May
20
2013
Austerity has failed in Europe, where the European Union just racked up 18 months of negative growth with no end in sight. It is failing in the United States, where this year’s deficit reductions will cut the growth rate in half.
But austerity is succeeding as politics. The German government shows no signs of taking its heavy foot off Europe’s oxygen hose, and President Obama seems determined to strike a 10-year deal with the Republicans that …
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May
20
2013
Twelve-year-old Judeline crouches at the feet of a much younger girl, lifting high a makeup kit so the little girl, Boubou, can apply a colored pencil to her brow. Boubou studies herself intently in the kit’s mirror; Judeline, hidden to her, stares at us with a look that seems both humiliated and beseeching.
Taken by the photographer Vlad Sokhin for a series called “Restavek: Child Slavery in Haiti,’’ it is one of the most haunting images …
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May
17
2013
Move over, mobile phones. There’s a new technological fix for poverty: biometric identification. Speaking at the World Bank on April 24, Nandan Nilekani, director of India’s universal identification scheme, promised that the project will be “transformational.” It “uses the most sophisticated technology … to solve the most basic of development challenges.” The massive ambition, known as Aadhaar, aims to capture fingerprints, photographs, and iris scans of 1.2 billion residents, with the assumption that a national …
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May
17
2013
TOKYO — Seismologists said Wednesday that a nuclear reactor in Tsuruga, in western Japan, stands above an active seismic fault, a finding that could lead to the first permanent shutdown of a reactor since the Fukushima crisis two years ago.
Japan’s newly installed Nuclear Regulation Authority also said Wednesday that it would issue an order that would effectively keep a separate unit, the Monju experimental fast breeder reactor, closed until its operator overhauled safety measures …
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May
17
2013
A group of researchers from the Floating Sheep project – who also mapped racist tweets surrounding President Barack Obama’s re-election – have geotagged racist and homophobic tweets in the United States and plotted them on an interactive map.
Students at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., looked at 150,000 geotagged tweets that contained slurs and were in North America between June 2012 and April 2013. The students read each individual tweet and manually coded the sentiment …
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May
17
2013
Despite recent headlines trumpeting a return of America’s real estate market to its boom-time highs, a report released today by the Alliance for a Just Society shows how little of that has trickled into communities of color. The document, entitled “Wasted Wealth,” is a sobering reminder of the gap between top-line economic cheerleading and the reality of what’s happening on the ground.
As “Wasted Wealth” lays out, close to 2.5 million families lost homes in just …
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May
17
2013
A US federal judge has refused to block Arizona’s Republican governor from denying driver’s licenses to young immigrants granted temporary legal status by the federal government.
Civil rights groups had filed a lawsuit in US district court in Phoenix in November against Governor Jan Brewer and two state transportation department officials on behalf of five Mexican immigrants who qualify for deferred deportation status under a program pushed by President Barack Obama.
The suit challenged the legality of …
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May
17
2013
Chinese environmental authorities have approved construction plans for what could become the world’s tallest dam, while acknowledging that the project would affect endangered plants and rare fish species.
The 314 metre-high dam (1,030ft) will serve the Shuangjiangkou hydropower project along the Dadu river in south-western Sichuan province, according to China’s state news agency, Xinhua. A subsidiary of Guodian Group, one of China’s five major state-owned power companies, will complete the project over a decade at an …
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May
17
2013
Chinese environmental authorities have approved construction plans for what could become the world’s tallest dam, while acknowledging that the project would affect endangered plants and rare fish species.
The 314 metre-high dam (1,030ft) will serve the Shuangjiangkou hydropower project along the Dadu river in south-western Sichuan province, according to China’s state news agency, Xinhua. A subsidiary of Guodian Group, one of China’s five major state-owned power companies, will complete the project over a decade at an …
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May
17
2013
The CIA chief has made an unexpected visit to Israel to meet senior political and military figures to discuss the deteriorating security situation in neighbouring Syria.
John Brennan, who took up his post two months ago, met the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, military chief of staff, Benny Gantz, and Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, according to reports in Israel media.
The unannounced meetings followed two Israeli air strikes on weapons stores near Damascus …
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