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UN Gaza Rebuilding to Halt at End of January Due to Lack of Funds

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A United Nations programme to rebuild Gaza and give aid and shelter to more than 100,000 Gazans made homeless by the 50-day summer war will be suspended at the end of January because world donors have reneged on promises to pay.

After the war, known as Operation Protective Edge in Israel, world donors, meeting in Cairo in October, pledged $5.4 billion to reconstruct the bombed-out Strip but only a small proportion has been paid.

A sum of  $720 million was set aside for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, for rebuilding the homes of Gaza’s refugees, who make up more than two thirds of the population. To date the UNRWA program is $580 million short.

During the war, which broke out on July 17th, more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed, including 500 children as Israel bombarded the strip. The conflict left 64 Israeli soldiers dead as well as seven Israeli civilians, killed mostly by Hamas rockets fired into Israel.

Since the temporary ceasefire in August the homeless have been forced to live in makeshift shelters, UN schools, and under canvas set up amidst acres of craters and rubble.

Aid workers had hoped to begin reconstruction before winter hit the Strip but the lack of cash and commitment from donors have dashed such hopes.

"So many months after the devastating summer conflict, people are living in freezing temperatures under tarpaulins in the ruins of what were their homes, with children reported to have died from exposure to the cold, so the lack of reconstruction is leading to anger and frustration,” said Chris Gunness, spokesman for UNRWA.

“The gap between expectations after the October Cairo conference and present reality is widening. There are genuine fears that if UNRWA halts this programme, the consequences could be dramatic," said Gunness.

A total of 110,000 houses or flats are now known to have been destroyed or damaged, according to figures produced by UNRWA. Some of those affected are still living in their half-destroyed houses but up to 19,600 families have lost homes entirely and are living in the makeshift shelters, caravans, tents and in UN schools.

The entry to Gaza of reconstruction materials has also been slow due to the continuing siege, enforced by Israel and by Egypt at the Rafah crossing.

The reconstruction crisis comes amid growing concern about the failure to establish a permanent ceasefire for Gaza and fears of further conflict.

Attempts earlier this month by United Nations war crimes investigators to gain access to Gaza in order to gather evidence of alleged war crimes during the summer war have also stalled.

For the second time in six months, the head of the Commission of Inquiry, William Schabas, professor of international law at London’s Middlesex University, was refused entry to the strip and also to Israel and was obliged to take evidence instead in the Jordanian capital Amman.

During the visit to Amman many victims and witnesses recounted “deeply traumatic events”, said a Commission spokesman. However, the inquiry team are understood to be “extremely frustrated” by Israel’s refusal to allow them to speak to victims inside Gaza or to view the destruction themselves.

The UN team are also investigating allegations of war crimes by Hamas.

A spokesman for the UK Foreign Office said yesterday that Britain “regretted” Israel’s decision not to allow the Commission of Inquiry to visit Gaza or Israel. “We believe that all states should co-operate with the mechanisms of the Human Rights Council as a matter of course,” he said.

The Aftermath, an ebook telling the story of one correspondent’s return to Gaza by Sarah Helm is available now from Newsweek Insights.

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Prosecutor Alberto Nisman Didn't Kill Himself, Argentina's President Says

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BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - The death of a prosecutor investigating the bombing of a Jewish community center was not a suicide, as was initially reported, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said on Thursday.

Alberto Nisman, lead investigator into the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish center that killed 85 people, was found dead in his apartment late Sunday, a 22 caliber pistol by his side.

He had accused Fernandez of trying to derail his investigation into the bombing and was due to present his case to Congress hours later on Monday.

The government says two key witnesses in Nisman's case against the president had been falsely presented to him as state intelligence agents.

Fernandez said the deception discredited Nisman's charges against her and points to a conspiracy to smear her name.

"They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead," she said in an open letter to the country, adding that his death was "sad and terrible".

She did not say who killed him and no one has been arrested in the case, which has shocked Argentines. Social media networks are seething with conspiracy theories, some pointing at Fernandez and her government.

Thousands took to the streets this week to protest the slow pace of justice for the victims of the bombing and demanding answers to the questions around Nisman's death.

Fernandez again defended herself in a Facebook post on Thursday.

"Nisman's accusation not only collapses, but becomes a real political and legal scandal ... That's the key. Prosecutor Nisman did not know that the men identified as intelligence agents were in fact not," she said.

"The spies who were not spies. The questions that turned into certainties. The suicide that I am now convinced was not a suicide."

Argentine courts have accused a group of Iranians of planting the AMIA bomb. Nisman charged last week that Fernandez opened a secret back channel to Tehran as part of a plot to clear the suspects and whitewash the attack.

He said she was pushing to normalize relations with Iran as a step toward clinching a grains-for-oil deal that would help Argentina close its $7 billion per year energy deficit.

The government dismissed the charge as ridiculous.

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Russian Watchdog Chief ‘Ironically’ Threatens to Ban Wikipedia

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The deputy head of Russia’s education watchdog Rosobrnadzor, has spoken out against online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, telling Russia’s state owned news agency Itar-Tass he would like to “simply put [Wikipedia] under censorship” today.

According to Alexander Biserov of Rosobrnadzor the website is full of “a colossal number of mistakes,” which is affecting Russian pupils who use the site to revise for their exams.

“My opinion on this, and I have said it many times, is I would ban Wikipedia, simply put it under censorship,” Biserov said.

In a matter of hours and after an apparent backlash against Biserov’s words, Rosobrnadzor’s press office issued a statement on Russian radio RusNovosti saying their deputy director’s statement was not official and should not to be taken as such.

“All this was said in jest, with irony and it should not prompt any kind of public reaction,” the statement read.

Rosobrnadzor, which was formed in 2004 by Russian President Vladimir Putin, reserves the right to effectively remove and block the distribution of material in Russia deemed to have a negative impact on the country’s education.

Like other government watchdogs formed and endorsed by the Russian president, Rosobrnadzor has gradually increased in influence since its creation, culminating in yesterday’s announcement that Rosobrnadzor will the authority to take away accreditation from schools across Russia and effectively shut them down without court approval.

The watchdog’s increased powers will take effect as soon as next month.

Meanwhile concern over Wikipedia’s potentially negative impact on Russia has been an ongoing issue for government officials. In November, St. Petersburg’s Presidential Library and Moscow’s National Library announced they were working on a Russian alternative to the website as a joint venture.

More than 50,000 books and archive documents from libraries across 27 Russian regions were submitted to the Presidential Library, who are tasked with getting the initiative off the ground.

The project is intended to deliver where Wikipedia has appeared “incapable”, namely in “accurately portraying the life of the Russian nation,” according to Alexander Vershinin, the head rector of the Presidential Library.

The new site will allegedly allow users to put in their own content eventually, however the backbone of content will be pooled together from Russian national, regional and local government records.

According to Kevin Rothrock, a project editor at international news website Global Voices, “digital sovereignty” is a major talking point in Russia, where Russian developers have already provided more popular alternatives to Facebook, Twitter and Internet Explorer, namely VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and Yandex.

 
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ECB to Pump €1 Trillion Into Euro Economy

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The European Central Bank took the ultimate policy leap on Thursday, launching a government bond-buying program which will pump hundreds of billions of new money into a sagging euro zone economy.

The ECB said it would buy government bonds from this March until the end of September 2016 despite opposition from Germany's Bundesbank and concerns in Berlin that it could allow spendthrift countries to slacken economic reforms.

Together with existing schemes to buy private debt and funnel hundreds of billions of euros in cheap loans to banks, the new quantitative easing program will pump 60 billion euros ($68.8 billion) a month into the economy, ECB President Mario Draghi said.

By September next year, more than 1 trillion euros ($1.14 trillion) will have been created.

"The combined monthly purchases of public and private sector securities will amount to 60 billion euros," Draghi told a news conference. "They are intended to be carried out until end-September 2016 and will in any case be conducted until we see a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation."

Bonds will be bought on the secondary market in proportion to the ECB's capital key, meaning the largest economies from Germany down will see more of their debt purchased by the ECB than smaller peers.

The prospect of dramatic ECB action had already prompted the Swiss central bank to abandon its cap on the franc while Denmark, whose currency is pegged to the euro, was forced to cut interest rates in anticipation of the flood of money.

The Danish central bank intervened to weaken the crown ahead of the announcement.

Former ECB policymaker Athanasios Orphanides said action was long overdue. "The ECB should have already embarked on QE," he said. "Now that the situation has deteriorated, the ECB will have to do much more."

The euro fell, European shares jumped and bond yields in Italy, Spain and Portugal fell with the single currency dropping a full cent against the dollar to $1.1511.

Draghi has had to balance the need for action to lift the euro zone economy out of its torpor against German concerns about risk-sharing and potentially being left to foot the bill.

Tensions broke out as the meeting got underway with French Finance Minister Michel Sapin firing a broadside atBerlin.

"The Germans have taught us to respect the independence of the European Central Bank," he told France Info radio. "They must remember that themselves."

A German lawyer who has been prominent in attempts to halt euro zone bailouts said he was already preparing a legal complaint against an ECB bond-buying program.

WILL IT WORK?

Draghi said 20 percent of the asset purchases would be subject to risk-sharing, suggesting the bulk of any potential losses will fall on national central banks.

Critics say that calls the euro zone concept of risk sharing into question and countries with already high debts could find themselves with further liabilities.

Euro zone inflation turned negative last month, far below the ECB's target of close to but below 2 percent, raising fears of a Japan-style deflationary spiral.

But there are doubts, and not only in Germany, over whether printing fresh money will work.

Most euro zone government bond yields are already at ultra-low levels while the euro has already dropped sharply against the dollar. Lower borrowing costs and a weaker currency could both help to boost growth but there is a question about how much downside there is for either.

"It is a mistake to suppose that QE is a panacea in Europe or that it will be sufficient," former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

"There is every reason to expect that QE will be less impactful in a context like the present one in Europe than it was in the context of the United States."

A plunge in the price of oil has thrown central bankers into a spin worldwide. Canada cut the cost of borrowing out of the blue on Wednesday while two British rate setters at the Bank of England dropped calls for tighter monetary policy as inflation has evaporated.

The ECB has already cut interest rates to record lows. Earlier, it left its main refinancing rate, which determines the cost of euro zone credit, at 0.05 percent.

Greece and Cyprus, which remain under EU/IMF bailout program, will be eligible but subject to stricter conditions.

"Some additional eligibility criteria will be applied in the case of countries under an EU/IMF adjustment program," Draghi said.

The move comes just three days before an election in Greece where anti-bailout opposition party Syriza is on track to gain roughly a third of the vote.

 
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For the Islamic Instagram Generation, Dating Takes Off

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In another age, the engagement between Mubarak al-Balooshi and his cousin would have been arranged by their family, with little input on the decision from him or her. Instead, the 23-year-old Omani met his fiancée on Instagram, the photo-sharing application.

“I was liking her photos, then it turned out she was from my family,” al-Balooshi says. As he tells his story, he is sitting with friends on a seaside road in Muscat nicknamed Sharia Al Hub – Arabic for Love Street. The café-lined promenade is a popular place for dates, increasingly common in Oman as the Persian Gulf sultanate adjusts to four decades of oil-fuelled development. While the sun sets over the Indian ocean, young men call out honeyed words to female passers-by.

But in this traditional Islamic society, where mixing between genders is limited, social media offered one of the only discreet ways for al-Balooshi to woo a girl.

“I got to know the charisma of her personality,” he says of his cousin, whom he did not know personally because she lives in the United Arab Emirates. Two months ago, he proposed. Their families welcomed their plans.

Marrying for love was rare just 20 years ago in Oman, a peaceful nation of four million that borders Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Arranged matches were for a long time the norm, with minimal contact between a couple before their wedding. But customs are evolving rapidly. Oil wealth, globalisation and widespread higher education have transformed the country since Sultan Qaboos bin Said seized power from his father in 1970 and opened Oman to the world.

“It’s a new generation,” says Rahma al-Mahrooqi, director of the humanities research centre at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. “People are becoming more open-minded,” says Ammar Ali, 26, an Omani who met his wife Sarah (half-Omani, half-Scottish) through a mutual friend.

In a survey of 921 Omanis aged 18 to 60, al-Mahrooqi’s research centre found that 83% were against arranged marriage. More than a love marriage, young Omanis want a “compatible marriage,” al-Mahrooqi says. “Somebody with, for example, the same kind of education and background, instead of the same kind of family.” As a result, many are looking for partners at university, at work or on social media.

Similar changes are happening in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, says Jane Bristol-Rhys, associate professor of anthropology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. Exposure to other cultures – whether through television, the internet, or direct contact with foreigners – has influenced ideas about what a good marriage should look like. “They’re not living in a vacuum here, and they know there are other choices,” Bristol-Rhys says.

An arranged marriage was unthinkable for Waleed Abdullah, a 28-year-old Omani. “Because I had relationships before, it’s impossible I could be convinced easily by any girl,” he says. “I need to know the girl.”

Abdullah married a woman he met at university. She follows a different sect of Islam, but after many months of discussion, he convinced his family that she was the right choice.

In some segments of Omani society, dating and marrying for love has become ordinary.Samar al-Mawali, 23, did not tell her parents about her relationship with her high-school sweetheart at first, but when they found out anyway, they supported her. The couple married in December after eight years together. Persuading her family was simple, she says. “They may be conservative in terms of religion and praying five times a day and fasting . . . but they’re not conservative in the sense that they don’t allow us to mix with boys,” she says.

But in other segments of Omani society, dating is still completely taboo. While the country lacks the religious police of Saudi Arabia, vigilant relatives can play a similar role. Amira, 23, who has dated in secret for years, has always been careful. “Imagine if somebody sees me, my cousin or my brother, by chance?” she says. “So it’s always in places a bit closed-off, places like the seaside at night, or a park, places far from people close to us.” She asked Newsweek not to publish her last name, so that her family does not find out.

Amira met her first boyfriend in an online chat room when she was 18. Charmed by his words, she talked to him for two years before they met in person. “It was the first date in my life, and I was shaking,” she remembers. “It was the first time I sat with a man.” Over two more years, they fell deeply in love, picking names for their future children. Then he told her his family would never approve, cut off contact and married his cousin.

Amira was hurt, but she recovered. A year after the break-up, he asked her to be his second wife; men are permitted to marry up to four women in Islam. She refused. “After this love, I said, ‘Enough, what’s the point of love? And guys are idiots,’” she said. “I’ll try a traditional marriage.” Her family arranged three matches, none of them right. Now she is dating a man she met at work. With dating, of course, come broken hearts.

Mohammed al-Hinai, 29, is happily married, but wistfully remembers his first love. Their families were too different, he says. Opposition from relatives sunk the relationship. “Sometimes the culture kills us here,” he says.

Twenty-six-year-old Dana – not her real name – hopes to avoid a similar fate. After she met her boyfriend on Facebook four years ago, they schemed to win over her father, who has no idea she dates. Her boyfriend prayed at the mosque near her house and trained at the gym her brother attended, hoping to run into her family members. Dana found a job at the office where her boyfriend worked, giving them a safe explanation for how they met.

But when he proposed, three times, her father demurred. He never informed Dana she had an offer, rejecting the proposal because the boyfriend has two daughters from a previous marriage and is separated but not divorced. This does not matter to Dana; she loves him. But she cannot tell her father, she says. “For us, it’s a shame for the girl to say to her father, ‘I want this one or that one,’” she says. “Unless the father has reached a level of open-mindedness that . . . ” she laughs, as if the thought were absurd.

Sitting on a lawn chair on Love Street, al-Hinai says he has moved on from his disappointment. After refusing a marriage his father had arranged, he chose a wife for himself, a woman from his village. His eyes are bright as he describes the way their two-year-old son calls out “Baba” each morning. “It’s impossible to get everything, impossible,” he says. “The most beautiful thing in life is hope. And a message to every lover, every madman: don’t say that I loved and it didn’t happen, so enough, end of life.”

When love fails, look around, he says. “If one door is closed, 99 will open.”

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Thousands of Drivers Declined to Take Uber Survey Claiming 78% of Drivers Are Satisfied With Platform

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Uber released a massive data dump from a poll of drivers Thursday morning. The accompanying analysis looked at the driver-partner labor market, a comparison to taxi drivers and quality of work life statistics. But the number of drivers who responded to the poll was startlingly small, especially when compared with the 160,000 drivers the company employs.

By conducting a survey of 601 drivers across 20 cities, Uber determined 78 percent of drivers are satisfied with the Uber platform and the average hourly earnings is $19, though some drivers in New York have an earnings of almost $30 per hour. Most drivers joined Uber because they wanted to be their own boss and have a work-life balance. About a third of drivers use Uber to earn extra money and are employed elsewhere full time.

The survey focused on the 20 most significant United States markets, including San Francisco, New York, D.C., Miami, Boston and Los Angeles. According to data provided by the company, these 20 cities are home to 85 percent of drivers in the United States.

Though the data encompasses driver replies from across the country, 601 drivers is a tiny percentage of Uber’s overall driver force. The company has 160,000 total active driver partners (active is defined as drivers who complete more than four rides a month) in the United States, meaning the survey accounts for .38 percent of drivers. Benenson Strategy Group, which worked with Uber on the survey for a flat fee, noted that the methodology does account for quotas and weights, which are used to ensure the data is statistically representative of the area and service the driver works in.

Perhaps more significant are all the drivers who did not want to take the survey though they were asked to. According to findings presented by Dr. Jonathan V. Hall, Uber’s head of policy research, and Professor Alan B. Krueger of Princeton University, “the response rate to the survey was only 11 percent.”

Uber verified to Newsweek that the vast majority of drivers who were asked declined to participate. The survey was sent to about 5,464 drivers, meaning about 4,863 drivers declined to reply or indicated otherwise that they were not willing to take the survey. Had all the drivers replied, the survey would represent about 3.4 percent of Uber’s U.S. driver-partners.

In their analysis, Hall and Krueger note “based on a comparison of aggregated administrative data, the (weighted) respondents do not appear to be very different from the full set of driver-partners in terms of their average work hours or hourly earnings.”

Several drivers interviewed by Newsweek indicated that they were disinterested in taking the survey or feared its impact on their livelihood. One driver noted that had they been selected to take the survey, they would not reply out of fear that negative answers would be used against them. Uber drivers can be frozen out of using the application if their rating, based on rider feedback and activity on the application, falls below a certain number. The driver who spoke with Newsweek thought the survey could impact their rating, though the survey and data did not indicate this would be the case.

Uber declined to provide any of the survey questions to the public, making it impossible to study how the questions were framed. Survey creators often battle over the “framing effect,” meaning the way in which a question can be phrased to receive different replies. Questions like “Are you happy with your job” versus “Do you like going to work every day” can affect the end outcome of a survey.

Research for the survey began in November and the interviews were conducted online from December 16 to the 22. Notably, price cuts went into effect in January, after the survey was complete, and December is a notoriously busy month for drivers. On a media call, researchers noted that the earnings estimates encompassed a longer time frame than just holiday travel. Uber representatives explained that they hope to use the data to learn more about driver experiences, rather than use it for lobbying purposes. 

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Prepare for the Pill to Make You Thin

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Our airwaves, like our organs and limbs, are suffocated by expanding flab. Fat dominates the news. In the last month alone, the National Obesity Forum suggested that regular weight checks should be compulsory; a European court ruled that obesity is a disability after the sacking of a 25-stone Danish child-minder; and the chief executive of NHS England called the same ruling “daft”, declaring war on obesity after a study found that only Hungary has fatter adults than the UK. Queensland, meanwhile, declared an “obesity state of emergency”; the Saudis organised an anti-obesity run; federal regulators in the US approved an appetite-suppressing implant; a Canadian study linked a type of serotonin with obesity; and a Harvard team found two compounds that turn “bad” white fat cells into “good” brown fat ones.

The Western world is preoccupied with obesity, and rightly so, because the statistics of our expanding girths are shocking by any measure. Twenty-five per cent of citizens in most Westernised countries, including the UK, are now obese; and about half of the population is overweight. The problem is so immense that lifespans, it is predicted, may begin falling, rather than rising, for the first time in history.

Even more worryingly, it is not so much the length of life as its quality that is affected by fat. Being obese means we are more likely to suffer from mobility and joint problems such as aching knees, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers – as well as social stigma and diminished mental health.

A predisposition for obesity, alongside a fondness for smoking and drinking (exacerbated by its pervasive association with the underclass) has been condemned in the court of public opinion as a moral weakness. It is an issue for those who lack self-control or the ability to help themselves; in other words, an issue only for those without any sense of personal dignity or responsibility.

In the course of writing this piece I spoke to several intelligent, usually sympathetic, types who displayed the near-anger, disgust even, that the educated classes feel for the “feckless fat”. “They just need to eat less,” people say.

While this is true, things aren’t quite that simple. For a start, less of what? Once it was saturated fats; now sugar is the fashionable smoking gun. Some, reductively, argue that a sugar tax would bring an end to the problem. Certainly sugary drinks, from soda to fruit juice, are particularly unhelpful because though they are calorific they do not alleviate hunger. In obesity terms, this is toxic.

But politicians are reluctant to level taxes on foodstuffs – partly because they don’t want to annoy the food-and-drinks lobby, a significant player in any economy, and partly because such taxes always disproportionately penalise the poor. In Denmark and New York, fiscal measures didn’t work, and were shelved.

So while everyone knows there is a problem, many of the answers are controversial because, in the British mind, the flip-side of personal responsibility is personal liberty. While we must have the freedom to eat whatever we like, anyone who chooses to abuse that right is weak-willed, greedy and self-destructive.

And so it is that complications from type 2 diabetes, a disease largely brought on by obesity, are costing the NHS £1.5m an hour – 10% of its annual budget. Is the problem too big to stall?

The Beginning of Fat

Let’s wind back a little see how we arrived at this mess. In any society, there have always been severely obese people. The Venus of Willendorf, a statuette of a very roly-poly female figure found in rural Austria, dates from before 25,000 BC; Hippocrates wrote about obesity in the fourth century BC. In 1700, as England became more prosperous and its food supplies more reliable, Thomas Short wrote A Discourse Concerning the Causes and Effects of Corpulency. At the time, though, the condition was a rarity.

It is only since the Second World War that the march of fat has accelerated. Coincident with our moving in from the fields and working in increasingly sedentary office jobs, food supplies have become more plentiful, cheaper, and laden with fat and sugar. Just as our calorific output went drastically down, our calorific input went drastically up.

DiagramMore than a quarter of children are overweight or obese.

Multiple environmental reasons have compounded the problem: the availability of calorie-laden, cheap, deliberately-addictive fast food; the reduction in exercise among urban children, fuelled by a rise in interest in computer games, a fear of letting children play outside, and scaled-back state-school sport; an increase in city living, and a concurrent rise in the use of public transport and takeaway food outlets; and the ever-more sophisticated marketing techniques of food companies. Even central heating has played its part – since we no longer shiver, we no longer have to move around as much to stay warm. Gyms, meanwhile, are a mixed blessing. Intensive exercise (unlike, say, working in the fields all day or walking everywhere) is unlikely to be sustained over time, and is subject to interruption by even mild injury. It is also likely to boost appetite.

So we hear the (often accurate) horror stories of the need for NHS beds to be doubled in size; of morgues with bodies too big for their fridges; of airline seats rebuilt to accommodate the large. Tabloids feature a gallery of grotesques: teenagers carried out of their houses by stretcher, men who are unable to leave theirs at all.

The severely obese have their own specific set of problems. But underneath these outliers there is a growing army: the overweight and less-severely obese, who are getting fatter and fatter, and less and less healthy.

In a world that, incredibly, has more overfed than underfed people in it, even the way we look at fat has changed. The problem of over-nutrition is so severe that those of ideal weight (between 18 and 25 on the BMI index) now look malnourished to us. Obesity is so prevalent we can’t even see it straight.

Inventing the Fat Pill

In order to see what we’re doing about this complicated problem, I went to visit Britain’s war rooms in the fight on flab: the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge. It’s the vision of an affable, determined and imaginative Irishman, Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly.

The Institute opened in 2008 next to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. On the ground floor there is a clinic for diabetic patients, – adult and paediatric – who often join trials. On the second floor, Professor Nick Wareham runs the public health department, looking at measures that might make a difference to the population at large. In January, he announced the results of a study of 334,000 people which showed the importance of exercise – 20 minutes a day cuts the risk of premature death by a third.

Meanwhile on the top two floors, Professor O’Rahilly’s 19 principal investigators examine all manner of scientific angles on obesity: the specific genes involved; what happens in utero; the effect of circadian rhythms.

The bigger the problem, the greater the glory – and the riches – at stake for any person, or any company, who can produce the much-discussed miracle pill, the magic bullet that can make the world thin again.

It is no exaggeration to say that millions of lives and billions of pounds are at stake. There is a secretive global arms race under way to develop a cure, of which O’Rahilly is part and is probably, given his reputation, our best bet.

“Many people are trying to work on mimicking the effects of bariatric [gastric bypass] surgery through the use of medicines that a) mimic or enhance the effects of natural satiety hormones produced by the gut after food and/or b) enhance the amount of those natural hormones produced after food,” he explains. He won’t go into detail about his own trials, or even tell me which pharma company he’s working with. While other global teams release enticing snippets that may or not may lead anywhere, this is not O’Rahilly’s style.

HamburgerThe ability of calorie-laden, cheap, deliberately-addictive food has compounded the problem of obesity.

The most effective surgery works by making people feel full. But such surgery is dangerous, expensive, and one-size-fits-all. A pill that can trick the brain into feeling full by elevating satiety hormones and thus sending it false messages from the gut – which, I sense from O’Rahilly’s caginess, may not be that far off – will change everything. Only feeling full will stop us from eating, and if we can medically induce that, then we will have slayed the obesity dragon.

The other advantage of a pill over surgery, says O’Rahilly, is that is it can potentially be personalised. Clearly, half of Europe cannot have a bariatric procedure. But they could be given different combinations of hormones to stop them eating so much.

Such a pill would be a seminal breakthrough. O’Rahilly’s team, though, are thorough, and there doesn’t seem to be an angle on obesity that they’re not investigating. His colleague, Dr Giles Yeo, says we tend to look at obesity in the wrong light. Rather than just condemning those who overeat, he says, we should be asking, “Why, exactly, do some people eat too much, when others don’t?” Our environment plays its part, but how we eat is powerfully genetically determined, “because of how we got to today . . . all of us are programmed to survive long enough to reproduce. In order to survive that long you need to eat, and you need to survive. For the entire history of our existence as a living, breathing creature, too little food has been around, until the last 50 years. Pre-agriculture, in the Serengeti, we caught an antelope, brought it back and ate it because didn’t know what would happen next – we would eat, and prepare for famine.’” In other words, our genes tell us – more loudly in some of us than in others – to eat whenever we can.

Fifty years, in context of genetics, is the blink of an eye; our bodies haven’t yet adapted to our suddenly food-dense environment. As Yeo puts it, “our body frame has evolved to be lean” and is unable to adapt to our new habits. If we do become obese, our chances of getting heart disease and cancer, and dying early, rise. So there is now a catastrophic mismatch of our genes and our environment. Once, very few of us could overeat. Today in the West most of us can – we can all be Henry VIII now. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone is fat – the less-hungry stay thin. Although in Serengeti terms, you could argue that the fat ones are more evolved. “Perhaps, back then, Kate Moss types would have been lion food,” says Yeo.

The Genetic 'Crunch'

The genetic argument is not a popular one. Yeo tells a story of a man at a Cambridge college dinner pointing at him saying, “you are giving them a crutch.” Yeo says, “If Mrs Smith, a 25-stone diabetic about to die, chooses to use heritability as a crutch, the only person who’s going to suffer is her. But ignoring the role of genetics is helpful to no one.”

As Yeo sees it, those who eat less aren’t morally stronger, they are just people who don’t feel like eating as much, just like those who feel like taking more exercise. O’Rahilly’s team often looks at the extremes – the severely obese, and now the very underweight – not only to help them, but also because a study of the margins often yields clear insights into the more muddled mainstream.

Professor Sadaf Farooqi studies severely obese children. Although we are fatter because we take in more calories than we burn, what we choose to eat isn’t always a rational decision. In children it is more complicated still, because it isn’t always clear who is choosing what.

Farooqi reads me a recent email from a professor of endocrinology at Harvard. She writes that she “had her work cut out” with a piece from The New York Times in June titled, “In Britain’s, Child’s Weight Leads to Parents’ Arrest”. The parents of an 11-year-old boy in Norfolk, who weighed 210 pounds, had been arrested. “There is a massive failure of understanding when it comes to severe obesity,” says Farooqi. Later, O’Rahilly tells me they have heard of children eating food straight from the freezer, and chewing on bin scraps, because they feel extreme hunger.

Overweight childA severely overweight child plays in China.

The idea that you might take a child away from its parents because of its size is a “travesty”, Farooqi says, because, ironically, the more severely obese the child, the more likely it is that genes are playing a powerful part. She has seen children from war-torn Liberia and rural Pakistan who are severely obese when you might expect them to be malnourished. There is no way, she says, that the parents are to blame in these cases; who could possibly get a three-year-old to 36 kilos? As all parents know, young children eat what they want to eat and nothing else.She is currently working on a study involving a disorder that affects some 50,000 people in the UK (and over a million globally) and that may be able to remedy another defect in the brain concerning hunger and satiety. O’Rahilly’s study on “extreme metabolic phenotypes” (people with rare genetic defects) led him to identify children with a congenital leptin deficiency. Leptin is a hormone that causes people to feel full after eating; when he treated the children with doses of the missing hormone, even those who were nearly wheelchair-bound returned to a normal weight. That was a breakthrough; but leptin, frustratingly, proved ineffective for all but the most chronically deficient. It wasn’t quite the magic bullet.

Farooqi finds it frightening that society is so judgemental. In the case of the three-year-old in Manchester, she identified a genetic problem. “I never realised I’d be getting involved in these disputes, but I want to help the patients, partly because of the social stigma. Public awareness means that people are confusing the population problem with the more unusual problem of severe obesity. People think parents must be taking toddlers to McDonald’s 10 times a day. But it’s often a biological problem. I don’t think children should ever be taken away from their parents for weight reasons alone,” she says.

On the other hand, obese parents do often have obese children. Farooqi estimates the genetic component at 40–70%. In other words, we inherit much of our propensity to fat, our appetite and our metabolism. More and more genetic factors are being identified. O’Rahilly is currently excited about Labrador dogs; with the Department of Veterinary Medicine, they have worked out why some Labradors are hungrier than others. This may lead to treatment for flabby Labs and, possibly, information on the fight against fat in the human population (insulin was first identified in dogs, and research is often performed on mice – leptin, for example, was first identified in the rodents).

The Price of Being Thin

If O’Rahilly had to point the finger at anything that got us into this, it would be food transportation. Never in history has “so little percentage of income been needed to buy so much food,” he says. There’s the rise of discount retailers like Aldi and Lidl, and portion expansion – croissants the size of boomerangs; buckets of popcorn and Coke. As his colleague Yeo says, if we could wind the clock back to 1950, obesity would go away, but we can’t, so we have to find a way to deal with it.

The cure will be multifaceted, just as it has been for high blood pressure. O’Rahilly draws me a graph: like blood pressure, obesity has a normal range and a rather arbitrary cut-off point at which normal tips into excessive. Blood pressure is now manageable because of an awareness of the dangers of salt and an accompanying reduction in its consumption, and because of drugs such as statins that control it. Hospitals were once full of those suffering from the effects of hypertension, such as strokes – but no longer. The hope is that through a variety of environmental and pharmaceutical measures, obesity, too, will become manageable, a crisis of the past.

The Skinny on Obesity Recent studies have shown that 20 minutes of exercise can burn enough calories to prevent premature death.

The key might be in genetic treatment, or otherwise in a magic pill that mimics the effects of gastric bypass surgery. A team from Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, for example, announced recently that they were five years away from producing one. “Bands and balloons don’t really work and shouldn’t be heaped together with other surgery,” says O’Rahilly, “a stomach bypass is effective because as the food goes into the intestine lower down, the brain is tricked into thinking it’s full. But it is surgery, and it is expensive.”

O’Rahilly, working alongside pharmaceutical companies, sees his team as a kind of military intelligence, and the companies as their weaponry. There have been other pills in the past: safe ones that weren’t effective; effective ones that weren’t safe. His promising early-phase trials have a clear aim: that high body-weight eventually becomes, like high blood pressure, “easily, cheaply treatable, and no longer life-threatening.”

Like the rest of his team, he is non-judgemental and intensely sympathetic to the obese. “Thin people are not morally superior. They are less prone to obesity, and those who are unlucky are not feckless. They are biologically different. I want to see what we can tweak under the bonnet.”

It’s not a straightforward task. “Unlike cancer – when people who know they might die will take anything – obesity kills you very slowly so we can only use safe agents.” Obesity studies struggle with funding because of the moral angle – “an obese man eventually dies of a heart attack and his widow gives money to a heart charity,” says O’Rahilly drily.

He thinks in spite of data that show sharp acceleration in recent years, there is also some evidence that obesity is levelling out, particularly among children – that it won’t continue rising to a point where we are all obese.

Governments are taking notice. O’Rahilly broadly supports a sugar tax, although he thinks that, ideally, food companies will one day find that healthy food equals more profit.

The Sugar Demon

Some things are simple. When sugary drinks are restricted in lunch boxes, studies show that weight falls. “It’s not magic – it’s just lowering calorie intake,” says O’Rahilly. Sugary drinks are particularly dangerous because they are not filling – they’re empty calories.

And as Yeo says, sugar has the power to distort the appetite: “people will have a dessert when they’d never have another portion of mashed potato.”

O’Rahilly recently wrote that while glucose and fructose are equal in calories, and therefore equal in their ability to cause weight gain, fructose is worse for us because “it’s handled differently in the body, especially the liver. As a consequence of this, high-fructose diets in rodents tend to cause high lipid levels in the blood, insulin resistance, high uric acid (the substance that precipitates out in joints when we get gout) and high blood pressure.”

In conclusion, O’Rahilly wrote: “There is evidence that excessive consumption of fructose (found in sugar and in high-fructose corn syrup) is associated with a worsened metabolic state than excessive consumption of glucose, even though both forms of overconsumption can increase weight and fat stores to a similar amount. This provides further evidence that policies designed to discourage the ingestion of sweetened beverages would likely have a positive impact on public health.”

So even within sugars, some calories are worse for your health than others. To complicate matters further, Professor Toni Vidal-Puig says it’s not as simple as “fat equals bad, thin equals good”.

CokeOne of the most pressing issues in global obesity is the rise in overweight children, who are most affected by fast-food products of high sugar content.

All fat is not equal. Internal fat can be even more dangerous than the external kind. They are investigating why a 200kg man can be healthier than an 80kg one. “If his adipose tissue doesn’t work as well then the fat will go to his muscles, heart and liver.” This is part of O’Rahilly’s second question (after that of what makes some people obese): why excess weight leads to illness and why, sometimes, it doesn’t.

In another area of Vidal-Puig’s studies lies, potentially, an amazingly simple fix. In spite of all the millions spent on diets, food and exercise, it may be that something as basic as temperature is the answer. We all have two types of fat, white and brown. White fat is inert and sits in deposits. Brown fat, which regulates babies’ temperatures but is much harder to pinpoint in adults, can be activated to burn calories and generate heat.

Studies show that exposure to low temperatures may encourage white fat to behave like brown fat. So while central heating ensures we move less and burn fewer calories, it’s possible that lower temperatures might increase the activity of brown fat, which will burn our calories for us. “It is indeed theoretically possible that if we all switched on our brown fat by living in colder ambient temperatures we might all expend more energy,” says O’Rahilly.

It’s a nice idea, he says, but so far there has not been sufficient study to show whether it’s possible, or whether our bodies will compensate in other ways by making us eat more.

The Big Breakthrough

Scientists at the Stem Cell Institute at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital (one of the many teams in the world to have joined the race) announced before Christmas that they had identified two compounds that could turn “bad” white fat into “good” brown fat, in what is possibly a step towards their own version of that magic pill. One of the two compounds is already used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, but the team admits they are some way from their pill because the compounds concerned could damage the immune system.

Associate Professor Chad Cowan says, “If you administered them [the compounds] for a long time, the person taking them could become immune-compromised . . . The good news and bad news is that science is slow; just establishing proof of concept takes an enormous amount of time.”

At the same time, another player – a team of researchers from Imperial College, London – identified an enzyme called glucokinase which could possibly be target for a new pill because it drives the craving for sugar in the brain.

“This is the first time anyone has discovered a system in the brain that responds to a specific nutrient, rather than energy intake in general. It suggests that when you’re thinking about diet, you have to think about different nutrients, not just count calories,” says James Gardiner of Imperial College, whose study was published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. His tests on rats showed that boosting glucokinase activity caused the animals to consume glucose over normal food. If a pill could reverse this desire, sugar consumption would decrease.

Earlier this month, a report was published in Nature Medicine from researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, claiming they had developed a drug that works like an “imaginary meal”, which was shown to reduce obesity in mice. O’Rahilly says of the paper, “If we could fool those cells into thinking we have had a meal, that could be a way of reducing people’s food intake to produce safe weight-loss. While these are interesting observations, only a modest percentage of drugs that seem effective in mice ever make it into the clinic for patients.” So, in spite of the constant flow of exciting announcements, most of them, as yet, seem to be better news for rotund rodents than obese people.

Work in Cambridge isn’t confined to O’Rahilly’s team; Professor Nick Wareham, on the second floor, examines the population as whole. The causes of the obesity epidemic are not quite the same as the causes of obesity in individuals. Education and labelling, Wareham believes, can only go so far because we are not rational creatures. He wrote a paper recently in the British Medical Journal studying the importance of exposure to takeaway food: the more outlets, the higher the local bodyweight. That might sound obvious – but lined up with the fact that flat, spacious countries have more cyclists, a central point emerges: people are suggestible. They will do whatever is easiest. So we should perhaps look at changing the environment rather than just telling people to change their habits. “If I was forced to choose, diet matters the most,” says Wareham, “But so does the environment and the infrastructure.”

Somewhere between magic tablets, genetic studies, sugar taxes, cycle lanes, turning the central heating down, education and sympathy, O’Rahilly and Wareham, and others of their noble breed will, I hope, help cure us with kindness and ingenuity. Until then, the fat battle rages on.

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ISIS ‘Piggyback’ on Manchester United, Comedy Central and Taylor Swift Hashtags

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While US comedian Chris Hardwick’s late night game show @Midnight often successfully creates trending content as part of its ‘Hashtag Wars’ round, last night an unusual new contributor started getting in on the Twitter action - ISIS.

The concept of the simple game is to get contestants and Twitter users to come up with humorous responses to a theme, which last night was #ToughGuyRomComs - an amalgamation of action films and romantic comedies - and the hashtag soon went viral.

Even Sony Pictures entered the fray with a tweet:

However, for Islamic State supporters, the trend was simply another opportunity to attract attention and promote their Jihad in Syria and Iraq. ISIS Twitter accounts began using the hashtag whilst tweeting one of their most recent propaganda videos.

The video is produced by its al-Hayat media wing, infamous for making high budget propaganda to try and recruit Western jihadis, and it shows an ISIS operative urging “Russian-speaking Muslims” to join ISIS in the Middle East.

In a brazen attempt to hijack the popular hashtag several pro-ISIS accounts tweeted the footage using it as it was trending last night, while others used it to take a public swipe at Saudi Arabia:

According to Charlie Winter, a researcher for the anti-radicalisation thinktank the Quilliam Foundation, ISIS often “piggyback” on popular hashtags to increase their online presence: “This is something that is done by Islamic State supporters wherever they are. It is part of a strategy of flooding the world with as much coverage of Islamic State as possible,” Winter said.

ISIS have previously used social media coverage about the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson to urge violent unrest in the U.S. However it appears ISIS activists do not limit their activities to political trends on social media, having also hijacked hashtags relating to the National Basketball League’s (NBA) draft, and transfer speculation surrounding football club Manchester United (MUFC), to spread their message.

ISIS activists have also used pop culture events to promote their cause such as the launch of the iOS8 iPhone, the release date of Taylor Swift’s album 1989, the trailer for the latest Star Wars film, and sporting events like the Manchester football derby.

“Central to their media strategy is trying to appear ubiquitous, their use of popular hashtags is not to do with recruitment efforts necessarily,” Winter said. “Obviously someone who buys a Taylor Swift album is not exactly a prime candidate for recruitment to jihadism.”

“It is all part of their efforts to intimidate - they want to portray themselves as this big menace to the West, bigger than they actually are. They want to make it appear as though they control the media,” he added.

While some of these Twitter trends have been global others, like the English Premier League football matches, have been more regional, suggesting that pro-ISIS accounts using them are based in the region where the hashtag is popular.

Last month, UK broadcaster Channel 4 publicly identified one of the most popular ISIS Twitter propaganda activists, as Shami Witness - a businessman based in Mumbai who had never travelled to Syria or Iraq.

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Report Accuses Israel of Human Rights Abuses in Gaza During Summer War

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A report commissioned by the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has accused the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of carrying out a series of human rights abuses during the Gaza conflict in the summer 2014. The group have now called for the Israeli government to open an inquiry into the alleged violations they say occurred during the 50-day conflict.

The war resulted in the deaths of almost 2,200 Palestinians, including 500 children, and the displacement of 100,000. There were 73 Israeli casualties, 64 of whom were soldiers.

The team, whose testimonies the report was based on, was made up of eight independent international medical experts who were unconnected with Palestine or Israel. They visited the Gaza Strip three times between August and November last year, interviewing 68 Palestinian patients who had been hospitalised during the attacks, and also held meetings with a variety of local NGOs.

Key findings documented in the report include that “heavy explosives were used in residential neighbourhoods, resulting in multiple civilian casualties” and that the IDF also conducted ‘double tap’ strikes, meaning that first responders to an area already hit, lost their own lives in the second round of bombing. There are also claims that on 21st July 2014 the Israeli army carried out an “apparently deliberate attack” on Shuhada’ Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al Balah, a city in the centre of the Gaza Strip.

Some of the most shocking findings were discovered when the team carried out an in-depth study of Khuza - a small farming town with a population of around 13,000. The report concludes: “The conduct of specific troops in the area is indicative of additional serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

The site was chosen due to the fact that both rescue organisations and journalists had reported the difficulties they had faced when trying to access the site and “the need to collect first-hand evidence regarding various allegations made”.

The report describes how on 23rd July hundreds of residents had attempted to evacuate the town holding white flags but were told to return by Israeli soldiers, while some also said that they were shot at. On the same day, a clinic came under attack, despite the fact it was clearly marked as a healthcare centre.

A day after this, when a group again tried to leave, there are three eyewitness accounts which describe how a six-year-old boy who reportedly had serious abdominal injuries was denied “medical evacuation” despite the fact that Israeli troops are thought to have seen him and how badly he was wounded. The boy later died of his injuries.

Other accounts from Khuza include members of the IDF using Palestinians as human shields and one man described how soldiers had shot dead his 65-year-old father in front of him at point blank range.

In the conclusion of the report the IDF are criticised for failing to enable Palestinian residents to escape the shelling. “The initiators of the attacks, despite giving some prior warnings of these attacks, failed to take the requisite precautions that would effectively enable the safe

evacuation of the civilian population, including provision of safe spaces and routes.” It also describes how the team found numerous example where medical teams were attacked, and that there was mistreatment and abuse of civilians by individual soldiers, and that some were even shot at short range.

The findings were sent to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF have released a statement lambasting the report as “one-sided, thin and imprecise”, saying it was based on “information from sources biased against Israel from the start. The report’s sweeping conclusions and the problematic methodology it uses cast a heavy shadow over its contents and credibility,” it concluded. The IDF did not respond to requests for further comment.

The report is to be included in a United Nations Human Rights Council probe into alleged war crimes that occurred in Gaza, which will be published in March.

A team of UN war crimes investigators seeking to look into allegations of war crimes by both the IDF and Hamas were denied entry to Israel and Gaza earlier this month and have had to take evidence in the Jordanian capital Amman.

The Aftermath, an ebook telling the story of one correspondent’s return to Gaza by Sarah Helm is available now from Newsweek Insights.

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$242 Billion High-Speed Beijing-Moscow Rail Link Approved

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A social media post, published by Beijing’s municipal government yesterday, finally confirmed that China are to go ahead with plans to build a multi-billion dollar high-speed rail link between Beijing and Moscow.

The line aims will provide super fast transport across Central Asia and will compete with the Trans-Siberian Railway, cutting travel time between the two countries from six days to two,

according to the government’s post on social media website Weibo.

However, critics of the 1.5 trillion yuan ($242 billion) project fear that the investment will have to be shouldered mostly by China. Russian economy has floundered over the last few months due to the sanctions imposed by Europe and the U.S. over Russia’s role in the Ukrainian crisis. The severe drop in crude oil prices has also had a devestating effect on the strength of the rouble.

A Chinese blog has claimed that the rail link will have multiple long term benefits, including improving the country’s food shortage problems as fertile soil can be easily imported from Russia. The site also said the link would provide an easy way for Chinese farmers to migrate to Russia where they would set up farms to supply food to both countries.  

Russia has long had a strong relationship with China, which has only been strengthed by the recent souring in relations with Europe and U.S. As well as the finalisation of this new transport link, in May last year the two countries increased the transfer of energy resources between them, signing a gas supply deal worth $400 billion. The 30 year contract stipulates that 38 billion cubic meters of Russian gas will be supplied annually to China, according to Russian news agency Itar-Tass.  

Trade between the two countries exceeded $95bn in 2014, according to the Chinese customs department, a 6.8% growth on the year before, with raw materials such as oil, ore and timber accounting for 80% of the trade.

This year, China overtook the U.S. in becoming the world’s largest economy, and the country approved billions of dollar of investments. The government’s economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), approved $113 billion worth of infrastructure projects between the months of October and November alone.

Earlier this month there were reports that China is planning even more infrastructure projects valued at a stggering total of seven trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion).

 
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Civilians Killed as Shell Hits Bus in Donetsk

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The war in Ukraine continued in bloody fashion today as government forces retreated from key parts of Donetsk airport and a mortar shell hit a public bus, leaving several civilians dead. There were conflicting reports on the number of those killed on the bus, but estimates range between eight and 13.

It is currently unclear who fired the shell, separatist forces supported by Russia or Ukrainian government troops. Separatist gunmen found on the scene blamed Ukrainian forces, while the Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, blamed “Russian terrorists” in a statement on the government’s website. The Ukrainian defence ministry released a statement saying that its forces were 15 kilometres away. Amnesty International released a statement saying the likely target for the shell was a former-soviet military base, 500 metres away, that the pro-Russian forces have been using.

Amnesty condemned both sides, saying in their statement: “By basing troops, weaponry and other military targets in residential areas, using them as firing positions and firing artillery, rockets and mortars into these locations, pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces are endangering civilians in violation of the laws of war.”

This attack comes just a week after another bus was shelled, killing 13 and injuring 18 in Buhas, a village south-west of Donetsk. Similarly, both sides blamed each other.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian defence ministry told reporters that its troops had withdrawn from the main terminal of Donetsk airport.

During an eight-month battle, the airport has become a focal point for fighting between the two forces, gaining a certain “symbolic value” says Orysia Lutsevych, a Ukraine expert at Chatham House.

Vladislav Seleznyov, spokesman for Ukrainian government forces told Reuters that six soldiers had been killed in fighting around the airport over the last 24 hours. “As the fighting intensified we took a decision to leave the terminal and pull back to new lines,” he said, but told reporters that “fighting around the airport is continuing and our troops have taken up defence in a number of areas”.

"We continue to control the southern part of the airport,” Seleznyov said. “We left the new terminal because it looks like a sieve and there's simply nowhere to hide there.”

The airport has changed hands between the two sides a number of times since Russian-backed rebels initially took hold of it in May, with the main terminal and control tower being mostly destroyed.

 

 

Despite it’s state of repair, Lutsevych says it could still have some use to the forces fighting over it. “You should remember the airport was built a few years ago; it has a super-efficient runway. It could be used for a military purpose.“

The foreign ministers of several European countries including Germany’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier, France’s Laurent Fabius, Ukraine’s Pavlo Klimkin and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov concluded their latest crisis meeting in Berlin on Wednesday, calling for “all sides involved to cease hostilities and withdraw heavy weapons”.

Negotiating peace in Ukraine is becoming increasingly difficult as combat forces continue to clash and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko accuses Russia of fuelling the war by supplying rebels with fresh troops and tanks. No peace agreements have yet been reached in Berlin but European foreign ministers have hope for another peace summit in Kazakhstan, which they say, will only happen once an effective ceasefire has been put in place.

According to Amnesty International’s estimates, around 5,000 people have died since fighting broke out in Ukraine last year.

Thinking With the Blood, an in-depth ebook on Ukraine’s civil war by Owen Matthews, is available now from Newsweek Insights.

 
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Closing Gitmo: Obama Must Confront Congress

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New and justified optimism greets the otherwise dismal sixth anniversary of President Barack Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, one of his first decisions as president. While Obama failed to meet the one-year deadline established in his 2009 executive order, fresh momentum behind the effort to close the prison has brought the achievement within reach.

Congressional Republicans have other ideas, however, and now that they represent the majority in both chambers, they have proposed more roadblocks to closing Guantanamo that are seemingly designed to harm American security and waste taxpayers’ money.

Obama remains deeply committed to closing Guantanamo despite these obstacles, because the case for it continues to grow. The first commander of the prison facility at Guantanamo, retired Major General Michael R. Lehnert, recently came out strongly in favor of closing the detention center he helped create. Lehnert argues that we can manage the risk associated with releasing detainees who may take up the fight against the United States, but the “risks associated with keeping Guantanamo open are harder to mitigate, and the harm will be far more lasting.”

Ambassador Cliff Sloan, who stepped down in December 2014 from his State Department post overseeing the effort to transfer detainees out of the prison, recently said, “Nobody should underestimate the determination of the president to close Guantanamo during his presidency.” Obama is so committed not only because he pledged to close the detention facility but also because, in his view, Guantanamo“is something that continues to inspire jihadists and extremists around the world.”

This helps explain why the pace of transfers out of Guantanamo has dramatically increased, with more detainees leaving the prison in the past two months than in the previous three years combined.

Including the five Guantanamo detainees transferred to Oman and Estonia on January 14, 2015, a total of 27 detainees have been moved out of the prison since mid-November 2014—a substantial increase compared with the total of 19 detainees transferred from 2011 to 2013. That leaves only 122 detainees at Guantanamo, of which 48 already have been cleared for transfer—a process that requires the approval of the secretaries of defense, state, justice and homeland security, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence. These detainees are waiting to be sent home or resettled in another country.

Of the 74 detainees that have not been approved for transfer, 33 are slated for prosecution or have been prosecuted already. Current law enacted by Congress prohibits bringing any detainees into the United States for trial in federal criminal court. That leaves the Guantanamo military commissions as the only available avenue for prosecution of at least some of these detainees. Progress has been incredibly slow, however, and while 10 men in this group of 33 have been charged, none are currently close to an actual trial.

The slow pace is not the only problem with the military commissions, as serious questions remain about whether the commissions are consistent with international and domestic law. In spite of these questions, however, the commission process has at least presented the hope of resolution for some detainees. And paradoxically, being convicted of war crimes in a military commission is actually the surest ticket out of Guantanamo.

Just eight detainees have been convicted since the military commissions were created in 2002, but two of those convictions were overturned on appeal. The vacating of these two verdicts did not affect the detention status of the detainees, as they already had been transferred out of Guantanamo and were living freely in their home countries. Of the remaining six convictions, three of the detainees were quickly transferred out of Guantanamo—with two living freely—to their home countries.

The two that remain at Guantanamo have plea deals with prosecutors that require their testimony at other commissions, and they will be transferred home once that testimony is given. Only one detainee convicted in a military commission is not currently scheduled to be transferred out of Guantanamo, but two of the three charges he was convicted of already have been overturned on appeal, and the third remains on active appeal.

In an effort to address part of the reason these commissions are moving so slowly, a recent military order now requires the judges overseeing military commissions to relocate to Guantanamo. Up until now, judges would schedule only one week of proceedings every two months. This is a glacial pace, considering that many issues must be fully litigated, as there is no existing body of law to back up the newly created commissions.

In contrast, U.S. criminal courts have hundreds of years of case law to fall back on, so judges can often resolve issues quickly and with reasonable certainty. These military commissions have prosecuted only a handful of cases, and, as a result, most issues must be litigated; the presiding judges are making new law, so they are proceeding with great caution. This move certainly does not solve all of the problems, and progress still may be slow, but at least the courts will be able to convene regularly.

With fewer detainees at Guantanamo, the already sky-high costs of keeping each detainee there are reaching astronomical levels. When the year began, the average cost per detainee was around $2.7 million, but that was when there were still 155 individuals being held at the detention center. Now that 33 fewer detainees occupy the prison, the cost per detainee is rising because most of the costs associated with the Guantanamo detention center are fixed and thus not linked to the size of the detainee population.

With only 122 detainees at Guantanamo, the cost per detainee is roughly $3.5 million, with the potential to rise even further as more detainees are transferred out of the prison. If each of the remaining 48 detainees cleared for transfer is moved out of Guantanamo this year and the total costs remain about the same, the cost per detainee would rise to $5.7 million.

Compare that with just $79,000 per detainee in the highest-security prison in the United States—the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, also known as the Supermax, which already holds one former Guantanamo detainee—and the waste is so apparent that it becomes ridiculous.

Taken together, these actions create real momentum toward closing Guantanamo, the most progress we have witnessed since 2009. They do not magically solve all of the problems associated with the task of closing the facility, but there is reason for genuine optimism.

One of the problems, of course, is the Republican-controlled Congress, which is extremely hostile to Obama in general and to closing Guantanamo in particular. Just a week into the legislative session, Senator Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, introduced legislation that would essentially halt all transfers from Guantanamo for two years, even of detainees who already have been approved for transfer and whom the U.S. military no longer wants to hold.

Importantly, among the bill’s co-sponsors was Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, who—when he ran for president in 2008—favored closing Guantanamo and transferring all of the detainees to the United States; he was thought to be a potential ally for Obama in the Republican caucus.

Senator Lindsay Graham, R-South Carolina, another of the bill’s co-sponsors, tried to push back on the arguments against the excessive cost by claiming that“whatever money we spend to keep a terrorist off the battlefield is money well spent.” But that is not the issue, and Graham knows it. The absurd waste of Guantanamo is not the byproduct of a choice between keeping the detainees the United States wants to retain in custody or letting them go—it is the choice between continued detainment at Guantanamo or options for detention in the most secure prisons in the United States at one-seventieth of the cost.

Obama has been building momentum behind his effort to close Guantanamo. The new Congress is trying to erect new obstacles in his path. If the president wants to close Guantanamo during his final years in office, a confrontation with Congress is inevitable—and it is a confrontation he must be prepared to win.

Ken Gude is a senior fellow with the National Security team at the Center for American Progress. This article first appeared on the Center for American Progress website.

Author’s note: Tracking Guantanamo detainees is a challenging process, as most publicly available information regarding the facility’s population can vary from source to source or does not include prisoner classification details. The data in this column reflect the author’s own research and tracking of Guantanamo detainees.

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English Cities 'Enjoy More Real Devolution Than Scotland'

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The leader of Manchester City Council Sir Richard Leese has blasted the Scottish devolution bill signed by the UK government today, arguing it gives Scotland less “real devolution” from Westminster than some English cities already have.

When asked about the concession of powers to Scotland made by British prime minister David Cameron, Sir Leese said the move was “simply transferring power from a centralised parliament to one even more centralised parliament.”

Leese, who has spent 30 years as a Labour councillor and 18 as council leader, has been one of the main voices calling for more powers to be transferred to England’s northern cities such as Manchester.

Although Alistair Carmichael, the UK government’s Scottish secretary said earlier today the new plans would make Holyrood “the third most powerful devolved institution in the world,” Sir Leese believes cities such as Manchester already have agreements with the government which leave them with more devolved power than Scotland.

“Scottish cities have exactly the same needs as their English counterparts and real devolution would give Glasgow and Edinburgh the opportunity to develop their own packages along the same lines as the Greater Manchester deal,” Sir Leese said.

According to Leese this deal, agreed between Westminster and Manchester Council in 2011 already allows local government full control over two thirds of its spending, and the councillor told The Independent newspaper in October thta: “We are in discussion with government about far greater levels of devolution of power and resources.”

Leese, who was knighted for his services to the city the decade after an IRA bomb inflicted £1.2 billion worth of damage in central Manchester, has led the charge for more devolution of powers at a city level across the UK.

When asked to comment on the new concessions of devolution for Scotland, Leese said it was not an example Manchester wanted to follow.“I definitely don't want to be like them. Being a city in Scotland is even worse than being in one in north England,” he said.

While the draft for today’s bill was agreed in November by John Swinney, Scotland’s deputy first minister and Westminster’s three main parties, the Scottish National Party (SNP) and its first minister Nicola Sturgeon have criticised the extent of powers devolved to Scotland.

Sturgeon called for greater decision making powers to be transferred to Scottish government, highlighting that “the legislation published today does not represent the views of the Scottish government”. Her comments follow Cameron’s insistence that the new laws had made Scottish parliament “one of the most powerful devolved parliaments in the world”.

Although Sturgeon did commend the new powers as representing “some progress”, she reiterated her comments from when the bill was first drafted in November, saying that the devolution deal still “imposes restrictions on the recommended devolved powers and would hand a veto to UK ministers in key areas. ”

Sturgeon criticised the new powers for failing to give Scotland the ability to create new benefit entitlements, abolish the bedroom tax and have full control over its fiscal policy.

The initial proposals for Scots to have greater home rule were put forward in September, when Cameron, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband, issued a joint ‘vow’, when they were faced with the possibility of Scotland voting for independence from the United Kingdom in the referendum.

Ultimately 55% of Scots voted not to leave the Union. However, since then there have been ongoing disagreements between the SNP and Westminster about what this vow promised. While the former said it ensured complete fiscal autonomy, the three Westminster parties have insisted fiscal federalism was not part of their promise and have succeeded a smaller proportion of policy powers to Scotland. 

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California Measles Outbreak That Started in Disneyland Jumps to 59 Cases

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A rash of measles in California has infected 59 people, with 42 of those cases linked to an outbreak at the state’s Disney theme parks.

Initial exposure to measles either occurred at Disneyland or Disney California Adventure Park, both in Anaheim, California, between December 15 and 20, 2014. Five Disney employees were among the infected, said the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) in a press release Wednesday. Anyone who has visited high-traffic areas for international visitors like airports or theme parks should “be considered to have a plausible exposure to measles,” the CDPH said.

Vaccination status of the patients, whose ages range from 7 months to 70 years old, were documented in 34 out of the 59 cases. Twenty-eight out of those 34 were unvaccinated; of those 28, one patient had one dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and five had received two or more doses, the CDPH said.

Last week, California health officials said it was the worst case of measles the state had seen in 15 years. Eight additional cases of measles—in Washington state, Utah, Oregon and New Mexico—were also connected to the Disney outbreak, CNN reports.

"We are working with the health department to provide any information and assistance we can," Dr. Pamela Hymel, chief medical officer for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, said last week in an emailed statement.

In their press release on Wednesday, the CDPH confirmed the number of cases and added that the best way to prevent catching and spreading measles is to get vaccinated. Health officials in Orange County in California,also urged people to get inoculated against measles, even if they’re adults. The vaccine is 99 percent effective against the disease, which is characterized by symptoms like a skin rash, fever and inflamed eyes, or conjunctivitis.

Last year saw 644 cases and 23 deaths from measles, the largest number of measles cases in the U.S. since 2000, when the disease was thought to be eradicated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2013, there were less than 200 cases. Most people who become infected with measles are unvaccinated people, according to the CDC.

The CDPH is urging California residents to be vigilant about their health in order to stifle the spread of the illness. “If you have symptoms, and believe you may have been exposed, please contact your healthcare provider. Unless you have an emergency, it is best to contact your health care provider by phone to prevent spread in doctor’s offices,” Dr. Ronald Chapman, director of the CDPH, was quoted as saying in a press release. 

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What Newtown Will Destroy—and Build—After Sandy Hook

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In the two years since 20-year-old Adam Lanza burst into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 26 people, including 20 children, before shooting himself, the town has grappled with what to do with the physical reminders of that painful day.

Should a new school replace the one where the children were shot? What should be done with the house Lanza lived in and shot his mother before embarking on his killing spree? What would a memorial look like?

At least one of those questions was on its way to being resolved this week when the town’s Legislative Council voted Wednesday to tear down the house where Lanza lived before his rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The town has also started discussions for a memorial and construction is due to begin on a new school on the same property where the elementary school stood until it was demolished at the end of 2013.

Officials decided in a unanimous vote to demolish Lanza’s house based on a proposal by the board of selectmen, and after the bank turned over its title to the town at no cost.

“I think that this is the best way we can honor the victims families and remove another obstacle to their healing, as well as for families who have children who live in that neighborhood,” says Mary Ann Jacob, chair of the Legislative Council. “It’s still an object of curiosity, and that’s stressful I think for people who live there.”

A neighbor, Dave Ackart, expressed similar sentiments, writing: "Not only is the property a constant reminder of the evil that resided there—those of us who walk, run, drive, ride or otherwise must pass it multiple times a day, are having a hard time moving on."

First Selectwoman Patricia Llodra—who, Jacob explains, is like a mayor—will call a special town meeting for any members of the community who would like to discuss the issue before the Newtown can proceed with the demolition. Once the meeting is held, likely in the coming weeks, Llodra is authorized to proceed with plans to raze the house at 36 Yogananda Street as soon as it’s feasible, weather permitting. The estimated demolition cost of roughly $30,000 will be covered by municipal insurance policy.

Llodra will also look into documentation that would ensure the town would not benefit from any future sale or development of the property, but rather that any such proceeds would go to benefit the victims’ families.

“There are no imminent plans to do anything other than demolish” the house, says Jacob, but the measure will be put in place “should future generations make another choice.”

Demolition on the school where Lanza killed 20 children and six staff members on December 14, 2012, after killing his mother in the house on Yogananda Street was completed early last year, but for different reasons.

After the shooting, it became clear that renovating the school would cost nearly as much as building a new one. The design for a new school—on a different footprint on the same property—has already been approved, according to Jacob. Construction of the new school is due to break ground this spring and expected to open in the fall of 2016. In the meantime, the children are learning in the neighboring town of Monroe in a school building that had previously been vacant.

The vote to demolish Lanza’s home came just one day after the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission held an open forum on a potential memorial to honor the victims of the shooting. A second open forum is scheduled for next Thursday.

“It’s a long process that will probably take several years,” says Jacob, explaining that a decision has yet to be made on whether a memorial will be built and if so, what it would look like. The forums are part of the very early stages, she says, opportunities for townsfolk and families of victims to speak their minds. 

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Were Those State of the Union Responses True?

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President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night contained many claims and sparked many responses.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, best known by her campaign ad about castrating pigs of her family’s farm, delivered the official Republican response. Fellow senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky also delivered responses on YouTube.

So, who was right, and who was wrong? It’s still the economy, stupid, so we took a closer look at the various claims made Tuesday night.

Wages: Ernst and Cruz claimed wages have stagnated under President Obama. That’s true: Inflation-adjusted median incomes have actually dipped in the past decade, from $786.67 in Q1 2004 to $784.13 in Q1 2014. However, as you can see in the following graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the drop in wages we are seeing now is somewhat cyclical, and wages have been steadily climbing for 35 years, regardless of who was in the White House at the time.

Inflation-adjusted median income from 1983 to 2014.

 

Jobs: Ernst lamented that Americans had lost jobs under Obama. But despite the Great Recession, employers are actually adding jobs now. The economy gained 148,037 jobs in December, the most of any month since 1999. Still, Obama’s claim that the job market is growing at its fastest pace since 1999 is hyped. In December, the number of new jobs was 0.2 percent of the total number of jobs—which means the job market isn’t growing at quite as fast a clip as it was in October 1999, when new jobs were 0.3 percent of all jobs, or in March 2000, when new jobs were 0.4 percent of all jobs. But the job market is certainly expanding, which makes Ernst’s claim ring hollow.

Keystone: Ernst claimed that building the proposed Keystone Pipeline, which will ferry tar oil from Montana to the Gulf of Mexico, would create “thousands of jobs and pump billions into our economy.” The first point is somewhat contentious: While the actual building of the pipeline would indeed require around 3,500 workers, once it’s built, it will require only 35 workers to keep it running—so those thousands of jobs Ernst mentioned come with an expiration date of one year, the time expected to build the pipeline.

Income Inequality: In his response, Paul said income inequality has worsened under Obama. That’s true. But it’s also true of every president since the Great Depression, according to the Pew Research Center. The gap between rich and poor began to increase dramatically in the mid-to-late 1970s, the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter years.

Unemployment: “Today we’ve got the lowest labor force participation since 1978; 92 million Americans aren’t working today,” said Cruz in his ad-hoc response. That’s true. Labor force participation—the number of Americans who are actively working or looking for work—was 62.7 percent in December 2014. Labor force participation peaked at 67.3 percent in the first quarter of 2000 and has declined steadily since then. Here is a graph that shows the rise and fall in labor force participation since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting data for the statistic in 1948.

 

Labor force participation from 1948 to 2014.Paul also attacked the so-called War on Poverty, claiming that black unemployment remains twice that of white unemployment since the program began 50 years ago. That is true, and has been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting employment data by race, according to the Pew Research Center. But it’s also true that entitlement and tax benefits that aid the middle class, such as Social Security or the home mortgage deduction, dwarf the War on Poverty, means-tested programs aimed directly at the poor.

Debt: This is a leading talking point for conservatives, but of all the responses to the State of the Union, only Paul gave it more than a passing mention. The Kentucky senator claimed, “Obama is on course to add more national debt than all our previous presidents combined” That’s sort of true, depending on how you measure debt. According to PolitiFact, a government watchdog organization, the national debt is set to double in terms of raw dollars during Obama’s presidency—but that number is somewhat misleading, because it isn’t adjusted for inflation. It’s not surprising, in other words, that the government will rack up more debt during Obama’s presidency than it did fighting World War II, because things just cost more these days. But, under Obama, debt is not expected to double as a percentage of GDP—the ratio of debt to revenues, which many economists find to be a more useful metric for measuring debt. Statistics from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office show that, from 2009 to 2013, the ratio of debt to GDP increased by 18.5 percentage points. That’s slightly less than the 20.7 percent it increased under President George W. Bush, and much less than it increased under President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II.

So all said, the top Republican responses weren’t wildly off the mark but they didn’t hit it either.

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The MTA Fare Hike Is Less Terrible Than You Think

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New Yorkers let out a collective groan Thursday as the MTA decided unanimously to raise subway fares for the second time in two years. Starting March 22, the cost will rise to $2.75 per ride and $116.50 for a 30-day MetroCard, an increase of a quarter and $4.50, respectively.

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Paying more out of pocket is never pleasant, but the new prices are easier to digest when you look at the change of rates over time, adjusted for inflation. Using this metric, the 2013 30-day MetroCard cost strap-hangers $113.82. With today’s increase, it’ll be only $2.68 more, or roughly the price of a street vendor hot dog.

The price increase will, in theory, help close the MTA’s $15 billion budget gap. But the city’s transportation experts are not convinced. Ydanis Rodriguez, a city councilman and chair of the Transportation Committee, took issue with the increase, saying the MTA has “no true dedication to exploring alternative means of funding.”

Rodriguez urged the authority to seek new means of funding. “It can no longer be the first instinct of the MTA to increase the burden they put on working-class New Yorkers,” he said.

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Should We Leave War to Our Warrior Caste?

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Who is truly bearing the burden of repeated deployments and protracted conflicts? Who comprises our shrinking all-volunteer force?

As the daughter of an A-10 pilot, I see my fellow military brats enlisting and being commissioned at incredible rates. Anecdotally, it has seemed at least one child in every military family tends to serve, while the ROTC programs in the Ivy League are some of the smallest in the country, and military service is left unconsidered as a viable career option for most young Americans.

This is creating a cultural gap between military and civilians and presents challenges for effective civilian control and oversight of the military. More and more military service has become a family affair, creating a “warrior caste” whose mantle is passed down from generation to generation.

Bridging the civil-military divide will not only be accomplished by encouraging a broader group of young men and women to join up, but also by educating young Americans who are less likely to interact with the military about their role in American society. Fostering engagement with and understanding of the military will create a greater sense of national investment, and perhaps cause a few more people to give pause when we engage militarily around the world.

There is little evidence that the burden of the past 12 years has been felt outside of the military, a stark contrast from previous wars characterized both by the draft and engagement—both positive and negative—by regular citizens. As an Air Force brat, I grew up as a military dependent with all of the realities that entails: frequent moves, my father’s deployment to the Middle East and an international move before my senior year of high school. Despite the challenges, I would not trade my upbringing for the world.

There is a sense of duty and service to country that is ingrained in the children of those who serve. It is both a blessing and a burden that is further leading to the civil-military divide, as a disproportionate number of the military brats I grew up around are now serving, or intend to serve. A 2007 U.S. Army study found that of the 304 general officers serving in the military, 180 had children serving in uniform.

A 2011 survey by Pew found that “Veterans are more than twice as likely as members of the general public to say they have a son or daughter who has served (21 percent versus 9 percent).” Considering the fact that less than 10 percent of 18-year-olds have a veteran parent and twice as many veteran parents have a son or daughter who has served, the military looks less like a shared burden and more like a family tradition.

This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

 
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Tom Brady Addresses Deflate Gate: 'This Isn't ISIS'

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Tom Brady held a press conference Thursday afternoon to address accusations that he was guilty of participating in what has come to be known as "Deflate Gate." The NFL has reportedly found the New England Patriots provided under-inflated game day balls in their face off for the AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts last Sunday. Eleven of twelve balls were found to be two pounds per square inch lighter than they should be,

When a ball is under inflated, it can affect how it travels as well as how easy it is to catch and throw. While it could have led to an advantage for the Patriots against the Colts, the final score was 45-7, and even Colts player Dwayne Allen felt the inflation level of the ball did not affect the end outcome of the game. 

Patriots Coach Bill Belichick said he was shocked by the news and had "no knowledge whatsoever of the stiaution." At Brady's conference, a reporter asked "When and how he altered the balls" and another asked "Is Tom Brady a cheater?" Brady said he did not alter the balls, he picked them out in the same fashion he does for every game, roughly five hours before taking the field. He laughed off the accusation of being a cheater. "Everyone is trying to figure out what happened, I was as surprised as anybody when I heard Monday morning what was happening."

In a detailed explanation, Brady said he and other players typically pick out and break in the balls before the game. Those specific balls then arrive at the game when it begins. He clarified that in any game, a player would be frustrated if the balls were changed out, as they break the balls in to their specific preferences before the game. "I certainly wouldn't want them to take away us breaking the balls in. Some guys like them round, some like them thin," he explained of player's ball preferences. 

Though he takes much effort in preparing the balls, Brady said once the game begins, he puts little thought into the ball. “Once I'm out on the field, I have no thought of the football. I'm thinking about the defense and execution of the play. I'm not thinking about how the football feels... It wasn’t a thought, concern of mine that they were different between the first and second half.”

He also said he was unaware of any team member, or ball attendant, tampering with the balls before or during the game. “I am very comfortable saying nobody did it [on my end] as far as I know. I don’t know what happened in the process with the footballs, I was there doing my job." 

Brady did acknowledge that several years ago, he said he liked to play with deflated footballs. He clarified that he believes his grip is best on a 12.5 pound pressurized ball. Reporters present questioned whether Brady had previously played with deflated balls, considering his affection for them. He clarified he did not know if he had played with an under inflated ball before as he spends little time considering the density during the game. 

As reporters yelled out questions about Deflate Gate, Brady reminded the crowd that this was all about a football game in the end. "This isn't ISIS," he said. 

As for any disciplinary measures, he did not offer suggestions or insight into what penalties his team faces. "I'm not the one that imposes discipline, that is not really my job. Obviously I'd like to know what happened. In the meantime, I have to get ready to play agains the Seahawks." NFL investigators had not yet spoken to Brady at the time of the press conference. 

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Imagining the Jeb Bush-Mitt Romney Meeting

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Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush’s Utah summit has drawn plenty of attention, but, unfortunately, there will be no hidden microphones. Would that we were in the room to hear the giants of the GOP hug it out:

Jeb: Mitt, how are you? You look great, fantastic. Losing suits you!

Mitt: Why, thank you. Jeb, how’s your work for financial companies going? Sixty-one is pretty old to be working your way up the ladder. I’d already made a real fortune when I was younger than you. But enough about me: How’re your parents and your oldest brother? I forget his name.

Jeb: George. George Walker…

Mitt: Right. Shame how unpopular he was when he left.

Jeb: Maybe we should get on with it. Look, our families have never been that close, even when my grandpa was a senator from Connecticut and my dad was president. I understand that. But I think this is a great time for us to come together...

Mitt: ...behind my candidacy.

Jeb: Hold on there, Adlai.

Mitt: (Breathes deeply.) Remember, Adlai Stevenson ran against Eisenhower twice and lost by a lot. My 2016 bid would be totally different.

Jeb: Yeah, right. Sorry, let me make that William Jennings Bryan. He blew it four times. Four. You wanna be that guy?

Mitt: I’m not that “guy,” as you put it. First, he made that populist “cross of gold” speech that everyone still remembers. No one remembers mine, which is a blessing.

Jeb: True dat.

Mitt: And second, I’m in tune with my party and the country. I’m conservative but not crazy. I was right about Russia being our biggest foe, and I’m not a weepy squish when it comes to immigration. No way our party is going to nominate a presidential candidate who, with all due respect, wants to stand there in El Paso, donning a sombrero, embracing any Juan and Jose, welcoming them to America and handing them a welfare check.

Jeb: Really. Really. That’s your plan for winning 270 electoral votes? I have to make my own decision about what’s right for this country. I want to talk about how immigrants come here out of love, like I said a few months ago.

Mitt: Love. I heard when you said that, and boy, I thought I was on an episode of The Newlywed Game or Ozzie and Harriet.

Jeb: Way to go with the up-to-date pop references.

Mitt: I’m sorry, Homes, I don’t hang in Miami with Pitbull.

Jeb: Anyway, as I was saying, we’re each going to have to make a decision about what’s next for our country....

Mitt: Oh, I know what’s next, mi amigo. And it starts with M.

Jeb: J comes before M.

Mitt: All right, some people have to play little alphabet games.

Jeb: You’re the one who said M.

Mitt: In all seriousness, there must be a way that we can both run without scuffing up each other’s loafers or letting that New Jersey governor get the nomination.

Jeb: (In a Jersey accent.) “Yo, you forgot I-love-diners-but-I’m-a-Cowboys-fan New Jersey governor.” Mitt, you at least have your home state cleared. Marco Rubio may run. He’s smart. He’s nice. But it’s like having Skippy the Intern try to steal your wife—not gonna happen, but still annoying.

Jeb: Or those whack jobs, Paul and Cruz.

Mitt: Ugh. Two tacos short of a combination plate.

Jeb: You’re obsessed with immigrants. You know that, right? How about we just make it a friendly competition, keep the jabs to a minimum and see who prevails?

Mitt: That’s fine in theory, but you Bushes have a way of playing rough when it’s time. Or as Sollozzo said in The Godfather, “I am the hunted one. You think too much of me, kid. I am not that clever. I am the hunted one.”

Jeb: I know, I know. Maureen Dowd keeps comparing us to the Corleones. My brother’s peeps put a hit on John Kerry, saying he looked French, and his ads whacked him for windsurfing.

Mitt: And I did my missionary work in France, nearly got killed in an auto accident over there. You know what it’s like to be a Mormon missionary in France, trying to wean them off coffee, tobacco and wine. No, I don’t want you Bushes calling me French, smearing me with brie. Of course, France is the cat’s meow these days.

Jeb: Um, yeah. Well, let’s just try to keep it cool for now—two ex-governors, sons of political families, wanting to stake their rightful claim to the throne.

Mitt: Like Game of Thrones? Does that make you Joffrey?

Jeb: Hey, Voldemort, could you keep the peace for a minute?

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