History Readings

Marathon talks between major powers and Iran failed on Sunday to produce a deal to freeze its nuclear program, puncturing days of feverish anticipation and underscoring how hard it will be to forge a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“A lot of concrete progress has been made, but some differences remain,” Ms. Ashton said at a news conference early Sunday.

“I think it was natural that when we started dealing with the details, there would be differences.”

he number of Afghan national security forces killed in combat shot up almost 80 percent during this summer's fighting season, compared with the same time in 2012, as they take the lead in the fight across the country.

Pentagon report says that U.S. and coalition deaths, meanwhile, dropped by almost 60 percent during the same six-month period.

but U.S. military leaders have said that the number of Afghans killed each week had spiked to more than 100 earlier this year.

Taken at face value, the result implies that eventually (in 10^100 years or so) an unlucky quantum fluctuation will produce a bubble of a different vacuum, which will then expand at the speed of light, destroying everything.”

The idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it. Naturally, we would have no warning. Just blink and it’s over.

. You might think that finding the Higgs boson, after 50 years and $10 billion or so, would bring clarity to physics and to the cosmos. But just the opposite is true: they may have found the Higgs boson, but they don’t understand it.

In a surprise choice that bodes poorly for proposed peace talks, the Pakistani Taliban on Thursday appointed as its new leader the hard-line commander responsible for last year’s attack on Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Pakistani education activist.

Mullah Fazlullah, the head of a militant faction in the northwestern Swat Valley,

Mr. Fazlullah is best known for ordering public beatings, executions and beheadings, and delivering thunderous radio broadcasts — in which he denounced polio vaccinations, among other topics

many refugees from the country's civil war are also grappling with the invisible but severe effects of psychological stress and trauma.

They have no money left and Mohammed, hampered by a leg injury, is unable to find work. A former fighter with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), he left the conflict to join his wife. He wants his family to return to Syria, but Maryam refuses because their home is now destroyed.

Zeina Hassan, a counsellor with the International Medical Corps, says severe depression and anxiety are common among the refugees. "They make comparisons between how they were living and how they are now. There is a lot of hopelessness, which is very extreme. There is this feeling there is no return after the destruction they've seen."

some Harbin neighborhoods “experienced concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) as high as 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter. For comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality standards say PM2.5 should remain below 35 micrograms per cubic meter.” This means that Harbin would need a 97 percent reduction in pollution in order to reach the maximum level our government would recommend.

a powerful question: “What if China meets every criteria of economic success except one: You can’t live there.”

Indeed, what good is it having all those sparkling new buildings if you’re trapped inside them? What good is it if China’s rapid growth has enabled four million people in Beijing to own cars, but the traffic never moves?

The World Health Organization has confirmed an outbreak of polio in Syria, the country’s first since 1999

Though health groups still say polio could be eradicated entirely by 2018, recent outbreaks in Pakistan and Somalia are making this more likely. (The threats of violence against health workers in Pakistan aren’t helping matters.)

Polio also isn’t the only disease being kept alive by political violence. Guinea worm, a painful parasite once common in Africa and Asia, was thought to be on the verge of eradication, but health workers warned earlier this year that violence in Mali could hamper efforts to eliminate it entirely.

Hamas officials said they had introduced the new textbooks, and doubled the time devoted to the national education course to two sessions per week,

“We need to make sure generations stick to the national rights,”

In April, Hamas approved a law requiring gender-segregated schools from age 9, and making criminal any contact between educational institutions and Israel.

When a class of Palestinian ninth graders in Gaza recently discussed the deadly 1929 riots over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, it was guided by a new textbook, introduced this fall by the Islamist Hamas movement.

For the first time since taking control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, the Hamas movement is deviating from the approved Palestinian Authority curriculum, using the new texts as part of a broader push to infuse the next generation with its militant ideology.

Textbooks have long been a point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which dueling historical narratives and cultural clashes underpin a territorial fight. And they are central examples of what Israeli leaders call Palestinian “incitement” against Jews, held up as an obstacle to peace talks newly resumed under American pressure.

Some 9.3 million people in Syria - or about 40% of the population - now need outside assistance, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos has said.

This figure has risen by 2.5m from the 6.8m total the UN gave in September.

More than half of those in need are people living in Syria displaced by conflict, a total of 6.5m, up from 4.25m internally displaced people in June.

came the crisis, and flows of capital to Europe’s periphery collapsed. The debtor nations were forced — in part at Germany’s insistence — into harsh austerity, which eliminated their trade deficits. But something went wrong. The narrowing of trade imbalances should have been symmetric, with Germany’s surpluses shrinking along with the debtors’ deficits. Instead, however, Germany failed to make any adjustment at all; deficits in Spain, Greece and elsewhere shrank, but Germany’s surplus didn’t.

This was a very bad thing for Europe, because Germany’s failure to adjust magnified the cost of austerity. Take Spain, the biggest deficit country before the crisis. It was inevitable that Spain would face lean years as it learned to live within its means. It was not, however, inevitable that Spanish unemployment would be almost 27 percent, and youth unemployment almost 57 percent. And Germany’s immovability was an important contributor to Spain’s pain.

It has also been a bad thing for the rest of the world. It’s simply arithmetic: Since southern Europe has been forced to end its deficits while Germany hasn’t reduced its surplus, Europe as a whole is running large trade surpluses, helping to keep the world economy depressed.

Using extensive access to Beijing archives on Cixi that have not been available to biographers outside China, Ms. Chang presents her subject as neither the cruel despot nor the easily manipulated ruler that the Communist Party and other critics have long portrayed. Her book, “Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China,” presents Cixi as a powerful, strong-willed woman responsible for most of the modernizing programs undertaken during her rule, only to be thwarted on many occasions by men who were sometimes in the pay of foreign powers.

Ms. Chang gives Cixi credit for building China’s first rail artery from Beijing to Wuhan, although she initially opposed it, as well as for strenuously resisting Japan and other foreign powers, protecting freedom of the press and even seeking in her last days to give millions of Chinese men the right to vote.

Ms. Chang defended her work as fair while acknowledging that she “did develop sympathy for her.” “I documented every single one of Cixi’s killings, some of which have not even been put out by the official propaganda,” she said. “What I did was to provide the context and why Cixi did it.”

his position is not conservative because, while conserving our constitutional design is certainly a coherent part of a conservative approach to governing, McCarthy isn't proposing to conserve something that still exists—rather, he is proposing that we take an approach to social-welfare policy that hasn't been tried since the early 1930s and apply it to the modern economy: a radical change, whatever one thinks of it.

The radicalism and unpredictability of what might happen next doesn't necessarily make him wrong. But conservative is a weird word for it. Subject to the vagaries of his interpretations, he is a constitutional fundamentalist.