Syrian policy helped, as did the metastatic spread of ISIS that created a common enemy for both the pro- and anti-Assad camps.  
  • European countries like France and Britain are also in Syria because of ISIS. These countries’ policies have hewed largely to those of the United States
  • Saudi Arabia is in Syria—primarily by financing the rebellion—to oppose Iran.
  • Israel is in Syria to oppose Iran. For years, its border with Syria was its quietest frontier—despite its poor relationship with Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad. But Israel has watched Iran’s growing influence there with alarm.
  • Turkey is in Syria because of the Kurds.
oliviaodon

Fire and Fury Is Actually a Coup for Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550016

trump US foreign policy

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The explosive tell-all about President Trump, Fire and Fury, has been available for purchase for less than a week, but many of its readers are ready to render a verdict on its impact.
  • For the president’s detractors, the bestseller offers bona fide proof that Trump is unfit for office; for his supporters, it is nothing more than tabloid fiction written by an author with a questionable reputation.
  • The book’s international popularity mirrored its U.S.-based reception. In Singapore, some bookstores ran out of copies less than 24 hours after it was released.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • While the Trump administration tried to undermine the book’s release, even seeking to block its publication, these efforts only appeared to draw more attention to it. It’s not often a publisher is called on to cease and desist publication of a book, and it’s even rarer for such a demand to come from one of the most powerful leaders in the world.
  • “Given how central the story of Trump’s administration has been to the political conversation—certainly in the West and definitely beyond that as well—I think it’s fair to say that this book is getting a wide hearing ,” Jacob Parakilas, the deputy head of the U.S. and Americas project at the London-based Chatham House, told me. “The commentary in American publications about it, the way it has sort of driven the media narrative, is apparent to audiences far beyond Washington.”
  • This is especially true when it comes to the president’s foreign policy decisions, to which Fire and Fury dedicates ample space.
  • Bannon proposed quashing the two-state solution—once considered to be a cornerstone of American diplomacy in the Middle East—by splitting up the Palestinian territories between Jordan (which would retake control of the West Bank) and Egypt (which would assume control over Gaza).
  • While the book has earned Trump a fair bit of international bad press since its release
  • it probably won’t lower Trump’s standing in foreign countries by any significant margin.
  • “The effect of the book, rightly or wrongly, is to reinforce this narrative of the White House as this center of intrigue and competing fiefdoms and aggressive competition between different ideological and personality-based groupings surrounding the president and the sort of concomitant narrative of Trump’s own mental state, his fitness for office, his level of attention to the job,”
oliviaodon

The International Incidents Sparked by Trump's Twitter Feed in 2017 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...547892

trump

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • An unscripted moment in foreign affairs can be a dangerous thing, which is why entire bureaucratic apparatuses exist just to avoid them. And even the most on-message president can slip up and cause an international incident, whether it’s Ronald Reagan joking into a hot mic that “we begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes,” prompting a brief red alert of Soviet forces, or Barack Obama referring to “Polish death camps” and having to apologize for seeming to conflate the occupied Poles with the Nazis.
  • The more spontaneous interactions a president has, the greater the chances for the dreaded gaffe, which is why the president’s Twitter feed has been known to cause heartburn among U.S. national-security professionals.
oliviaodon

What Russian Journalists Uncovered About Russian Election Meddling - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549422

russia

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Much of 2017 was consumed with untangling the political mess that was 2016 and Russia’s role in it. Much of what we learned came from  American journalists, who brought us revelation after revelation about how the Kremlin meddled in the presidential election. Through these reporters’ domestic sources—in the White House, Congress, and the intelligence community—we learned how Russians bought Facebook ads aimed at sowing division; how Russian government agencies hacked the Democratic National Committee and congressional races; how Russians loosely affiliated with the Kremlin reached out to the Trump campaign; and how the Kremlin turned the popular Kaspersky Labs anti-virus software into a spying tool.
  • Here’s a rundown of what we learned from the Russian press this year:
  • revealed how and when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on the American election.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.
  • An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.
  • That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race.
  • ozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)
  • This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack.
  • Why has there been so little reporting on Russian election interference coming out of the place that perpetrated it? For one thing, the Russian security services and the Kremlin do not leak, at least not nearly as much as their American counterparts, and they are suspicious of Western journalists, of whom there are fewer and fewer these days. Russian government officials also “don’t like talking to independent journalists, but they’re still better to talk to than to American journalists,” said Liza Osetinskaya, a legendary Russian editor who now runs The Bell.
  • The problem is that independent journalism in Russia has been decimated.
  • Facing this kind of political and economic pressure, many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether.* What we are witnessing “is the last phase of the death of independent Russian media,” Galina Timchenko said at last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival. She is another well-known Russian editor forced out under Kremlin pressure. She now runs the independent Meduza from Latvia. It has a fraction of the reach of the outlet she ran for a decade, Lenta.ru.The squelching of press freedom and the shuttering of independent media abroad is, in other words, not an academic matter. As 2017 has shown, when these voices are silenced, we know far less than we need about vital national security interests. If the violation of an abstract principle doesn’t bother you, its very concrete repercussions should.
malonema1

Pakistan Will Try to Make Trump Pay - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549887

US Pakistan politics policy

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Before the news cycle—and the president himself—got consumed with the new White House tell-all last week, Donald Trump made a good foreign policy decision, albeit seemingly in haste. The administration announced it was suspending security assistance to Pakistan, on the grounds that the country is continuing to arm, assist, fund, and provide sanctuary to a wide array of Islamist militant groups that are murdering U.S. troops and their allies in Afghanistan. Well-placed sources involved with calculating the relevant funds have told me that this was not a planned policy and took the other agencies, not to mention the Pakistanis, by complete surprise. Rather it was an ex post facto response to Trump’s January 1, 2018 tweet vituperatively repining that:
  • The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!
  • The United States was well into the surge at this point; between NATO forces and Afghan forces, there were hundreds of thousands of troops to resupply, all of whom had relied on the routes through Pakistan. The need to find alternative routes by land and air—including through Central Asia—ended up costing the Americans about $100 million per month more than the previous arrangement. Many feared that while this worked to get supplies into Afghanistan, it would not be sufficient to get massive amounts of war materiel out of Afghanistan when the United States and NATO withdrew. Consequently, the U.S. government hoped that Pakistan would reopen the ground routes. But it turns out that weaning itself off them was not such a bad option after all.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Pakistan now says the alliance is over—and good riddance. Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif complained that “This is not how allies behave.” He is absolutely correct: U.S. allies do not take its lower and middle-class taxpayers’ hard-earned money and hand it over to enemies such as the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.Asif went on to offer the usual protestations that Pakistan’s military operations have cleared Pakistan of sanctuaries for these groups to hide in. But if there were such scoundrels on Pakistan’s territory, he said that if Pakistan went after them, “then the war will again be fought on our soil, which will suit the Americans.”
  • Still, Pakistan likely suspects it has the upper hand, and for good reason: It has cultivated a global fear that it is too dangerous to fail. This is why many Americans have been afraid to break ties with Pakistan and have never encouraged the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral organizations to cut off the country and let Pakistan wallow in its own mess. Pakistan believes it has effectively bribed the International community with the specter that any instability could result in terrorists getting their hands on Pakistani nuclear technology, fissile materials, or a weapon. In fact, Pakistan has stoked these fears by having the world’s fastest-growing nuclear program, including of battlefield nuclear weapons. It is conceivable that Pakistan could use funds from a future IMF bailout to service its burgeoning Chinese debt.
  • Still, one positive side effect of having an erratic head of state is that the United States now has a genuine and credible threat to act against Pakistan. America has not been in such a position since 9/11, when it used its position of leverage to coerce Pakistan to facilitate the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Whereas Pakistan had long comforted itself that neither Presidents Bush nor Obama would seriously alter course, due to the petting zoo of Islamist militants that Pakistan cultivated as crucial tools of foreign policy, and to its nuclear weapons, Pakistan will have to seriously consider that Trump means what he says. Since the early months of the war on terror that began in October 2001, the United States has ultimately swerved when confronted with Pakistani brinkmanship. Pakistan can’t count on that this time.
Javier E

A Weekend for Ignoring Signs of Doom - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553727

international relations war

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • If this thing starts, it’s going to [probably be] one of the worst, catastrophic events in the history of our civilization, but it is going to be very, very brief. The end of it is [will] see mass casualties, the likes of which the planet has never seen—it will be of biblical proportions. …
  • This president has at his fingertips the ability to dispense what he has said he is going to dispense, if the North Korean regime, if Kim Jong Un, continues down the path that he is [on] … the president can do this quickly and, as I said, it is at his fingertips.
  • the implication of his message was startling: The president of the United States is willing to launch a major war in the near future if North Korea does not back down.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Yet after Risch departed, the panel went on as normal. No one said much about North Korea except to reiterate that there is no bloody-nose strategy. Other preventive-strike options, which do appear to be under serious consideration, were not discussed. Indeed the prospect of the use of force against North Korea hardly came up earlier in the conference.
  • There was no overarching threat or narrative that captivated participants. There was no sense of urgency. No feeling that we were truly on the brink. But, if you looked, red lights were flashing everywhere.
  • Meanwhile, European and American officials did little to dispel the notion that the West is in disarray.
  • And doubts about who truly speaks for the Trump administration continued to swirl.
  • Also remarkable was what the speakers failed to bring up.
  • Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the conference, made several impressive attempts to encourage senior officials to consider how to preserve the liberal international order—to find a way back from the brink— but his message went unheeded.
  • it was not a year for bravery, usefulness, or faith. It was a year for false bravado, contradiction, and selfishness
  • The question we are left with is this: We know things are bad in our world today, but will they break? Judging from the proceedings in Munich, we will need to be very lucky in the year ahead for the answer to be no.
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