By Nate Silver, Five Thirty Eight @ nytimes.com, Dec. 18, 2012
An American child grows up in a married household in the suburbs [....] about 40 percent of such households reported having a gun in their home, according to the exit poll conducted during the 2008 presidential election [....]
[....] In 1973, about 55 percent of Republicans reported having a gun in their household against 45 percent of Democrats, according to the General Social Survey, a biennial poll of American adults.
By Dominic Evans in Beirut, Reuters, Dec. 15, 2012
Iran's army chief of staff warned NATO on Saturday that stationing Patriot anti-missile batteries on Turkey's border with Syria was setting the stage for world war.
By Kevin Johnson, USA Today, Dec. 13, 2012 (with graph)
The number of federally required background checks of prospective gun purchasers has nearly doubled in the past decade — a time when violent crime has been in long decline in many places across the USA, according to FBI records.
By Ellen Barry and Steven Erlanger, New York Times, Dec. 13/14, 2012
MOSCOW — The outlook for Syria’s embattled president darkened considerably on Thursday when his most powerful foreign ally, Russia, acknowledged that he was losing the struggle against an increasingly coordinated insurgency and for the first time said it was making contingency plans to evacuate its citizens from the country, the Kremlin’s last beachhead in the Middle East [....]
JERUSALEM — Facing indictment for breach of trust and fraud, Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, resigned his post Friday afternoon amid mounting political pressure, upending the campaign landscape five weeks before national elections [....]
By Nelson D Schwartz and Jonathan Weisman, New York Times, Dec. 11/12, 2012
A broad swath of the nation’s leading chief executives dropped its opposition to tax increases on the wealthiest Americans on Tuesday, while the White House quietly pressed Wall Street titans for their support as well.
By Ross Buettner, New York Times, Dec. 10/11, 2012
The former French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the hotel housekeeper who accused him of sexually assaulting her last year have agreed to settle her lawsuit stemming from their encounter, a judge said on Monday.
By Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 10, 2012
The U.S. State Department designated the Jabhat al-Nusra militia fighting Bashar al-Ashad's government in Syria a foreign terrorist organization today.
WASHINGTON — For more than a year, politicians have been fighting over whether to raise taxes on high-income people. They rarely mention that affluent Americans will soon be hit with new taxes adopted as part of the 2010 health care law.
By Jonathan Ansfield, New York Times, Dec. 4/5, 2012
BEIJING — “Thank you. I’m well. Don’t worry,” read the post on a Chinese social networking site. The brief comment, published in June, appeared to come from Ling Gu, the 23-year-old son of a high-powered aide to China's president, and it helped quash reports that he had been killed in a Ferrari crash after a night of partying.
It only later emerged that the message was a sham, posted by someone under Mr. Ling’s alias — almost three months after his death.
By Jared Bernstein, Guest Op-ed, New York Times, Dec. 5/6, 2012
With the budget-and-tax showdown dominating headlines, most Americans probably missed an even more ominous story: according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, America’s underlying growth rate — that is, the best the economy could do, under optimal conditions, without driving up inflation — has slowed from just under 4 percent a year in 2000 to just under 2 percent today.
WASHINGTON: The number of terrorist attacks worldwide has sky-rocketed over the past decade, with a third of all incidents taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new study published Wednesday.
Violence carried out by a “non-state actor” rose from less than a thousand incidents in 2002 to 4,564 attacks in 2011, according to the Global Terrorism Index, produced by the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace.
With increased fighting in and around Damascus in recent weeks, Syrian activists have posted a video that calls on residents of the capital to prepare for what they say is a looming collapse of President Bashar Assad's regime.
The YouTube video, called "Zero Hour, Your Final Chance," promises an imminent battle in Damascus aimed at ousting Assad. It is filled with instructions on what to do to prepare for and survive such a battle [.....]
By Jason Burke in Delhi, guardian.co.uk, Dec. 6, 2012
Hundreds of serving Indian soldiers, including senior officers, are accused of involvement in widespread human rights abuses in Kashmir in a new report to be published on Thursday.
Many have been decorated and promoted despite serious allegations against them, the authors say. In a move likely to provoke anger, the report, by a team of veteran legal activists in the Himalayan state, names 500 "alleged perpetrators" ranging from low-ranking policemen to Indian army generals.
