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Fury Shakes the Iowa Caucuses, Boosting Ted Cruz While Slowing Hillary Clinton - The Ne... - 0 views

  • it sent a forceful message to Democratic leaders that it was unwilling to put aside its resentment of Wall Street and corporate America to crown a lifelong party insider who has amassed millions in speaking fees from the big banks.
  • voters are united in an impatience, even a revulsion, at what they see as a rigged system that no longer works for them.
  • For Republicans, the enemy is an overreaching government, strangling their freedoms and pocketbooks.
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  • For Democrats, it is an unfair economy, shrinking their paychecks and aspirations.
  • “It’s striking,” Mr. Gergen said, “that the winner of the Republican side represents the far right and the moral winner for the Democrats comes from the far left. It’s a clear vote of no confidence in the economic order.”
  • a disappointed-looking Ms. Clinton raised her voice to a near yell as she tried to demonstrate her own conviction. But she offered oddly little direct assuagement to the unsettled working class that still craves her assurance.That task fell instead, as it has throughout the campaign, to Mr. Sanders, Mrs. Clinton’s ultraliberal rival, whose denunciations of greedy plutocrats and an unfair economy are at the center of his message. “Given the enormous crisis facing our country,” he said here after voting had concluded, “it is just too late for establishment politicians and establishment economics.”
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Zika virus tied to birth defects is international emergency, WHO says | Reuters - 0 views

  • The World Health Organization on Monday declared the mosquito-borne Zika virus an international public health emergency due to its link to thousands of birth defects in Brazil, as the U.N. agency sought to build a global response to the threat.
  • WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told reporters that coordinated international action was needed to improve detection and expedite work on a vaccine and better diagnostics for the disease, but said curbs on travel or trade were not necessary.
  • The WHO said last week the Zika virus, transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, was "spreading explosively" and could infect as many as 4 million people in the Americas. The Pan American Health Organization says Zika has spread in 24 nations and territories in the Americas.
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  • Chan, whose agency was assailed as too slow in reacting to West Africa's Ebola epidemic that killed more than 10,000 people in the past two years, cited "first and foremost the big concern about microcephaly," the birth defect that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and improperly developed brains.
  • U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) head Thomas Frieden said the WHO emergency declaration "calls the world to action" on Zika. The CDC added four more countries and territories to its list of locales that pose a risk for Zika infection, advising pregnant women to consider avoiding travel to those areas.
  • Brazil is due to host the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August, and President Dilma Rousseff's chief of staff said on Monday there is no risk of cancelling the games due to Zika.
  • The emergency designation, recommended by a committee of independent experts following criticism of a hesitant response to Zika so far, should help fast-track international action and research priorities. The move lends official urgency to research funding and other steps to stem the spread of the virus.
  • This marks the fourth time the WHO has declared a global health emergency since such procedures were put in place in 2007, with the others arising from influenza, Ebola and polio.
  • The Zika virus has raised questions worldwide about whether pregnant women should avoid infected countries. Chan said delaying travel was something pregnant women "can consider" but added that if they needed to travel they should take protective measures by covering up and using mosquito repellent.
  • Brazil has reported some 3,700 suspected cases of microcephaly. Brazilian Health Minister Marcelo Castro told Reuters the epidemic was worse than believed because in 80 percent of cases the infected people had no symptoms.
  • As the virus spreads from Brazil, other countries in the Americas are also likely to see cases of babies with Zika-linked birth defects, experts believe. The clinical symptoms of Zika are usually mild and often similar to dengue, which is transmitted by the same mosquito, leading to fears that Zika will spread into all parts of the world where dengue is commonplace.
  • More than a third of the world’s population lives in areas at risk of dengue infection, in a band stretching through Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.Zika's rapid spread in Latin America is attributed to the prevalence of Aedes aegypti and a lack of immunity among the population.
  • A senior Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, "This is not an Ebola-type situation where you have to stop people at the border."
  • New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said the state's health department would offer free tests for individuals with symptoms of infection who have traveled to countries impacted by Zika.
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Wildly Popular App Kik Offers Teenagers, and Predators, Anonymity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Unlike some competing apps, Kik says it does not have the ability to view written messages between users, or to show them to the police. It can view pictures and videos, but retains them only until the recipient’s device has received the message. Those practices are legal.
  • With a court order or in a dire emergency — as in Nicole’s death — the company can provide the authorities with a log of a user’s sent and received messages, and in some cases can supply the user’s Internet protocol address, giving a physical location.
  • In deciding what information to store, the company says, it aims to “strike a balance” between “protecting user privacy and the need to remove bad actors from our platform and assist law enforcement.”
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  • But Kik says it can find users on its system with only a user name. And because Kik is based in Canada, law enforcement officials say, it can be a slow process. Requests have to go through the United States Justice Department.
  • when it comes to the content of conversations, they don’t retain information including photos and videos. So it makes it tough for us.”
  • Law enforcement officials say they often run across Kik in cases of “sextortion,” or blackmail, in which a sexual predator coaxes a young person to send nude photos — and then threatens to post the photos online, or alert the child’s parents or harm the child, if he or she does not send more.
  • Professor Finkelhor cautions against “technophobia,” saying character traits — not technology — make young people vulnerable. Those who are socially isolated, who have conflict with their parents, who are bullied in school or who are depressed are “at higher risk,” he said, “both in face-to-face and electronic environments.”
  • Investigators learned only later that the girl had met Mr. Schroeder on Kik. Asked about the odds of finding her if the man had not gone onto Facebook, Mr. Frattare, of the Ohio crime task force, said, “In my opinion, it would have been slim to none.
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The West's desire to 'liberate' the Middle East remains as flawed as ever | Voices | Th... - 0 views

  • The West's desire to ‘liberate’ the Middle East remains as flawed as ever
  • As General de Gaulle set out for the Middle East in April of 1941, he famously wrote that “towards the complicated Orient, I flew with simple ideas”.  They all did. Napoleon was going to "liberate" Cairo, and Bush and Blair were going to "liberate" Iraq; and Obama, briefly, was going to "liberate" Syria. 
  • And so they still must be.  But back in 1941, things went badly wrong for de Gaulle’s tiny Free French army. The "Army of the Levant" – officially fighting for Vichy France – did not surrender. Anxious to avoid the shame of the French military collapse before the Nazi Wehrmacht in April and May of 1940, it fought with great bravery against both de Gaulle’s rag-tag army and the British and Australians who accompanied them. 
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  • Back again now to the 1941 Allied invasion of Lebanon. Among the British forces was Sergeant Major Frank Armour, almost certainly fighting in a Scottish Commando unit that was badly hit in the first stages of the attack. He and his fellow officers arrived in "liberated" Beirut and were billeted on the top two floors of Salim Boustani’s home, and last week I walked through their rooms with their beautiful Italian architrave window frames and views over the Mediterranean, a glorious olive garden and banana plantation next door.
  • Dentz did not face the firing squad, but he died a slow death, deliberately brought about by a nation which imprisoned him in dank, freezing cells, dripping with water.  On 22 November 1955, he wrote in his diary:  “They have taken away my overcoat and scarf…I am writing absolutely numb in mind and body.”  December 13:  “The walls are running like little waterfalls…the best time is when one goes to bed…and, for a few hours, everything is forgotten.”  They were his last words.
  • Petain shared Dentz’s fate.  De Gaulle became president of France. Assad remains president of Syria. Better to be a small soldier, I suppose, like Frank Armour.  He, too, came to the complicated Orient.  Surely not with simple ideas.  I guess he fell in love with the place.
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Climate Deal Analysis: The Good, the Bad, the Still Unknown - NBC News - 0 views

  • First, the good news: On Saturday afternoon, world leaders ratified a universal pact to slow global warming, ending a decades-long political stalemate and, according to the best possible science, lowering the risk of ecological collapse.
  • The decisive moment arrived inside a high-security airplane hangar on the outskirts of Paris, where delegates from nearly 200 nations fought over the deal line-by-line for two weeks. Finally, the French foreign minister called an all-hands meeting, and asked if there were any objections to the final 31-page agreement.
  • Seeing and hearing none, he banged a tiny green gavel, sealing the deal into international law. The room erupted in a man-on-the-moon-like moment of rapturous applause. The online world followed.
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  • President Barack Obama praised the deal as "the most ambitious climate change agreement in history." "Beautiful," added French president Francois Hollande. "I used to say we must," commented Christiana Figueres, the United Nation's climate chief. "Today, we can say we did!"
  • The agreement commits the world to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." That's an ambitious goal here in 2015, which is expected to be the hottest year on record, amid the three hottest decades on record.
  • Finally, the agreement pledges a minimum of $100 billion a year for developing countries to adapt to the ravages of our already overheated climate. That's an acknowledgement of the vast inequities of climate change: The fact that the richest, most powerful countries have done the most to cause climate change, yet suffer the least as a result. advertisement
  • But there's a whole lot of bad news in this agreement as well: It's vague. It's aspirational. And critics say it's several orders of magnitude away from being enough to avert a crisis in the decades ahead.
  • "The Paris Climate Agreement is not a fair, just or science-based deal," said Erich Pica, president of the eco-watchdog group Friends of the Earth. "The result is in an agreement that could see low-lying islands and coastlines swallowed up by the sea, and many African lands ravaged by drought."
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Who are the winners and losers of the COP21's climate deal? - CBS News - 0 views

  • "The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
  • But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?
  • On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)
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  • To achieve this goal, countries that signed on to the agreement promised that they would focus on cultivating clean, renewable energy sources and shift from the use of fossil fuels. They will also be required to report on their progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions every five years.
  • The deal also commits countries to deliver $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries by 2020, with a promise to increase financing in the future.
  • In a preamble, the deal doubles down on a pledge made six years ago, that richer, industrialized countries will contribute at least $100 billion of aid a year to poorer nations to help them battle the effects of climate change by 2020. It also promises that countries will consider increases to that amount in the future.
  • So there may be many vested parties with a stake in the climate change deal -- but there are also a few key winners and losers. We take a look at them here:
  • According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's (IDMC) 2015 Global Estimates report, "an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards" since 2008. These threatened populations are largely found in developing countries, which tend to be more vulnerable to rises in sea level, droughts, and floods.
  • The climate accord in Paris, however, have many in the developing world cheering.
  • According to President Obama, the targets are bold, but they also empower "businesses, scientists, engineers, workers, and the private sector -- investors -- to work together."
  • Mohamed Adow, senior climate change adviser from the disaster relief agency Christian Aid, told CBS News that this is one of the most important aspects of the COP21 accord: the promise provides poorer nations with the "assurance that the international community will not leave developing countries to deal with climate impact."
  • Some nations were not entirely satisfied with the final language -- there is still, after all, no legally binding provision that holds industrialized countries to this pledge for "adaptation" funds -- but nonetheless, Adow said, it gives significant hope to those countries hit especially hard with the threat of displaced citizens.
  • In fact, the aid money already seems to be flowing in light of the Paris negotiations: early this week, the U.S. promised to double its own aid to affected countries to $861 million as part of last-ditch efforts to push the climate deal through.
  • The effects of climate change in poor and developing nations also pose an increasing terror threat to the United States -- a connection that President Obama has made in the past, when he called global warming "an economic and security imperative" just weeks after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.
  • As Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders explained it on CBS' "Face the Nation" in November: "If we are going to see an increase in drought, in flood, and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that people all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources... When people migrate into cities and they don't have jobs, there's going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment, and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al Qaeda and ISIS are using right now."
  • Military reports have also viewed climate change as a "catalyst for conflict," and the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review last year dubbed its effects as "threat multipliers" that ultimately lead to "conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."
  • But the climate change deal seeks to mitigate these possible conflict catalysts so that "countries that don't have the resources to address these problems head on, now will," Jon Powers, who served the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer and Special Advisor on Energy to the U.S. Army in the Obama Administration, told CBS News.
  • One important target put forth by the deal was to ensure that parties would "undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century."
  • Here, the deal aims to strangle heavy carbon-emitting industries -- the "anthropogenic emissions" -- and cut down on total fossil fuels burned worldwide. Importantly, it's also a nod to investment in and development of new technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air.
  • U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told CNBC in an interview, "We recognize fossil fuels will continue to be a part of the portfolio for quite a long time," but that the popularity of other power sources are on the rise.
  • "Wind energy has gone up by several fold just in the last five to six years," Moniz said, "and now (wind) provides about 4.5 percent of our electricity. You add that with solar, we're talking 5 percent."
  • Kathleen McLaughlin, the chief sustainability officer for Walmart, said in a statement that the company would "support the U.N.'s call for the U.S. corporate sector to commit to science-based targets to reduce emissions."
  • Ahead of the Paris summit, China -- the world's biggest coal consumer -- said it would aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly two-thirds of its 2005 levels. In the past, international monitoring of those numbers would have been difficult to do, but the COP21 deal changes that.
  • The agreement holds nations accountable for reporting their progress on their climate goals in a global "stocktake" every five years starting in 2023. It also means countries will be monitoring, verifying and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions in a single accounting system.
  • According to one report released last month by the carbon investment think tank Carbon Tracker, fossil fuel companies could risk over $2 trillion dollars of current and future projects being left valueless as the market for fossil fuels narrows with recent global climate change action.
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Obama: ISIS strategy 'moving forward with a great sense of urgency' - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • U.S. military battle against ISIS is "moving forward with a great sense of urgency,"
  • admitting that progress against the terrorists in Iraq and Syria remains slow-going.
  • "ISIL is dug in in, including in urban areas, and they hide behind civilians, and using men, women and children as human shields. So even as we are relentless, we have to be smart and target ISIL with precision."
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  • It's rare for Obama to meet with his top military brass and homeland security experts outside the White House Situation Room;
  • Obama said the visit was part of an ongoing effort to "review and constantly strengthen" U.S. military plans against ISIS.
  • the group's land-grab was "contained" and that the U.S. homeland has "never been more protected."
  • . Obama delivered a rare primetime address to update the nation on his anti-ISIS strategy last Sunday, and on Thursday will receive a briefing at the National Counterterrorism Center, outside Washington, on the latest intelligence about holiday threats.
  • U.S. has also ramped up intelligence gathering in partnership with European allies, an effort that doesn't lend itself to grand displays of military strength that could help assuage fears in the U.S
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Here's What's Up With The East Coast's Absurdly Warm Weather - 0 views

  • The weather's been positively toasty across much of the east coast over the past several days, especially for a December. In New York, Sunday temperatures shattered a 30-year-old record, hitting 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And the month has been chock-full of 60-plus days.
  • So what's going on? Is this a climate change thing, or a welcome boon from the ongoing El Nino tropical weather event? The answer actually lies with a buzzword from 2014's equally extreme temperatures: the polar vortex.
  • Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service, said last week the band of cold air surrounding the arctic -- called the "Arctic Oscillation" -- is particularly tight right now. During the polar vortex, pressure changes in that band of air caused it to slow and slip down towards America, bringing with it a wave of Arctic air that led to well below zero temperatures.
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  • This time around, all of that frigidity is being kept north, causing the far more pleasant temperatures experienced around the east coast.
  • Meanwhile on the West Coast, a series of storm systems is expected to bring more rain and cover the Northwest and Rockies with snow this week.
  • Some meteorologists have warned the Arctic Oscillation could slip as winter carries on, leading to a sudden downturn in temperatures.
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US Willing to Provide Apache Helicopters and Advisers to Help Retake Ramadi, Ash Carter... - 0 views

  • The U.S. is prepared to help the Iraqis retake Ramadi by providing Apache attack helicopters and accompanying advisers, if requested by Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee today.
  • Carter noted recent progress by Iraqi forces in retaking Ramadi, including the retaking of the Anbar Operations Center on the northern bank of the Euphrates River across from Ramadi’s city center.
  • "I mention all this because it represents how we’ve adapted in the way we support our Iraqi partners. And it shows that training, advising and assisting is the right approach. We will do more of what works going forward," he added.
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  • "The United States is prepared to assist the Iraqi Army with additional unique capabilities to help them finish the job, including attack helicopters and accompanying advisers, if requested by Prime Minister Abadi," Carter said.
  • The idea of providing additional assistance with American pilots flying Apache helicopters or moving American advisers closer to the fight has been described before by Defense Department officials, but this is the first time that Carter has disclosed it as a proposal that could be requested by the Iraqi government.
  • American Apache helicopters have been in Iraq since last summer but only in a force-protection capacity, though last fall Apache helicopters assisted Iraqi ground troops fighting west of Baghdad.
  • In July, Iraqi security forces began a military operation to retake Ramadi which had been seized by ISIS earlier this year.
  • Since then, American military officials have grown frustrated by the slow pace of the Iraqi operation as Iraqi troops faced a tougher than expected ISIS defenses. About 10,000 Iraqi troops have encircled the center portion of the city where it is believed hundreds of ISIS fighters remain.
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TIME Person of the Year 2015: Angela Merkel - 0 views

  • Fairy tales are where you find them, but any number seem to begin in the dark German woods where Angela Merkel spent her childhood.
  • The girl who would grow up to be called the most powerful woman in the world came of age in a glade dappled by the northern sun and shadowed by tall pines.
  • But to a child of 3, Angela’s age when her family arrived, it was a world unto itself, and would remain so until she went to school in the adjoining town of Templin. There, she came to realize that, like the 17 million other residents of East Germany, she actually was living within the walls of a fortress.
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  • Merkel remained a captive for the first 35 years of her life, biding her time. As an adult, she lived in East Berlin, riding an elevated train beside the barricade whose 1961 construction she recalled as the first political memory of her life. When it fell in 1989, she gathered the qualities cultivated as a necessity in the East—patience, blandness, intellectual rigor and an inconspicuous but ferocious drive—and changed not only her life but the course of history.
  • The year 2015 marked the start of Merkel’s 10th year as Chancellor of a united Germany and the de facto leader of the European Union, the most prosperous joint venture on the planet. By year’s end, she had steered the enterprise through not one but two existential crises, either of which could have meant the end of the union that has kept peace on the continent for seven decades.
  • The first was thrust upon her—the slow-rolling crisis over the euro, the currency shared by 19 nations, all of which were endangered by the default of a single member, Greece. Its resolution came at the signature plodding pace that so tries the patience of Germans that they have made it a verb: Merkeling.
  • The second was a thunderclap. In late summer, Merkel’s government threw open Germany’s doors to a pressing throng of refugees and migrants; a total of 1 million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December. It was an audacious act that, in a single motion, threatened both to redeem Europe and endanger it, testing the resilience of an alliance formed to avoid repeating the kind of violence tearing asunder the Middle East by working together. That arrangement had worked well enough that it raised an existential question of its own, now being asked by the richest country in Europe: What does it mean to live well?
  • Merkel had her answer: “In many regions war and terror prevail. States disintegrate. For many years we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.” For her, the refugee decision was a galvanizing moment in a career that was until then defined by caution and avoidance of anything resembling drama. Analysts called it a jarring departure from form. But it may also have been inevitable, given how Angela Merkel feels about walls.
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Fed raises interest rates, citing ongoing U.S. recovery | Reuters - 0 views

  • Fed raises interest rates, citing ongoing U.S. recovery
  • The U.S. central bank's policy-setting committee raised the range of its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to between 0.25 percent and 0.50 percent, ending a lengthy debate about whether the economy was strong enough to withstand higher borrowing costs.
  • The Fed's policy statement noted the "considerable improvement" in the U.S. labor market, where the unemployment rate has fallen to 5 percent, and said policymakers are "reasonably confident" inflation will rise over the medium term to the Fed's 2 percent objective.
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  • "The process is likely to proceed gradually," Yellen said, a hint that further hikes will be slow in coming.
  • New economic projections from Fed policymakers were largely unchanged from September, with unemployment anticipated to fall to 4.7 percent next year and economic growth hitting 2.4 percent.
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Lessons to be learned from how Britain handled a refugee crisis in 1914 | Letters | Wor... - 0 views

  • Why did Robert Winder in his survey of refugees fleeing to Britain not include the closer parallel to today’s problem: that of Belgians coming in 1914
  • Estimates of 100,000 Belgians, mostly in family groups, and overwhelmingly coming in the three months of September to November 1914 were welcomed throughout Britain as victims of a war their government did not seek, and ours did little to avoid.
  • These families were welcomed in towns and villages by a spontaneously formed scattering of committees which raised cash, found empty houses, organised brass bands to greet them at railway stations.
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  • Leek housed more than 50 refugees in three different properties by Christmas 1914 and silk-mill workers led a fund-raising scheme which made over £2,500 by May 1916.
  • One very obvious observation is that in 1914 the government was slow and clumsy in its response to the flood of humanity. Churchill flatly rejected any idea of receiving them, and the Local Government Board had no part in distributing the families. This was done by volunteers
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Russia and Ukraine suspend direct flights between countries | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Direct flights between Ukraine and Russia were grounded on Sunday, as mistrust between the two countries boiled over into a new trade war that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.
  • I never thought it would come to this,” said 30-year-old Alexander Mikhaylin, from Moscow, after walking off the last Russian flight into Kiev’s Boryspil airport late on Saturday night.
  • Moscow also says that at least 70% are Ukrainians trying to visit Russian relatives and that it was Kiev’s main airline that was likely to be financially hurt the most by the air blockade. Travellers must now look into other less convenient, more expensive options including slow overnight train rides and flights via other countries on relatively good terms with both sides.
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  • People without the required passport must stay cooped up – often for many hours – in the grim waiting areas because they cannot legally leave the airports.
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Voters Go To Polls In Haiti - To Pick From 54 Presidential Candidates : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

  • thousands of voters in Haiti took to the polls Sunday to cast ballots for presidential and parliamentary elections.
  • This election day comes after years of delays and despite recent spates of violence during previous rounds of voting at polling sites.
  • because a whopping 54 candidates are vying to become the country's next president.
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  • "Haiti's high-stakes presidential, legislative and local elections got off to a slow start Sunday, with long lines forming outside of voting centers well before the 6 a.m. start time.
  • 'No voting two times!'
  • "The field is so crowded and confusing that there's little clarity about who might be leading; polls have been unreliable and contradictory.
  • Valeant — which makes a wide range of drugs, including the antidepressant Wellbutrin an
  • d antifungal Jublia — is one of a number of drug companies known for buying other pharmaceutical companies and then raising prices on their drugs, sometimes by huge amounts. As we reported earlier this week, the company's business practices have been under scrutiny:
  • Valeant has found itself in even deeper trouble because of a campaign by short-sellers, investors who place bets that a stock will fail.
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Obama, at Conference, Says U.S. Is Partly to Blame for Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter,”
  • “to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”
  • “No nation — large or small, wealthy or poor — is immune,” he said.
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  • “And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us.”
  • “For I believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late,”
  • “We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its most destructive effects,” he said.
  • “What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it,”
  • Mr. Obama has staked much of his legacy on ensuring success here, spending much of the past year courting the leaders of China, India and other major emitters in hopes they would finally agree to slow their rapidly rising use of coal and other carbon-intensive fuels.
  • They stopped at the site immediately after Mr. Obama landed at Orly Airport and was driven through the quiet and largely blocked-off streets of Paris.
  • Mr. Hollande arrived at the climate talks at 7:46 a.m. and was greeted by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who was accompanied by Mr. Hollande’s former partner, the minister of ecology, Ségolène Royal.
  • Citing climate change as “a huge challenge,” Mr. Xi said it was “very important for China and the United States to be firmly committed to the right direction of building a new model of major country relations,” including by “partnering with each other to help the climate conference deliver its expected targets.”
  • “As the two largest economies in the world and the two largest carbon-emitters, we have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “And so our leadership on this issue has been absolutely vital, and I appreciate President Xi’s consistent cooperation on this issue.”
  • The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of business and philanthropy leaders led by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates who have a combined total of $350 billion in private wealth, have pledged to invest in moving clean-energy technologies from laboratories to the marketplace.
  • “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow,” he wrote in a column published in The Financial Times. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder.
  • In exchange, India was demanding free technology from other countries as well as significant financial aid. India has some incentives to cooperate with broader plans to curb emissions. Some studies suggest that more Indians could be displaced as a result of rising seas than people from any other country, that cities in India are already among the world’s most polluted, and that nearly a fifth of deaths in India are caused in part by air pollution.
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Enter the Age of the Outsiders - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the 1990s, the central political institutions radiated confidence, derived from an assumed vision of the post-Cold War world. History would be a slow march toward democratic capitalism. Nations would be bound in peaceful associations like the European Union. The United States would oversee a basic international order.
  • This vision was materialistic and individualistic. Nations should pursue economic growth and a decent distribution of wealth. If you give individuals access to education and opportunity, they will pursue affluence and personal happiness. They will grow more temperate and “reasonable.”
  • Since 2000, this vision of the post-Cold War world has received blow after blow. Some of these blows were self-inflicted. Democracy, especially in the United States, has grown dysfunctional. Mass stupidity and greed led to a financial collapse and deprived capitalism of its moral swagger.
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  • the deeper problem was spiritual. Many people around the world rejected democratic capitalism’s vision of a secular life built around materialism and individual happiness. They sought more intense forms of meaning. Some of them sought meaning in the fanaticisms of sect, tribe, nation, or some stronger and more brutal ideology
  • In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate.
  • The uncertain Republican establishment cannot govern its own marginal members, while those on the edge burn with conviction. Jeb Bush looks wan but Donald Trump radiates confidence.
  • The Democratic establishment no longer determines party positions; it is pulled along by formerly marginal players like Bernie Sanders.
  • Republicans blame Obama for hesitant and halting policies, but it’s not clear the foreign policy and defense apparatus believes anymore in its own abilities to establish order, or that the American public has any confidence in U.S. effectiveness as a global actor.
  • the primary problem is mental and spiritual. Some leader has to be able to digest the lessons of the last 15 years and offer a revised charismatic and persuasive sense of America’s historic mission.
  • This mission, both nationalist and universal, would be less individualistic than the gospel of the 1990s, and more realistic about depravity and the way barbarism can spread. It would offer a goal more profound than material comfort.
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Republicans ignore the lessons of World War II - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • President Obama addressed the nation Sunday night from the Oval Office, a rare use of the sacred symbols of the presidency to reassure Americans about their security while steeling them for a long and complex struggle against the Islamic State.
  • Donald Trump answered Obama’s call for tolerance by declaring that no Muslims should be permitted to enter the United States:
  • “Repackaged half measures . . . Tone deaf . . . sales pitch for the status quo . . . President Obama is riding the bench at T-ball today.
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  • But the only thing this reflexive complaining does is divide the country further and make a coherent response to Islamic State more difficult.
  • There, I met Dale “Red” Robinson, a Pearl Harbor survivor and a staff sergeant in the infantry who was later part of the Normandy landing. He recalled the national unity of that war
  • “Nothing like this, these days. It’s sad, kind of sad, my friend.”
  • Robinson said he feels “sorry for all of the soldiers” serving today, let down by their political leaders.
  • That’s what Monday afternoon’s ceremony was about. A sailor rang a bell at 1:57 p.m. Eastern time, the moment 74 years earlier when Japanese planes struck
  • ater, while the band played “America the Beautiful,” the veterans, some wheeled, some walking with support, made a slow procession around the memorial’s pool to place wreaths
  • We live all of us today with the prosperity and the security built on the shoulders of these heroes,”
  • That’s our challenge — and we’re failing.
  • “The difference is the uncertainty of today, and it’s a big difference,”
  • “I thought they were more loyal, more concerned about the nation than their position,” he said.
  • Mays complained about the sharp partisan divisions in Congress. “How can we bring unity when you have that?”
  • Now, our representatives can’t even manage to come up with a resolution authorizing the use of military force against the Islamic State — and they’ve been at it for a year.
  • “just a half-hearted attempt to defend and distract from a failing policy.” Ryan said we are “one step behind our enemy.”
  • and the constant sniping at each other does nothing to defeat the Islamic State. As those old soldiers on the Mall taught us, victory comes from unity.
  •  
    Dana Milbank
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Marx Rises Again - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The taproot of agitation in 21st-century politics, this trend suggests, may indeed be a Marxian sense of everything solid melting into air. But what’s felt to be evaporating could turn out to be cultural identity — family and faith, sovereignty and community — much more than economic security.
  • somewhere in this pattern, perhaps, lies the beginnings of a  more ideologically complicated critique of modern capitalism — one that draws on cultural critics like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch rather than just looking to material concerns, and considers the possibility that our system’s greatest problem might not be the fact that it lets the rich claim more money than everyone else. Rather, it might be that both capitalism and the welfare state tend to weaken forms of solidarity that give meaning to life for many people, while offering nothing but money in their place.
  • Piketty himself is a social democrat who abjures the Marxist label. But as his title suggests, he is out to rehabilitate and recast one of Marx’s key ideas: that so-called “free markets,” by their nature, tend to enrich the owners of capital at the expense of people who own less of it.
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  • This idea seemed to be disproved in the 20th century, by the emergence of a prosperous, non-revolutionary working class. But Piketty argues that those developments were transitory, made possible mostly by the massive destruction of inherited capital during the long era of world war.
  • Absent another such disruption, he expects a world in which the returns to capital permanently outstrip  —  as they have recently  —  the returns to labor, and inequality rises far beyond even today’s levels
  • Combine this trend with slowing growth, and we face a future like the 19th-century past, in which vast inherited fortunes bestride the landscape while the middle class fractures, weakens, shrinks.
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Global Malaise Spurs U.S. Growth Worries - WSJ - 0 views

  • Concerns are mounting over whether the U.S. economy and financial markets can remain upright while so much of the world teeters.
  • Falling oil prices and worries about China’s economy have walloped stock markets, leading to a volatile start to the year.
  • Market volatility has heightened the stakes for Federal Reserve officials, who are expected to keep interest rates unchanged at a meeting later this month.
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  • Forecasters in The Wall Street Journal’s latest survey of economists said there is a 17% chance the U.S. will enter a recession in 2016,
  • Many investors have alternately feared the U.S. would succumb to global weakness or latched onto signs it would muddle through.
  • “I find it hard to believe that a quarter-point rate hike has created all this enormous uncertainty,” said Timothy Adams, head of the Institute of International Finance, a trade group representing financial institutions.
  • One reason economists aren’t even more worried: The U.S. relies less on trade than many of the world’s largest nations.
  • Still, the U.S. has more than 100 million people working in service industries—primarily transacting with other U.S. businesses and individuals
  • Some industries are sure to be hit harder than others if the global economy slows. Durable-goods makers
  • They forecast payroll growth falling from about 202,000 in the first three months of 2016 to 180,000 in the last three months
  • Little is known about how much emerging-market risk U.S. investors hold,” said Daniel Bachman, senior U.S. economist at Deloitte Services LP.
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Under Fire From G.O.P., Obama Defends Response to Terror Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views

  • explained that his refusal to redeploy large numbers of troops to the region was rooted in the grim assumption that the casualties and costs would rival the worst of the Iraq war.
  • realizes that he was slow to respond to public fears after terrorist attacks in Paris and California, acknowledging that his low-key approach led Americans to worry that he was not doing enough to keep the country safe.
  • defense of his approach came as Republican presidential candidates have been branding him as weak and competing in their calls for more robust action to combat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
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  • especially exasperated with Mr. Trump, who has called for a temporary ban on Muslims’ entering the United States.
  • Mr. Obama said that it was “understandable” that Americans were concerned, but that they should be reassured.
  • Mr. Obama claimed progress in pushing back the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, through a strategy of airstrikes combined with Special Operations raids and support for local forces on the ground.
  • Moreover, he added, part of the group’s strategy is to draw the United States into a broader military entanglement in the region.
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