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Ellie McGinnis

Talks With Iran Fail to Produce a Nuclear Agreement - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.”
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  • not only divisions between Iran and the major powers that prevented a deal, but fissures within the negotiating group.
  • France objected strenuously that the proposed deal would do too little to curb Iran’s uranium enrichment or to stop the development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium.
  • “What I was looking for was the political determination, willingness and good faith in order to end this,” he said. “I think we’re all on the same wavelength, and that’s important.”
  • Iranian officials had promoted the possibility of a deal for days, generating an expectant atmosphere that swelled when Secretary of State John Kerry cut short a tour of the Middle East on Friday to join the talks. He was joined by the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Russia and a vice foreign minister from China.
  • “It takes time to build confidence between countries that have really been at odds with each other for a long time now.”
  • The proposal under consideration in Geneva was to have been the first stage of a multipart agreement. It called for Iran to freeze its nuclear program for up to six months to allow negotiations on a long-term agreement without the worry that Iran was racing ahead to build a bomb. In exchange, the West was to have provided some easing of the international sanctions that have battered Iran’s economy.
  • .Despite the diplomats’ insistence on progress, the failure to clinch an agreement raised questions about the future of the nuclear talks, given the fierce criticism that the mere prospect of a deal whipped up in Israel and among Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.
julia rhodes

AP - Pentagon report shows spike in Afghan troop deaths - 0 views

  • 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.
Javier E

Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • they don’t understand why it weighs what it does — it is about 125 times as massive as the protons that were collided to make it, not gazillions of times as heavy, as standard quantum mechanical calculations would suggest.
  • For years the preferred solution to this conundrum has been a theory called supersymmetry, which, among other things, predicted the existence of a whole new spectrum of particles, superpartners of the ones we already know, that would cancel out the quantum calculations and keep the Higgs light. One of these particles might also be the dark matter that makes up a quarter of the universe by weight.
  • experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have already eliminated the simplest versions of supersymmetry.
  • The most talked-about alternative to supersymmetry is the idea of the multiverse, an almost infinite ensemble of universes in which the value of the Higgs — as well as many other crucial parameters — is random. We just happen to live in the one in which the conditions and parameters are fit for us. This is a notion that flows naturally from string theory and modern theories of the Big Bang, but accepting multiple universes means giving up the Einsteinian dream of a single explanation for the cosmos, a painful concession.
  • “Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”
Ellie McGinnis

Peace Talks May Be Casualty as Pakistani Taliban Pick Hard-Liner as Leader - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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
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  • But the news was likely to be received with less enthusiasm by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government
  • Furious government officials criticized the United States’ killing of the previous Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a drone strike last Friday, claiming that the Mr. Mehsud had been on the verge of starting peace talks that could end seven years of bloodshed in Pakistan’s major cities.
  • He set up a pirate radio station that broadcast jihadist propaganda across the valley, at one point urging women not to sleep with their husbands if they refused to join his jihad.
  • Mr. Sharif “bargained and sold out Hakimullah to the Americans,” he said.
  • For the Pakistani military, Mr. Fazlullah is a cherished enemy, too. He escaped the army’s toughest anti-Taliban offensive of recent years in 2009 when, as thousands of soldiers swept through Swat, following the collapse of a peace deal, he slipped through the dragnet and fled across the border into Afghanistan.
  • “This changes the entire equation,” said one senior government official in Peshawar.
  • Shahidullah Shahid, said there would be “no more talks as Mullah Fazlullah is already against negotiations.”
  • armed fighters displaced the civil government, instituting a authoritarian and often cruel rule that mandated public floggings, executions and the closure of girls’ schools.
  • But those compromises quickly foundered — there was public outrage across Pakistan over a video that showed Taliban fighters flogging a teenage girl in Swat — and by summer 2009, the army had moved in.
  • Mr. Khan has vowed to block NATO military supply lines into Afghanistan after Nov. 20 if the United States does not halt drone attacks in the tribal belt.
  • But Mr. Khan’s aggressive anti-American stance could be complicated by a fresh wave of Taliban violence — particularly if it is engineered by a Taliban leader who hails from the province that Mr. Khan controls.
  • The Pakistani Taliban is related to, but distinct from, the Afghan Taliban. The group has largely attacked targets inside Pakistan but has also deployed suicide bombers into Afghanistan and claimed responsibility for an attempted bombing of Times Square in May 2010. As a result, its leadership has been repeatedly targeted by American drones.
julia rhodes

Syrian refugees struggle with trauma - Features - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • 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."
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  • Meanwhile, daily life in the makeshift, overcrowded shelters often feels like living in a pressure cooker
  • "With a daily reminder of what effect the political struggle next door is having on you, while you see your own livelihood decline and physical mental well-being challenged… this underlines a strong need for support."
  •  "Most symptoms they have are aggression, sleeping problems and speech problems like stuttering - not being able to say words correctly", Yosef said. "I saw many children faint in front of me because they don't eat properly."
  • Anger is mounting among many refugees. Unable to find work, men often feel inadequate, and women are sometimes forced to beg or exchange sex for services to provide for their families. Children become especially vulnerable as targets of verbal and physical abuse
  • "I am very angry all the time, and people are starting to complain about me", Selma said. "I don't take anything lightly. The other day I couldn't deal with anyone - so I went to a gravesite and just talked to the dead."
Javier E

Too Big to Breathe? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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?
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  • China is a one-party system with multiple, competing interests inside. More enlightened party leaders in Beijing may declare, “We have to clean this up,” but they still have to get the local bosses — whose bonuses depend largely on generating economic growth
  • — “to assert environmental interests at least as strongly as economic interests,” said Harvey. That requires assigning real value, and giving real institutional power and weight, to those in the system who believe that it is just as important to protect the commons — air, water, land, food safety — as it is to grow the commons, that it is just as important to have decent ingredients in the pie as it is to grow the pie.
  • We can thank our lucky stars that foresighted Americans, starting around 1970, built the institutions to protect our air and water. Next time you hear someone beat up on the E.P.A., send them to Harbin for a week.
  • China needs to carve our own unique way to a thriving life and stable community — a path that is a sustainable path. If we don’t do this soon, we will end up with a China Nightmare. And there’s no escaping that a China Nightmare is a global nightmare.”
julia rhodes

Polio outbreak in Syria: War is keeping the world from eradicating polio. - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • In both cases, it’s been demonstrated that science has the means to wipe these diseases out, if only politics didn’t keep getting in the way
grayton downing

To Shape Young Palestinians, Hamas Creates Its Own Textbooks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • “to study the history of Palestine instead of the history of Egypt or Jordan,” and that the books present the “Palestine I want to learn about — I don’t recognize that Palestine is only Gaza and West Bank.”
  • “The book has nothing about Oslo. It’s our right to know about Oslo because it’s a fact in our life.”
  • The new books, written by a Hamas committee, feature cover pictures of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a West Bank city, both sites of continuing clashes between Muslim and Jewish worshipers.
  • It’s a lesson of nationalism and belonging.”
grayton downing

To Shape Young Palestinians, Hamas Creates Its Own Textbooks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • What Gaza teenagers are reading in their 50-page hardcover texts this fall includes references to the Jewish Torah and Talmud as “fabricated,” and a description of Zionism as a racist movement whose goals include driving Arabs out of all of the area between the Nile in Africa and the Euphrates in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
  • “Palestinians have developed a system of deception — to English-speaking people they sell one story, and to themselves they have a different story,” Mr. Kuperwasser said. “Textbooks are one of the tools with which they tell their children what is the truth.” He added, “If you want real peace, it has to be based on a real change in the culture of hatred.”
grayton downing

BBC News - UN aid chief says 40% of Syrians in need of assistance - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • It followed a resolution on eliminating Syria's chemical weapons. The UN says the number of those needing help has risen by more than 30% from 6.8 million in September. Syria has a population of 23 million.
  • The UN estimates that more than 2.8m people have fled Syria since the unrest began in March 2011 resulting in a humanitarian crisis.
  • More than 100,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the conflict.
Julia Blumberg

Roman Skulls Discovered at Liverpool Street - 0 views

  •  
    Just an interesting article about skulls from the Rome era that have been discovered in London, England recently while building a utility tunnel
Nikki Mangan

In Pakistan, Drone Strike Turns a Villain Into a Victim - 0 views

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    Since missiles fired by American drones killed Mr. Mehsud in his vehicle on Friday, Pakistan's political leaders have reacted with unusual vehemence.
Javier E

Those Depressing Germans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • German officials, as we’ve seen, respond to all of this with angry declarations that German policy has been impeccable. Sorry, but this (a) doesn’t matter and (b) isn’t true.
  • Why it doesn’t matter: Five years after the fall of Lehman, the world economy is still depressed, suffering from a persistent shortage of demand. In this environment, a country that runs a trade surplus is, to use the old phrase, beggaring its neighbors. It’s diverting spending away from their goods and services to its own, and thereby taking away jobs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s doing this maliciously or with the best of intentions, it’s doing it all the same.
  • Germany isn’t blameless. It shares a currency with its neighbors, greatly benefiting German exporters, who get to price their goods in a weak euro instead of what would surely have been a soaring Deutsche mark. Yet Germany has failed to deliver on its side of the bargain: To avoid a European depression, it needed to spend more as its neighbors were forced to spend less, and it hasn’t done that.
  • it’s not just the Germans. Germany’s trade surplus is damaging for the same reason cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits in America destroys jobs — and Republican politicians are about as receptive as German officials to anyone who tries to point out their error. In the sixth year of a global economic crisis whose essence is that there isn’t enough spending, many policy makers still don’t get it. And it looks as if they never will.
Javier E

Another Look at the Empress Dowager Cixi, This Time as the Great Modernizer - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.”
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  • Mr. Delury said that, with most of the chapters ending with strong praise of Cixi, he was concerned about whether the archival material had been objectively assessed. “As a reader, you don’t know what to trust, because everything is the best possible” interpretation of her actions, he said. “Really what we need is a post-revisionist biography that is very scholarly and very careful.”
  • A few other authors have also begun offering somewhat favorable interpretations of Cixi, notably Sterling Seagrave in his 1992 book, “Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China.” Chinese historians, too, have offered more sympathetic interpretations of Cixi and other Qing court figures who resisted more radical calls for change in the late 19th century.
Javier E

Preserving Liberty Is More Important Than Making a Fetish of the Constitution - Conor F... - 0 views

  • 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.
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