The Defense Department’s average costs to maintain a service member on active duty has jumped 50 percent since 2001, to $158,000 per year, with even faster growth predicted in the future, according to a Congressional Budget Office report that looks at long-range implications of the pending 2013 defense budget.
What's to blame for persistent Muslim extremism - the violent appeal of political Islam, or botched western foreign policy? Mehdi Hasan goes head to head with Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam.
Dear Maajid,
Assalam alaikum.
Your new memoir, Radical, exploring your journey from Hizb ut-Tahrir activist to self-professed “liberal Muslim”, is bold, fascinating and, at times, insightful.
By Andrei Plesu, Der Spiegel, July 9, 2012 issue (translated for English online edition)
No longer is the government in Romania characterized merely by mistakes, excesses and professional incompetence. Prime Minister Victor Ponta has launched a brutal attack on the country's institutions, democratic principles and the rule of law
By Ramin Mostaghim, Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2012
[....] After years of being in public denial over the amount of illegal drinking in the country, officials in Iran are for the first time publicly addressing the issue of alcoholsim and the health problems drinking can cause, exacerbated by sometimes dangerous homemade brews.
Pensioners moving into nursing homes will be able to borrow money from the Government rather than having to sell their property to pay for care, under plans to be unveiled by ministers.
By Robert Winnett and Tim Ross, Telegraph.co.uk, July 10, 2012
Councils will lend money to nursing home residents and recover it after death from the proceeds of the person’s house being sold. The “pay when you die” scheme, to be introduced in 2015, is intended to stop up to 40,000 people each year being forced to sell their homes to pay for care.
KRYMSK, Russia — Forty-six new graves were cut on Tuesday in a field outside this city, where catastrophic flooding has left behind a slime of mud and anger.
Everyone here had a story of the pitch-black hours of Saturday morning, of being trapped inside homes as water rose to 6 and then to 8 and 10 feet, listening to the screams of neighbors and fear-maddened animals.
[....] In a startlingly frank interview in Thursday's New Statesman, the commander – described as a Taliban veteran, a confidant of the leadership, and a former Guantánamo inmate – also uses the strongest language yet from a senior figure to distance the Afghan rebels from al-Qaida.
WASHINGTON — In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.
Campaigners have attacked a "war on women" being waged by religious organisations before an international summit on family planning to be held in London this week.
[....] This weekend Melinda French Gates, the wife of the Microsoft founder and one of the world's richest women, tried to deflect controversy around the summit. In an interview to be broadcast on CNN on Sunday, she said giving women better access to contraception had become her lifetime's work.
[....] about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.
Islamists armed with Kalashnikovs and pick-axes have destroyed the centuries-old mausoleums of saints in the Unesco-listed city of Timbuktu in front of shocked locals, witnesses say.
The attack by the al-Qaida-linked Ansar Dine group came days after Unesco placed Timbuktu on its list of heritage sites in danger [....]
"They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks. The population is just looking on helplessly," said a local journalist, Yeya Tandina.
By Benoit Fauçon, Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2012
LONDON—As a European Union oil embargo took effect Sunday, Iran was stepping up its efforts to offset the sanctions by bartering products with China and selling more refined-oil products such as gasoline to its neighbors.
Tehran's strategy is being closely watched because if it doesn't succeed the country may have to shut down some of its oil wells—a move that over time could damage reservoirs and push up global oil prices.
