In a striking concession aimed at defusing Ukraine’s civil uprising and preserving his own grip on power, President Viktor F. Yanukovych on Saturday offered to install opposition leaders in top posts in a reshaped government, but they swiftly rebuffed the offer to the delight of thousands of protesters on the street craving a fuller victory in the days ahead.
Philippines and Rebels Agree on Peace Accord to End Insurgency →
The agreement will create an autonomous Muslim-dominated region in the restive south of the predominantly Christian country, handing much of the responsibility for security there to local authorities as well as a large share of revenues from the region’s wealth of natural resources. The militants have agreed to disarm, with many expected to join Philippine security forces.
Islamist Party to Boycott Algerian Election →
Algeria’s largest Islamist political party announced it will boycott April’s presidential election, citing fears of fraud.
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The party’s decision represents a break from its history of always participating in elections. On Friday, the liberal Rally for Culture and Democracy party announced its own election boycott for similar reasons.
The Franchising of Al Qaeda →
BEIRUT, Lebanon — THE letter bore the corporate tone of a C.E.O. resolving a turf dispute between two middle managers. In formal prose and numbered lists, Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of Al Qaeda, directed one of the group’s affiliates in Syria to withdraw to Iraq and leave operations in Syria to someone else.
The response was unequivocal. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, declared that his fighters would remain in Syria “as long as we have a vein that pumps and an eye that blinks.”
It was the first time in the history of the world’s most notorious terrorist organization that one of the affiliates had publicly broken with the international leadership, and the news sent shock waves through the online forums where jihadists meet. In no uncertain terms, ISIS had gone rogue.
Central African Republic: The Third Government in Thirteen Months Gets Under Way →
In 2013, CAR collapsed: the wages of civil servants were paid by foreign donors (notably the government of Congo Brazzaville); security disappeared, and efforts to reinstate it could only be conducted by international forces; there is no government in place and all state services have dissolved. The European Union’s decision yesterday (20 January) to send troops – pending a UN Security Council resolution expected for later this week – indicates that international involvement will only be deepening.
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...On 20 January, after two rounds of balloting, a majority of the transitional council elected Bangui Mayor Catherine Samba-Panza the new president.
Al Qaeda’s Next Comeback Could Be Afghanistan And Pakistan →
Al-Qaeda has staged a remarkable comeback in Iraq in the last year. Former National Security Advisor Jim Jones has called it “al-Qaeda’s renaissance.” This year, most if not all American forces and those of our allies in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) will finally come home from Afghanistan. Will al-Qaeda have another renaissance in South Asia?
Income Inequality as a Security Issue →
Interesting way of framing inequality. Obviously different levels of inequality may have different effects, but even in some place as relatively affluent and equal as the UK, "...inequality pulls production away from value creation to protecting and securing the wealthy's assets: one in five of the British workforce, for example, works as 'guard labour' -- in security, policing, law, surveillance and forms of IT that control and monitor. The higher inequality, the greater the proportion of a workforce deployed as guard workers, who generate little value and lower overall productivity."
*Some* variance in economic outcomes is useful. Maximizing social and economic outcomes, together, is tricky, but we should focus on doing *both*.
“Marriage promotion” is a destructive cargo cult →
A cargo cult is a particularly colorful way of mistaking cause for effect. Airplanes do not actually come to remote Pacific Islands because of rituals performed by soldiers at airports. But absent other information, to someone with no knowledge of the larger world, it might well look that way. So when the soldiers leave and the airplanes full of valuable stuff no longer come, it’s forgivable in its way that some islanders populated the abandoned tarmacs with wooden facsimile airplanes and tried to reenact the odd dances that used to precede the arrival of wonderful machines. It is forgivable, but it didn’t work. The actual causes of cargo service to remote Pacific Islands lay in hustle of industries vast oceans away and in the logistics of a bloody war, all of which were invisible to local spectators. Soldiers’ dances on the tarmac were an effect of the same causes, not an independent source of action...
The case for marriage promotion begins with some perfectly real correlations. Across a variety of measures — household income, self-reported life satisfaction, childrearing outcomes — married couples seem to do better than pairs of singles (and much better than single parents), particularly in populations towards the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. So it is natural to imagine that, if somehow poor people could be persuaded to marry more, they too would enjoy those improvements in household income, life satisfaction, and childrearing. Let them eat wedding cake!
But neither wedding cake nor the marriages they celebrate cause observed “marriage premia” any more than dances on tarmacs caused airplanes to land on Melanesian islands. In fact, for the most part, the evidence we have suggests that marriage is an effect of other things that facilitate good social outcomes rather than a cause on its own.