History Readings

t claims bugs were introduced to the French Embassy in Washington (under a code name "Wabash") and to the computers of the French delegation at the UN, codenamed "Blackfoot".

The US was worried the French were drifting to the Brazilian side - who were opposed to implementing sanctions - when in truth they were always aligned to the US position, says our correspondent.

"It helped me know... the truth, and reveal other [countries'] positions on sanctions, allowing us to keep one step ahead in the negotiations."

I said again to John Kerry what Francois Hollande told Barack Obama, that this kind of spying conducted on a large scale by the Americans on its allies is something that is unacceptable."

The information he leaked led to claims of systematic spying by the NSA and CIA on a global scale. Targets included rivals like China and Russia, as well as allies like the EU and Brazil.

The NSA was also forced to admit it had captured email and phone data from millions of Americans.

In the aftermath of drone strikes, things get worse. Many civilians hide at home, fearing masked vigilantes with the Ittehad-e-Mujahedeen Khorasan, a militant enforcement unit that hunts for American spies.

For some residents, the only option is to leave.

Civilian deaths from drone strikes will haunt him, and others in the American chain of command, for “as long as we live,” he said.

Last October, it says, American missiles killed a 68-year-old woman named Mamana Bibi as she picked vegetables in a field close to her grandchildren. In July 2012, 18 laborers, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed near the Afghan border.

“The drones are like the angels of death,” said Nazeer Gul, a shopkeeper in Miram Shah. “Only they know when and where they will strike.”

Their claims of distress are now being backed by a new Amnesty International investigation that found, among other points, that at least 19 civilians in the surrounding area of North Waziristan had been killed in just two of the drone attacks since January 2012

And on Friday, the drone debate is scheduled to spill onto the floor of the United Nations, whose officials have recently published reports that attacked America’s lack of transparency over drones.

Even when the missiles do not strike, buzzing drones hover day and night, scanning the alleys and markets with roving high-resolution cameras.

In theory, the Pakistani security forces should be in charge.

Unusually for the overall American drone campaign, the strikes in the area mostly occur in densely populated neighborhoods. The drones have hit a bakery, a disused girls’ school and a money changers’ market, residents say.

Some Caribbean nations have already begun assessing the lasting damage they suffered, ranging from stunted educational and economic opportunities to dietary and health problems, Mr. Day said.

Earlier this month the US government partially shut down operations for 16 days, putting hundreds of thousands of federal employees on leave.

“You can hear the person you are talking to, but not see him

The Chinese government describes air with an AQI between 301 and 500 as “heavily polluted” and urges people to refrain from exercising outdoors; the elderly and other vulnerable populations are supposed to stay indoors entirely

between 301 and 500 as “hazardous.”

Beijing declared an “airpocalpyse” last January when the U.S. Embassy reported an AQI equivalent of 755, with a PM2.5 concentration of 866 milligrams per cubic meter.

The pollution in Harbin has caused a 30 percent surge in hospital admissions

In the meantime, residents were left comparing the air to something out of a horror film

“This ruling should serve as a notice to Spain to correct continuing aberrations of justice in the name of fighting terrorism, such as incommunicado detention and limited rights of defense for terrorism suspects,”

Still, Madrid has refused to consider ETA’s cease-fire a sufficient act of surrender, saying that it would continue to hunt down ETA members, in cooperation with the French and other European security forces, until the group handed over all its weapons.

The country will also be gradually closing its mostly aging collection of nuclear plants, which now produce 19 percent of Britain’s power.

The overall costs of building the plants is estimated at £16 billion, or $26 billion, in 2012 terms.

Consumers will also wait a long time to receive electricity from the new nuclear plants,

In the 1930s, the private economy stumbled and private financial arrangements failed in many ways – but, on the whole, government was perceived as stepping in to help.

The politician whose career better matches the long march of the American right is Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich, elected to Congress in 1978, astutely saw the possibility of building a coalition that would turn the South into a Republican stronghold. Mr. Gingrich voted against the fiscal compromises between George H.W. Bush and the Democrats and, as speaker of the House, crafted the confrontations that led to the government shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996.

According to the latest C.B.O. numbers, debt relative to gross domestic product remains below 120 percent through the 2030s. I regard this as manageable, with the major wild cards being the extent of additional foreign war follies or big financial system blowups.

This backlash against government has been a long time coming, but – perhaps in the final irony – America’s fiscal affairs were in relatively good shape until quite recently.

these developments have been backed by people with deep pockets and a great deal of patience.

The economic recovery, although weak, has improved the nation’s fiscal picture – as have the large spending cuts and more modest revenue increases in the last few years

it only indicated what was to come – increasing willingness to further undermine the government and to question the validity of its debts. Every time the United States comes to a line, the most extreme voices in the Republican Party want to go even further – this time calling for an actual default on government obligations in some form as a potentially good thing.

I recommend that the revenue base be strengthened as the economy recovers further over the coming decade, while keeping a lid on spending increases. There is no case for precipitous fiscal adjustment, let alone a political confrontation that generates great uncertainty and therefore deters both investment and the purchase of consumer durables (including housing).

But it’s too late for good short-term fiscal news or to insist that the problem the country faces over coming decades is the rising cost of health care (not the government-paid part of health care, but all health care costs). Too many people are convinced strongly that they know better than what is in the numbers.

the decline in legitimacy of the United States government is real and lasting; it cannot regain the prestige it had in the 1940s and 1950s. Reinforcing and accelerating this trend is perhaps the greatest damage caused by the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the “rescue” measures that ensued.

Sooner or later, the American public may elect a group of politicians determined to end the belief that the federal government can be trusted. Their initial steps in that direction will strengthen their showing in opinion polls – and they will be encouraged to go further. At that time, the United States will default on its debts and the world’s financial and fiscal systems will be plunged into chaos.

the Skull 5 individual “provides the first evidence that early Homo comprised adult individuals with small brains but body mass, stature and limb proportions reaching the lower range limit of modern variation.”

Skeletal bones associated with the five Dmanisi skulls show that these hominids were short in stature, but that their limbs enabled them to walk long distances as fully upright bipeds. The shape of the small braincase distinguished them from the more primitive Australopithecus genus, which preceded Homo and lived for many centuries with Homo in Africa.

because reality is by its very nature complex, too much simplification leads to an unsophisticated view of the world. One of the strong suits of the best intellectuals and geopoliticians is their tendency to reward complex thinking and their attendant ability to draw fine distinctions.

Fine distinctions should be what geopolitics and political science are about. It means that we recognize a world in which, just as there are bad democrats, there are good dictators.

Not only is the world of international affairs one of many indeterminate shades, but it is also one in which, sometimes, it is impossible to know just where to locate someone on that spectrum. The question of whether ends justify means should not only be answered by metaphysical doctrine, but also by empirical observation -- sometimes ends do justify means, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the means are unconnected to the ends, and are therefore to be condemned, as is the case with Chile.

The shutdown has already led to the biggest plunge in consumer confidence since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. And it has had ripple effects on many industries that rely on the federal government in one way or another. Import inspections, export financing and oil and gas permitting have come to a halt, in some cases.

Residential real estate, which has been one of the brightest points of the recovery, appears to be taking a hit.

The impasse over the debt ceiling has already raised the United States’ short-term borrowing costs, with investors demanding triple the interest payments they demanded just a few weeks ago,

The World Bank has estimated that a similar standoff in 2011 raised borrowing costs in poor countries by about 0.75 percentage point, and that those costs remained elevated for months.

“Regardless of whether we get a deal, there will be efforts to diversify away from the United States in terms of assets.”

continuing fiscal gridlock in Washington would take a toll on growth not just in the short term but in the long term as well. In the absence of a broad deal that addresses entitlement spending as well as the budget deficit, “you will have perpetual uncertainty,” he said. “And that will undermine the U.S. role in the world much more than a default.”

it should be easy to see that Obama’s America is not retreating and will not retreat from the world

The “rebalancing” to Asia has manifested itself in numerous military and nonmilitary measures that have certainly gotten China’s attention, among its other effects.

Obama’s record shows that he recognizes America’s capacity to project military power around the world is its unique strength and an underpinning to the global order.

He has therefore used American military forces repeatedly in such diverse locales as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Uganda, among others

But Obama also sees an America that is weary of war, fiscally constrained and in the view of many sometimes reckless in its use of force. Whatever one’s views on the latter point, there is little doubt in the eyes of most Americans that the wars of the past dozen years have been very difficult and costly — and that they are not to be repeated.

This reflects a sense that American power is not enhanced by unnecessary wars that waste resources and erode American will. He also talks about ending the major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even while continuing to prosecute military operations on several fronts.

Obama’s priorities are clear: maintaining great-power peace, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and combating Al Qaeda and related groups — on these matters, very little retrenchment is visible in U.S. policy.

has Congress, especially in its willingness to tolerate sequestration and even a government shutdown and a debt default — blunders that could pose far greater threats to American internationalism than anything emanating from the White House.

starting around the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, economic globalization accelerated and the gap between nations began to shrink. The period from 1988 to 2008 “might have witnessed the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial Revolution,”

While the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed — namely, between Asia and the advanced economies of the West — huge gaps remain. Average global incomes, by country, have moved closer together over the last several decades, particularly on the strength of the growth of China and India. But overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. (The Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality, improved by just 1.4 points from 2002 to 2008.)

So while nations in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as a whole, might be catching up with the West, the poor everywhere are left behind, even in places like China where they’ve benefited somewhat from rising living standards.

income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. Within the last decade, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

With a few exceptions — France, Japan, Spain — the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind.

Over these same years, countries like Chile, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and Hungary managed to reduce (in some cases very high) income inequality significantly, suggesting that inequality is a product of political and not merely macroeconomic forces.

Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. Recently released census figures show that median income in America hasn’t budged in almost a quarter-century. The typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation); men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.

Excessive financialization — which helps explain Britain’s dubious status as the second-most-unequal country, after the United States, among the world’s most advanced economies — also helps explain the soaring inequality

Mobile capital has demanded that workers make wage concessions and governments make tax concessions. The result is a race to the bottom

None of this is inevitable. Some countries have made the choice to create more equitable economies: South Korea, where a half-century ago just one in 10 people attained a college degree, today has one of the world’s highest university completion rates.