What makes this wave of regret — not even taking into account the unmitigated hostility from the political right — so strange is that Obamacare is actually working. Indeed, evidence continues to mount that the law is working extremely, even shockingly, well.
Overall, this is a very positive report, but it still must be understood in the context of the hole created by the downturn. It would take two and half years at this growth rate to restore demographically adjusted pre-recession levels of the employment to population ratio.
It's good to know our relation to the rest of the animal world, especially the part of it we intentionally raise to slaughter for our consumption.
Perdue’s methods for raising chickens are typical of industrial agriculture. So the conundrum is this. Big Ag has been stunningly successful in producing cheap food — the price of chicken has fallen by three-quarters in real terms since 1930. Yet there are huge external costs, such as antibiotic resistance and water pollution, as well as a routine cruelty that we tolerate only because it is mostly hidden.
Torture a single chicken and you risk arrest. Abuse hundreds of thousands of chickens for their entire lives? That’s agribusiness.
When the militants of Islamic State swept across Iraq last June, they numbered no more than 12,000 and they faced a U.S.-trained, U.S.-equipped Iraqi army that boasted some 200,000 troops.And yet it was the Iraqi army that collapsed.
What happened? It was more than simply incompetence among Iraqi generals and ethnic tensions among the ranks. The hidden factor that gave Islamic State its victory was Iraq's rampant corruption. The Baghdad government's army had 200,000 troops on paper, but many were “ghost soldiers,” fictional troops whose wages went into their officers' pockets. The unfortunate troops who showed up often lacked equipment and ammunition because their officers had sold it on the black market.
We must figure out some way to balance freedom of speech with freedom from psychological abuse:
Many of the previously unreported incident reports — released Wednesday by the FAA in response to long-standing public-records requests from The Washington Post and other news organizations — occurred near New York and Washington.
The FAA data indicates that drones are posing a much greater hazard to air traffic than previously recognized. Until Wednesday, the FAA had publicly disclosed only one other near-collision between a drone and a passenger aircraft: a March 22 incident involving a US Airways regional airliner near Tallahassee, Fla.
Last week, in a surprising twist to the ongoing debate over the potential switch to a national PR system, Myanmar’s Upper House approved the change to a nationwide PR system. The implication of this vote is that Myanmar will have two different voting systems in the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament during the 2015 elections, the first general elections since the unfair and unfree election of 2010, which led to the development of the new democracy in Myanmar. Elections under a combined electoral system have taken place in other democracies such as Japan, Germany, and Mexico, but certainly not in such a nascent democracy as Myanmar.
A national switch from a majoritarian FPTP system to a PR system has been a hot topic for debate in Myanmar for the last few months, and would greatly influence the future of electoral politics in Myanmar, and especially the political participation of underrepresented ethnic minorities within the country. In the current FPTP system, whoever wins the majority of votes for a constituency wins the seat to represent the entire constituency in parliament. In a PR system, the number of parliament seats won by each party is proportionate to the number of votes each party receives. - See more at: http://www.indopacificreview.com/political-twist-combined-electoral-system-myanmar/#sthash.kI3plDyr.fvE8zYOW.dpuf
With all the despairing talk today of the impossibility of a two-state solution and the inevitability of protracted civil war in a single state, it is easy to forget how different the conflict looked two intifadas ago. Before the First Intifada, no one of any importance spoke of Palestinian statehood, rather than autonomy. Today statehood is publicly accepted, even if only rhetorically, not just by the US and the UN but by a long-serving Israeli prime minister from the hawkish Likud. Before the First Intifada, Israel and the US refused to engage with the PLO. Dividing Jerusalem was unthinkable, as was the idea of partition along the pre-1967 borders, with equal swaps. Today these are the positions of most of the international community and growing numbers in Israel. Many Israelis, however, see no reason for their country to take substantial risks and pay a large cost to change an imperfect but long-lasting and manageable status quo. It would be a great tragedy if nothing less than a third uprising, at a terrible price, could convince them otherwise.