Archive for April 2016

Special Relationship, Episode 1

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Special Relationship, Episode 1

This election cycle has been unpredicatable enough already. But what would happen if another terrorist attack, along the lines of those carried out in San Bernardino, Paris and Brussels were to happen in America before the general election? In this first episode of “Special Relationship”, a joint venture between The Economist and Mic, hosts John Prideaux and Celeste Katz try to work out what role terrorism, fear and national security are playing in the primaries, and look beyond America to examine how they have already reshaped politics elsewhere. You can subscribe to “Special Relationship” on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you go to get your podcasts. A new episode will be published every two weeks.



Source: United States http://ift.tt/1SRolDm

Dip your toe in the Maldives

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Dip your toe in the Maldives


THE moment I’ve made myself comfortable on the speedboat that is taking me from the Maldivian capital of Malé to the resort of Gili Lankanfushi a beaming crew member comes over and offers me a cotton bag marked “No Shoes, No News”.

Source: Daily Express :: Travel Feed http://ift.tt/1pRAYE0

Royal Bank of Scotland in £968m spiral into red

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Royal Bank of Scotland in £968m spiral into red


ROYAL Bank of Scotland investors may have to wait until 2018 for a dividend amid concerns over large fines and delays to offloading Williams & Glyn as the bank plunged £968million into the red in the first quarter.

Source: Daily Express :: Finance Feed http://ift.tt/1WwgugY

The mysterious power of Trump’s garish buildings

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The mysterious power of Trump’s garish buildings

IT IS easy to laugh at the image of a Donald Trump-designed White House, if not at the idea of Mr Trump himself as an occupant. Emblazoned with the family name in two-foot-high bronze letters, fitted with gold fixtures and marble surfaces, the Trump House’s Lincoln bedroom would perhaps be renamed after a president who was not such a loser that he got himself assassinated (Sad!). People might pay not to stay there. Harper Lee, writer of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, would have been one of them. “The worst punishment God can devise for this sinner,” she once wrote to a friend, “is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.”

Yet the Trumpian aesthetic, like the man himself, does have mysterious power over some. “It’s sensational, it’s magnificent opulence,” one gawper told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1990 upon visiting the Taj when the casino opened, complete with bejeweled elephants, imported palm trees and far more minarets than its humble namesake. “You almost feel you should be charged for just walking in.” It is not just the unwashed masses. No less an authority than the...Continue reading

Source: United States http://ift.tt/26BYy9p

Why freedom of speech might protect you when you aren’t speaking

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Why freedom of speech might protect you when you aren’t speaking

“HARD cases”, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1904, “make bad law”. But a ruling this week by the Supreme Court shows that cases featuring a tricky set of facts can, when the majority gets a little creative, make good law. In Heffernan v City of Paterson, New Jersey, the justices ruled 6-2 that a police officer who did a good deed for his ailing mother had a First Amendment right not to be demoted for appearing to engage in political speech when in fact he wasn’t expressing himself at all.

A decade ago, Jeffrey Heffernan, a detective in Paterson’s police department, entertained a request from his bedridden mother to pick her up a yard sign supporting Lawrence Spagnola, her preferred candidate for mayor. (She had already been displaying a Spagnola sign in her front yard, but someone had stolen it.) Several of Mr Heffernan’s colleagues saw him procuring the sign at a Spagnola campaign site, and word quickly spread through the police department. Mr Heffernan’s boss and the chief of police were both supporting the incumbent mayor, Jose Torres, and looked askance on Mr Heffernan’s apparent support for his opponent. The...Continue reading

Source: United States http://ift.tt/1VX8IOx

What is the point of the Arab League?

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What is the point of the Arab League?

WITH Syria and Libya aflame, with Iran challenging the Gulf Arabs for mastery of the region and with America questioning its role as ultimate guarantor of stability, this ought to have been a time, one might have thought, for the Arab League to assert itself. Instead, the body appears to drift ever deeper into irrelevance. Its idea of renewal, it seems, is simply to replace its octogenarian secretary-general with a septuagenarian, an uninspiring transfer that is due to happen on July 1st.

Once, it promised to bind the various Arab countries together and forge a superstate, much as Bismarck did Germany or the Risorgimento did Italy. Founded in 1945 in Cairo when Egypt was an anti-imperial beacon, the Arab League helped make the careers of such 20th-century titans as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Houari Boumedienne. Many of the Arab League’s leaders rallied the masses against British and French colonial rule and dispatched their armies in successive waves against Israel. These days it can barely gather the energy to choose a new head. When, earlier this year, Egypt insisted on yet another retired foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, other Arab states, led...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1WvnEBS

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