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The Minsk Protocol, which has theoretically brought peace to Ukraine, gives the Russian leaders' time to regroup their clandestine and conventional forces for the sake of a future offensive operation. One observer, writing from Crimea, believes the Russian forces will move against Ukraine when the whether turns cold. At least one Polish journalist believes the Russians will move against Ukraine in a matter of weeks. The predictibly named People's Republic of Lugansk, and the People's Republic of Donetsk, have now been established (by the Minsk agreement) as permenant Russian enclaves inside Ukraine. Will Russia be satisfied with these gains? What...

I have found this series to be intriguing, now that I own one. This pamphlet series is 45 publications long, it ran from 1932 to 1934. They are as follows: (author, title) 1: Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett Himself 2: Stuart Chase, Out of the Depression--and After: A Prophecy 3: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, The New Russian Policy: June 23, 1931 4: Norman Edwin Himes, The Truth about Birth Control: With a Bibliography of Birth Control Literature 5: Walter Lippmann, Notes on the Crisis 6: Charles Austin Beard,The Myth of Rugged American Individualism 7: Rexford Guy Tugwell, Mr. Hoover's Economic Policy 8:...

All peninsula schools will be ransacked for the extremist literature. In the self-proclaimed Ministry of Education of Crimea stated that the local education departments in the cities and regions of the peninsula are authorized to conduct an inspection visits with respect to keeping of extremist matter and banned literature, Censor.NET reports citing Hromadske Radio. The list consists of 2,442 items, including books, articles, pamphlets, and even texts of some songs. The law enforcement officials together with experts from the Department of Education shall hold the upcoming revision at schools. In case of banned literature detection, members of the inspection will...

New 'Novorossiya' General Korsun Vows to Install Harsh Soviet-like System 23:31 (GMT) snip.. The new "United Army of Novorossiya" Gen. Korsun recently gave an interview to a local news site, news-portal.dn.ua from which we get a definite impression of a determined hardliner. snip Asked to be more specific on plans for the industrial rebirth of the Donbass, the general said exports would go to Russia. He said Novorossiya would be run as a socialist system. "Despite Western propaganda, there is nothing bad in socialism. Moreover, the most advertised Western countries are proud precisely of their social orientation. Sweden, Switzerland, and...

A Barclays' survey of over 2,000 individuals with a net worth over $1.5 billion contains some pretty interesting results. Those in China and Singapore are most likely to leave their country, while those in the US and India were most likely to stay. Please consider Almost Half of Wealthy Chinese Want to Leave.

Yes, you can go to Cuba legally. Yes, you can have your passport stamped. And yes, it’s safe there. These were just a few of the questions I was bombarded with before and after I went to Cuba in July. Going to Cuba for Americans is probably the easiest it has been in years. Under the Clinton and Obama administrations, travel restrictions have been eased.

Fred Ross's change-making Axioms for Organizers is updated for the Internet age, and for a new generation battling discrimination and police brutality.Most residents of Ferguson, Missouri, have probably never heard of Fred Ross, Sr., but they could use his help now. Ferguson's population is two-thirds African American, but the mayor, almost all members of the city council and school board, and 95 percent of the police department is white, and in last year's municipal election only 7 percent of blacks came to the polls. Ross—perhaps the most influential (but little-known) community organizer in American history—had a successful career mobilizing people...

Venezuela's socialist government has quietly secured the backing of Latin America and the Caribbean to obtain a diplomatic trophy that long eluded the late Hugo Chávez: a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The unanimous endorsement of Venezuela's candidacy to represent the region on the Security Council came at a closed-door meeting July 23 in New York, said Amin Cruz, a diplomat at the U.N. from the Dominican Republic, which presided at the meeting. When Chávez last tried for a seat in 2006, the United States succeeded in torpedoing his campaign. This year, Washington has been mum.

(RNS) Arkansas State is removing a Christian cross decal from the back of its football helmets after a complaint that it violated separation of church and state, the university said Wednesday (Sept. 10). Athletics director Terry Mohajir said he wanted to fight the decision because the decal was intended to honor former player Markel Owens and equipment manager Barry Weyer, who both died this year. However, Mohajir said he had little choice but to follow advice from the university’s legal counsel to remove or modify the symbol. “My job is to support our players and our coaches in their expression...

A U.S. immigration program that grants visas to foreigners who invest in U.S. businesses and create local jobs, has for the first time in its 24-year history run out of quota due to the overwhelming demand by Chinese applicants and will thus no longer be China's newly rich's fast passage to America. The U.S. Department of State said the EB-5 program, which gives visas to those who invest at least 500,000 U.S. dollars and create at least 10 jobs in development projects, has hit its annual quota of 10,000 visas for the fiscal year, and will not receive new applicants...

The politics of a guaranteed income get a lot easier when you acknowledge that the U.S. is no longer the land of opportunity ... However, there are other trends that may be interacting with and exacerbating this original sin. Automation and globalization had already largely hollowed out America's manufacturing employment base; most jobs created during this "recovery" have been in crappy low-wage work. And when one takes automation to its obvious logical end, it's hard not to conclude that robots will soon be putting just about everyone out of a job. ... As someone with a nice, stimulating job, I...

One of the fundamental problems in our society is that we argue with one another from positions of moral parochialism: we assume that the other party shares our frames of reference. That may have been true in the earlier years of our nation, but I propose that this is no longer the case. Today, we argue from different and fundamentally incompatible moral codes and value systems. It is the dichotomy between the two that confuses our discourse and creates great dangers for our country.

If most foods created by the food industry are unhealthy, why not place a stiff tax on all of them and use the revenue to subsidize healthier food? This bold proposal, from Boston-area researchers, appears as commentary in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The researchers from Tufts University, Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital wrote that their plan would surely meet strong opposition from both the food and restaurant industries but that it could help people make meaningful dietary changes and substantially reduce health care costs. At issue is the higher cost of...

Want robots at McDonald's? Hike minimum wage: Zell Matthew J. Belvedere | @Matt_Belvedere Wednesday, 3 Sep 2014 Video Federal and state efforts to increase the minimum wage are misguided and pose serious risks to the economy and the job market, billionaire Sam Zell told CNBC on Wednesday. "The tinkering with the minimum wage is a very dangerous game," the chairman of Equity Group Investments said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "You start talking about a $13 or a $15 minimum wage, and you're going to have robots that are operating McDonald's."

Recently we have been pouring over “Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan that Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America,” a collection of numerous speeches written by Reagan primarily in the years leading up to his 1980 run for the presidency. One such speech on treaties — and how frequently throughout history they have been broken — is ringing particularly timely, not just in light of the ongoing Iranian nuclear negotiations or Russia’s eastward march, but in context of two recent stories out of Hong Kong, where as the New York Times writes, “Pro-democracy advocates…are girding for...

“When women go wrong men go right after them.” – Mae West “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago. During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!” What a giggle we girls...

Sixty-one years ago last month, the third-ever McDonald's opened in Downey, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles and home to Apollo, the third-ever NASA manned spaceflight program. McDonald's went to 119 countries from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Apollo went to the moon. A man who witnessed much of this history is Ron Piazza, who owns the landmark McDonald's in Downey —the world's oldest-operating McDonald's— along with nine other golden-arched franchises in the area. Piazza is something of a throwback. Plainspoken and serious, he is the type of business owner whose name and phone number are printed at the...

Dozens of fast food workers have been arrested at protests around the country where they are demanding higher pay at popular restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King and Domino's. Fast food workers in New York City, Chicago, Detroit and possibly more cities were arrested for blocking traffic in front of restaurants early Thursday morning, while thousands more continued protesting peacefully, according to news reports. Backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), fast food workers in 150 cities are walking off the job and picking up picket signs to demand that they be paid no less than $15 per hour....

The home-cooked meal has long been romanticized, from ’50s-era sitcoms to the work of star food writer Michael Pollan, who once wrote, “far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention.” In recent years, the home-cooked meal has increasingly been offered up as the solution to our country's burgeoning nutrition-related health problems of heart disease and diabetes. But while home-cooked meals are typically healthier than restaurant food, sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton from North Carolina State University argue that the stress that...