Crash grounds Russian helicopters: The Russian defence ministry grounds its fleet of Mi-28 attack helicopters after a fatal accident at an air show on Sunday. - Monday August 3rd, 2015 at 12:27 PM
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The Russian defence ministry grounds its fleet of Mi-28 attack helicopters after a fatal accident at an air show on Sunday.
Gulf States at risk of attack from Shia and Sunni extremists
Mexican security forces show media a sophisticated drugs tunnel they uncovered near the city of Tijuana on the border with the US.
Florida man gets 10 years in prison for stealing classified documents from military base
Baltimore sees 11 shootings, 2 of them fatal, in the first days of August
Texas Republicans quiet as new attorney general expected to turn himself in on fraud charges
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the state's top lawyer, charged with securities fraud
For the Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq, the bombing raids, abandoned villages and innocent lives lost are all-too-familiar tragedies.
Ebrahim B finally woke up to the horrific reality of life in Isis in August last year. Locked in a blood-smeared cell in one the terror organisation’s “execution centres” somewhere in Syria, the 26-year-old German Tunisian from Wolfsburg was forced to listen to the sound of a fellow prisoner being decapitated.
The campaign behind Donald Trump’s bid to become the Republican presidential candidate has fired a member of staff who allegedly made racist Facebook posts.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Most tables are empty at Walter Martin's coffee shop in San Juan's colonial district. His brow is furrowed with concern and glistens with sweat in the sweltering Caribbean morning....
Russian Security Forces Kill 14 Militantsby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) forces killed eight Islamic State militants on Sunday and six other Islamist rebels on Monday in the North Caucasus, the national Anti-Terrorist Committee (NAK) said. Moscow is struggling to quell an insurgency by militants who have proclaimed a caliphate in the North Caucasus, a patchwork of mainly Muslim republics on Russia's southern rim, where separatists fought two wars in the 1990s. NAK said the rebels killed on Sunday in the...
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IMF Says Western Sanctions Could Cut 9% off Russia's GDPby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
Sanctions linked to the Ukraine crisis could end up costing Russia 9 percent of its gross domestic product, the International Monetary Fund said on Monday. Russia's economy is showing signs of stabilization after slumping under pressure from Western financial sanctions and Russian counter-measures. Low international prices for its oil exports have added to pressure on the ruble and government finances. "The effects of sanctions in terms of external access to financial markets...
Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor at Columbia University, has given a powerful TED talk arguing for the decriminalisation of all drugs, challenging classist and racist stereotypes about drug use and calling for a new approach to the consumption of psychoactive substances.
A $10,000 reward has been announced for the suspect's arrest.
Ukraine's ex-PM announces creation of 'Ukraine salvation committee' in Moscow
Ex-PM Azarov, in Moscow, Proclaims 'Salvation Committee' for Ukraine by webdesk@voanews.com (RFE/RL)
Former Ukrainian prime minister Mykola Azarov has announced the formation of a "Ukraine Salvation Committee," calling for "total regime change" through early elections and vowing to "restore order in our home." Azarov, who was former president Viktor Yanukovych's prime minister until the latter was toppled by "Euromaidan" protests in February 2014 and fled to Russia, spoke on August 3 at a news conference in Moscow and in an interview on...
Dmitry Peskov, 47, married former Olympic icedancer Tatyana Navka, 40, last weekend. Russian opposition spotted the extravagant watch in the photos, but he claims it was a gift from his wife.
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GAZA (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Qatar on Monday and invited him to visit Moscow, a Hamas official said, extending a diplomatic welcome to the Palestinian group shunned by the West.
On Friday the government of Puerto Rico announced that it was about to miss a bond payment. It claimed that for technical legal reasons this wouldn’t be a default, but that’s a distinction without a difference.
So is Puerto Rico America’s Greece? No, it isn’t, and it’s important to understand why.
Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis is basically the byproduct of a severe economic downturn. The commonwealth’s government was slow to adjust to the worsening fundamentals, papering over the problem with borrowing. And now it has hit the wall.
What went wrong? There was a time when the island did quite well as a manufacturing center, boosted in part by a special federal tax break. But that tax break expired in 2006, and in any case changes in the world economy have worked against Puerto Rico.
These days manufacturing favors either very-low-wage nations, or locations close to markets that can take advantage of short logistic chains to respond quickly to changing conditions. But Puerto Rico’s wages aren’t low by global standards. And its island location puts it at a disadvantage compared not just with the U.S. mainland but with places like the north of Mexico, from which goods can be quickly shipped by truck.
The situation is, unfortunately, exacerbated by the Jones Act, which requires that goods traveling between Puerto Rico and the mainland use U.S. ships, raising transportation costs even further.
Puerto Rico, then, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. But here’s the thing: while the island’s economy has declined sharply, its population, while hurting, hasn’t suffered anything like the catastrophes we see in Europe. Look, for example, at consumption per capita, which has fallen 30 percent in Greece but has actually continued to rise in Puerto Rico. Why have the human consequences of economic troubles been muted?
The main answer is that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. fiscal union. When its economy faltered, its payments to Washington fell, but its receipts from Washington — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and more — actually rose. So Puerto Rico automatically received aid on a scale beyond anything conceivable in Europe.
Is Puerto Rico’s status as part of the U.S. all good? A recent report commissioned by the commonwealth’s government argues that its economy is hurt by sharing the U.S. minimum wage, which raises costs, and also by federal benefits that encourage adults to drop out of the work force. In principle these complaints could be right. In particular, even economists who support a higher U.S. minimum wage, myself included, generally agree that it could be a problem if set too high relative to productivity — and Puerto Rican productivity is far below mainland levels.
But the evidence that minimum wages or social benefits are really a problem is, as one careful if older study put it, “surprisingly fragile.” Notably, Puerto Rico’s low rate of labor force participation probably has more to do with outmigration than with welfare: when job opportunities dry up, young, able-bodied workers move elsewhere, while the least employable stay in place. You see the same phenomenon in Appalachia, where the disappearance of coal-mining jobs has induced many workers to leave, while the remaining population makes heavy use of the social safety net.
And how terrible is that, really? The safety net is there to protect people, not places. If a regional economy is left stranded by the shifting tides of globalization, well, that’s going to happen now and then. What’s important is that workers be able to find opportunities somewhere, and that those unable for whatever reason to take advantage of these opportunities be protected from extreme hardship.
There is, of course, the problem of maintaining public services for those who remain. Compared with Europe, America benefits hugely from having an integrated national budget – but it’s not integrated enough to deal with really big regional shocks. And Puerto Rico faces some risk of a death spiral in which the emigration of working-age residents undermines the tax base for those who are left, and deteriorating public services then lead to even more emigration.
What this tells us, in turn, is that even for a part of the United States, too much austerity can be self-defeating. It would, in particular, be a terrible idea to give the hedge funds that have scooped upmuch of Puerto Rico’s debt what they want — basically to destroy the island’s education system in the name of fiscal responsibility.
Overall, however, the Puerto Rican story is one of bad times that fall well short of utter disaster. And the saving grace in this situation is big government — a federal system that provides a crucial safety net for American citizens in times of need, wherever they happen to live.
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An apartment building in the Madrid neighborhood of Carabanchel completely collapsed this morning, after cracks in the structure began to appear at around 4am.
Dealing with mass killings in America by Karen J. Greenberg
Imagine that you're in the FBI and you receive a tip — or more likely, pick up information through the kind of mass surveillance in which the national security state now specializes. In a series of tweets, a young man has expressed sympathy for the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, or another terrorist group or cause. He's 16, has no criminal record, and has shown no signs that he might be planning a criminal act. He does, however, seem angry and has demonstrated an interest in following ISIS's (...) - Open page
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