"It's not that the leadership in Russia or China is looking for a war - and the United States certainly isn't," says Kathleen Hicks, a U.S. undersecretary for defense until last July who now works for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"The real worry is miscalculation."
One hundred years after the start of World War One, books on the period have become increasingly popular in Washington, Whitehall and NATO headquarters in Brussels, current and former officials say, and not purely for their historical interest. In June 1914, the killing of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb nationalist triggered actions and alliances that brought war in barely a month.
- Our economy needs investors like Mr Zorin. California welcomes him with open arms.
- May I quote you on that, Mr Howe?
- Certainly. Is there anything else I can tell the Financial Times?
The dialogue is from A View to a Kill, in which James Bond — a la Roger Moore — poses as an FT reporter “James Stock” to figure out whether tech billionaire Max Zorin is simply a savvy microchip entrepreneur or a megalomaniac eugenicist with a plan to takeover the world.
The Bond cannon provides a few other characters who, as we’ll explain below, no longer seem quite so fantastically fictional.
...the most significant findings in the report focus on the recognition that data can be used in subtle ways to create forms of discrimination — and to make judgments, sometimes in error, about who is likely to show up at work, pay their mortgage on time or require expensive treatment.
which should strike terror in the hearts of every Millennial, left- or right-leaning, because it is extremely unlikely that these future oligarchs will not expect something in return for the 'great' projects they end up sponsoring -- their accountants and money managers would be remiss in their fiduciary duties to let them.
No, Ukraine's right-wing agitators are not fascist anti-Semites. But Russia wants them to be.
Almost every Ukrainian I spoke with speculated that Moscow is secretly supporting Right Sector in an attempt to both destabilize the weak government in Kiev and provide a pretext for further meddling – the tried and true tactic of provokatsiya, or provocation, which Moscow has been using since the early Bolshevik period to deceive its adversaries and earn sympathy among credulous Westerners.
PARAMILITARY police raids are on the rise, and largely for non-violent offenses. Our correspondents discuss the troubling militarisation of America's police
From the moment he became president of Russia in a surprise handover from the ailing Boris Yeltsin on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the new millennium, Putin has by turns confused, infuriated, outwitted and just plain befuddled the West. And never more so than in recent days, as Russia has invaded neighboring Ukraine and taken over the Crimean peninsula in the prelude to what could be a full-scale annexation of the territory on the Black Sea, the first time such a maneuver has been pulled in Europe since the blood-soaked end of World War
There are two routes to success. It comes easy to those whom were borne of it, they already know how to get along and they’re surrounded by positive role models and key connections their whole lives. But success can also be learned and what it takes to get there can be earned. Despite all the handwringing over America’s recent lack of social mobility, I still believe that where there’s a will, there’s a way. It might just be that it’s harder now.
And it is a fact that it is harder than ever to fall out of the upper echelon.
As a White House special adviser on health policy, Ezekiel Emanuel had a ringside seat for the sometimes tortured process that produced the Affordable Care Act. He explains why it was so difficult to pull the law together.
Ezra Klein, that is. His new site is warming up and there is a new Twitter account @voxdotcom that went from 0 to almost 18,000 followers in three hours, the same three hours when people were live tweeting Cosmos and True Detective. Impressive.
Just as zombies—those mythical revived corpses hungry for living human flesh and gray matter—have infiltrated pop culture, they have also gotten their hands on our brainiest reserves: the academy. ... an advancing horde of scholars ...
An interesting discusssion despite the click-bait headline. The interview question and that made the headline possible:
Let’s say it’s the future and you can genetically program a being, like an engineer can currently program computer software. Would it be ethical to create a perfect slave? Is it permissible to create a being that, were it acting freely, would not elect to do anything other than serve you? Or do you have an obligation to give it human-style, personal-freedom-seeking agency?
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
It’s after midnight and a former Ukrainian special forces officer going by the name of Jean is racing into central Kiev to round up reinforcements.
There’s chaos at the palace of deposed President Viktor Yanukovych. Jean and his team of eight volunteers, who include a middle-aged owner of a textile business and an unemployed boxer, need to keep order in a city largely abandoned by official law enforcement since Yanukovych’s overthrow on Feb. 22.
The term "Deep State" is an Italian / Turkish notion that elected officials' influence on policy, perhaps especially on foreign policy, is potentially restricted by a shadowy network of serious men with experience in the serious organs of state.
If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?
