The boats, said to be carrying about 100 passengers, were evacuating people ahead of powerful Cyclone Mahasen.

The vessels sank off Pauktaw township in Rakhine state late on Monday. More than 40 survivors have been found and eight bodies recovered.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims are living in temporary camps in Rakhine after violence last year.

The UN had called for an urgent evacuation ahead of the storm, warning that many areas where displaced people are now living are …

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MONSON, Calif. — Laura Garcia was halfway through the breakfast dishes when the spigot went dry. The small white tank beneath the sink that purified her undrinkable water had run out. Still, as annoying as that was, it was an improvement over the days before Ms. Garcia got her water filter, when she had to do her dishes using water from five-gallon containers she bought at a local store.

Ms. Garcia lives in Monson, Calif. …

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DETROIT — An emergency manager assigned to lead this city back from the brink of financial ruin has taken his first detailed look at Detroit’s woes, and the picture of debt and disarray he paints may be bleaker even than earlier grim portrayals.

In a report to be presented to Michigan’s treasurer on Monday, Kevyn D. Orr, the emergency manager appointed in March to take over operations here, described long-term obligations of at least $15 …

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Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they’ve been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success.

But a new development makes the situation appear to be far worse. In a stunning announcement, the National Research Council—the Canadian scientific research and development agency—has now said that they will only perform research …

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a point of emphasizing during the Bush v. Gore arguments in December 2000 that there is no federal constitutional guarantee of a right to vote for president. Scalia was right. Indeed, as the reform group FairVote reminds us: “Because there is no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, individual states set their own electoral policies and procedures. This leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory policies regarding ballot design, …

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Years from now, when the United States is a shell of its former self and we are ruled by hedonist overlords, schoolchildren will look back on April 29, 2013 as the fateful day when President Obama called Jason Collins after he became the first openly gay NBA player, thus undermining American culture forever.

This is the type of future envisioned by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on the House floor last week. In a freewheeling discussion of …

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This is a tough moment in the fight against poverty.

Sequester is the latest chapter in a time-honored tradition of kicking the poor when they are down. A do-nothing Congress certainly isn’t going to do something about poverty without pressure from the grassroots. And it seems that the only way most of the mainstream media will pay attention to the more than 1 out of 3 Americans living below twice the poverty line — on less …

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Part 1: A Glaring Lapse in Climate and Energy Coverage

One of my morning rituals is half-listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” while I’m getting ready for work. But on January 3, when a story came on about the fate of the wind industry’s production tax credit, I snapped to attention. It was good news. Congress’s eleventh hour “fiscal cliff” agreement had left the tax credit in place for at least one more year.

The NPR story featured …

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Global Witness, a group that campaigns on resource issues, has accused Vietnamese rubber firms bankrolled by an arm of the World Bank and Germany’s Deutsche Bank of driving a land-grabbing crisis in Southeast Asia.

Indigenous ethnic minorities are bearing the brunt of the seizures, which have affected tens of thousands of villagers and led to the clearance of swathes of protected forests, according to the group.

Vietnam, the world’s third-largest rubber producer, is keen to tap surging …

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The civil war in Syria has been devastating, generating a death toll fast approaching 100,000, while uprooting millions of civilians from their homes.

But as the US and Russia signed an unprecedented accord on Wednesday in search of a political solution to an increasingly intractable conflict, its underlying causes in a fatal convergence of energy, climate and economic factors remain little understood.

The UN high commissioner for human rights has offered a conservative under-estimate of the death …

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