By Steve Scherer | ROME ROME Three days after resigning as Italian prime minister and before his successor took office, Matteo Renzi typed a late-night Facebook post from his family home near Florence that seemed to cast doubt on his future. “I have no seat in parliament, no salary, no pension… I’m starting over,” he wrote. Since stepping down on Dec. 7 after a crushing referendum defeat […]
It’s a hot July day in Bethlehem, and white-robed pilgrims from Nigeria stand in the courtyard entrance to the ancient church, singing and beating drums. They’ve travelled more than 3,500 kilometres to enter the church’s low wooden door, pass through a nave under restoration and down one of the staircases in the sprawling church, to the grotto. There, they will kneel in prayer and devotion at the […]
aNewDomain — Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil chief who Donald Trump has tapped to be the next US secretary of state, was the director of a Bahamas-based US-Russian oil firm, according to leaked documents in the Panama Papers. Tillerson ended the association with the Exxon subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, in 2001, Exxon rep Scott Silvestri said Monday, a day after the Guardian and reporters at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported the news. […]
By Tim Cocks and Aaron Ross | KINSHASA KINSHASA Gunfire could be heard in several districts of Kinshasa early on Tuesday as demonstrators demanded that President Joseph Kabila step down after his mandate expired at midnight, and measures to curb dissent fanned fears of more violence. Reuters witnesses in various parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital city heard repeated gunshots, and one saw youths burning […]
By Renita D. Young | CHICAGO CHICAGO In a word, 2016 was “surreal.” Surreal, meaning “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream” was looked up so much by online users that Merriam-Webster on Monday dubbed it the 2016 word of the year. Surreal joined the Oxford English Dictionary’s “post-truth” and Dictionary.com’s “xenophobia” as top words of the year. “Our word of the year is one […]
By Roberta Rampton and Eric M. Johnson | WASHINGTON/SEATTLE WASHINGTON/SEATTLE At least five Democrats who had been committed to back Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Electoral College cast ballots for other people on Monday, the largest number of “faithless electors” seen in well over a century. The 538 electors were voting across the country to confirm Republican Donald Trump as the next president. The event is normally […]
Los Angeles-area leaders on Monday announced a $10 million “justice fund” that will help provide lawyers to local immigrants who are facing deportation proceedings without legal representation. Since winning the presidential election, has said he would prioritize the deportation of two million to three million undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of crimes. Democratic mayors […] (via WSJ)
A last-ditch attempt by Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the struggling Italian bank, to raise up to €5bn in capital was thrown into doubt after the country’s private bank rescue fund expressed “strong reservations” over the terms of a bridge loan that is key to the deal. On Monday, MPS said in a statement that it was “in contact” with Quaestio Capital Management — which manages the […]
In democratic societies, it is considered an obligation of researchers and politicians to inform the public about modern technologies and their potential risks. Researchers recently found that information about technologies and their risks may have undesired side effects. It may also cause worries where they do not seem appropriate. (via WSJ)
By Angus McDowall and Ellen Francis | BEIRUT BEIRUT Thousands were evacuated from the last rebel-held enclave of the city of Aleppo on Monday after a deal was reached to allow people to leave two besieged pro-government villages in nearby Idlib province. Convoys of buses from eastern Aleppo reached rebel-held areas of countryside to the west of the city in cold winter weather, according to a U.N. […]
In this Dec. 8, 2016 photo, Steve Burke and Jim Besha of Albany Engineering Corp. stand at the site of an abandoned iron mine in the Adirondacks, in Mineville, N.Y., where they’re seeking a federal permit to build an underground hydroelectric pumped storage project. The hills behind them are “tailings” leftover from crushing ore to extract iron from the mine that closed in 1971. (AP Photo/Mary Esch) […]
A flagship of the settler enterprise, Amona, established 20 years ago, is testing how far Israel’s right-wing government is willing to go to protect the 100 or so outposts that were built without authorization across the West Bank. The case of Amona has also stretched the country’s democratic system, with right-wing politicians pushing to flout the 2014 Israeli Supreme Court order to demolish the outpost, and advancing […]
By David Morgan | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON A top aide to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said on Sunday it was an “open question” whether President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers colluded with Russia to hack into Democratic Party emails to try to sway the Nov. 8 election. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said there was evidence that Trump associates had contact with a Russian intelligence official and the website Wikileaks […]
By Lidia Kelly and Pawel Florkiewicz | WARSAW WARSAW Around two dozen members of Poland’s main opposition party extended their sit-in protest in parliament on Sunday after talks to resolve a dispute over proposed restrictions on media access failed to produce an agreement. New rules for journalists in parliament put forward by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party have led to the biggest political standoff in […]
That’s only one reason the current Israeli government is less than enthusiastic about having to evacuate Amona. In addition to fears of clashes with the settlers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will have to act against its own constituency, a plurality of which would like the evacuation avoided. And yet the government has little choice. Attempts to circumvent the court’s orders legislatively, by introducing a law to […]
Venezuelans are bracing for Christmas without cash after the country’s highest denomination banknote was withdrawn from circulation with new larger bills not due until January, as many fear that the country is spiralling towards hyperinflation. Embattled President Nicolás Maduro this week announced plans to scrap the ubiquitous 100 bolívar bill, which makes up about half the country’s banknotes but is increasingly worthless as annual inflation is forecast […]
Proponents of the drugs say switching to the new formulations could save taxpayers money if addictions decline, though there is little evidence now that they reduce rates of either addiction or overdoses. The prescription painkiller epidemic costs the U.S. economy $78.5 billion annually, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report this year. “We have an enormous prescription-drug abuse problem in Illinois that’s costing a […]
By Corina Pons and Andrew Cawthorne | CARACAS CARACAS Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro suspended on Saturday the elimination of the country’s largest denomination bill, which had sparked cash shortages and nationwide unrest, saying the measure would be postponed until early January. The surprise pulling of the 100 bolivar note from circulation this week – before new larger bills were available – led to vast lines at banks, […]
Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, enough said. “Poet laureate of the rock era.” But media critic, too? Patti Smith gained deserved attention for a notable performance of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the Nobel ceremony […]
By Pawel Florkiewicz and Lidia Kelly | WARSAW WARSAW Polish opposition leaders called on Saturday for days of anti-government protests and vowed to maintain a blockade of parliament’s main hall that the ruling party condemned as an illegal attempt to seize power. About two dozen members of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) took turns to sit in the legislature’s plenary hall through the night and the party’s […]
By Aaron Ross | KINSHASA KINSHASA Talks in Democratic Republic of Congo on Saturday between the ruling coalition and the opposition failed to reach a compromise on the political future of President Joseph Kabila, who is set to stay in power when his mandate ends on Monday. Delegates said the talks will resume on Wednesday once the Catholic bishops mediating the negotiations have returned from a trip […]
Capitalism as we know it is irrevocably in its death throes, argues German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, which on its own is not a novel thesis. In our age of regular financial crashes and bursting bubbles, illiberal movements and borderless wars, even Nobel Prize winners and mainstream thinkers – I think of Joseph Stiglitz, among others – say that the post-war free market regime is broken, and that […]
‘You can’t put a price tag on anybody’s life’ Two years after the overdose that killed her 21-year-old son, Terri Bartlett traveled to Illinois’ state capital to champion an unlikely cause: revamped painkillers. Bartlett’s son Michael became hooked on Vicodin and later graduated to heroin. In emotional testimony last year, she urged lawmakers to support a bill that would prioritize the new harder-to-crush pills, saying she believed […]
By Roberta Rampton and Jeff Mason | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON President Barack Obama said on Friday it was fine for President-elect Donald Trump to review Washington’s “one-China” policy toward Taiwan, but he cautioned that a shift could lead to significant consequences in the U.S. relationship with Beijing. “For China, the issue of Taiwan is as important as anything on their docket,” Obama told a news conference. “The idea […]
