5 new alita battle

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle should at some point "back off" from their persistent battles with the U.K. media because they are not doing themselves "any favors," a prominent royal biographer has told a new episode of Newsweek 's The Royal Report podcast. Author of the soon-to-be-released George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Shaped the Monarchy and biographer of Princess Diana , Sally Bedell Smith, told chief royal correspondent Jack Royston that Harry and Meghan have been "entwined with their own media outlets," such as Netflix and Spotify, building and maintaining relationships in much the same way the royals have been accused of doing. Since 2019, both Harry and Meghan have launched a series of lawsuits against the U.K. tabloid media, including publishing giants Associated Newspapers Limited whose titles include the Daily Mail , Mail on Sunday and MailOnline. Harry is currently in London, where he has attended hearings connected with his ongoing … [Read more...] about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s media battles won’t do them any “favors”

PUTUMAYO, Colombia — In a rebel-held town deep in the jungle, Joel ran drills beside his comrades, line after line of them in camouflage and boots, rifles at their sides. “To the right!” their instructor shouted. For Joel, 36, this scene was familiar. He had spent six years in the army, fighting on the front lines against a brutal insurgency that had terrorized Colombia for decades. But now he had a new employer: an illegal armed group that included the same insurgents he had spent his military career battling to defeat. “I know it shouldn’t be like this,” he said recently, cradling a rifle in his lap. But after he left the army, he said, he’d struggled to make ends meet. Then came an offer of a salary of $500 a month, nearly twice Colombia’s monthly minimum wage. Now, “my children live better lives,” he said, “because I can feed them.” Colombia’s peace accord, signed in 2016 by the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was supposed to … [Read more...] about Deep in Colombia, Rebels and Soldiers Fight for the Same Prize: Drugs

I. A Broken Economy As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working. The fact that the economy grows — that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one — no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems … [Read more...] about Obamanomics

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more -- a view of the planet's ultimate limits, a vision of humanity's destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era. They lead two intellectual schools -- sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters -- that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain … [Read more...] about Betting on the Planet

Russia’s casualties including dead and wounded in what they euphemistically call their “special military operation” in Ukraine is on the road to hitting a quarter-million people, the United Kingdom says. Huge numbers of Russians are being killed in Ukraine according to “the latest U.S. assessments” shared by British defence secretary Ben Wallace during a press conference on Wednesday, with those lives being sacrificed for “almost no progress whatsoever”. Mr Wallace, who is a former British Army officer and one of the longest-serving ministers in the British government as his close involvement in executing the UK’s support for Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion has seen him immune to the recent churn of Prime Ministers, said the Russians were “suffering huge casualties for whatever piece of ground they do take”. Speaking alongside the Swedish defence minister after talks in London, Wallace remarked; “The latest U.S. assessments I have seen put casualty figures at … [Read more...] about Russia Has Suffered 220,000 Casualties in Ukraine So Far, Says UK

Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now . ‘Horrible and Familiar’ An armed assailant shot and killed six people at a Nashville elementary school on Monday. Stephen Colbert called the situation “horrible and familiar, and horrible because it is so familiar,” noting that the tragedy was “the 130th mass shooting of 2023, and 2023 is only 87 days old.” “Not doing anything about this is an insane dereliction of our collective humanity. And the obvious solution here is one President Biden has proposed: an assault weapons ban. We’ve had one before, from 1994 to 2004 — and it worked. During that ban, the risk of dying in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower than it is today. That just makes sense. Fewer guns equals fewer shootings.” — STEPHEN COLBERT “It’s not complicated. It might be hard, but it’s not complicated. That’s … [Read more...] about Stephen Colbert Calls Nashville Shooting ‘Horrible and Familiar’

Along the riverbanks of Eastern Kentucky, the redbud trees are just starting to bloom, their branches still lumbering under the weight of last summer’s catastrophic flood: Lawn chairs, trampolines, twisted gutters and school backpacks remain high in the treetops, each item a persistent and disorienting sign of how life here was turned upside down last July when shallow streams surged more than 18 feet in 10 hours in parts of the state, killing more than 40 people and leaving hundreds homeless . Yet while residents reach for the possibility of renewal, the largest regional investment being offered is a federal prison proposed for Letcher County, the heart of the flood zone. The possible federal correctional institution adds insult to an already injured region. In 2019 activists defeated the proposal, demanding that the funds be used for more forward-thinking purposes, including safe and affordable housing — all the more needed since the flood. The Trump and Biden … [Read more...] about Eastern Kentucky Needs Flood Relief, Not Another Federal Prison

“Social security — they used to call it the third rail of American politics,” President Bush told a news conference last year, “because when you talked about it, you got singed, at the minimum.” But “singed” was putting it mildly; on another occasion, he concluded the metaphor with all the force inherent in it: “You grab ahold of it, and you get electrified.” Last month, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, agreed about the reason so many politicians dreaded dealing with the dangerous subject of Social Security: “This is, kind of, the third rail . No one wants to touch it.” We have here one of the most vivid political metaphors coined in the U.S. in the past generation. As every subway straphanger knows, the word picture is rooted in the system invented in the 1880s providing electric current to a railroad train and running parallel to its two rails; passengers are wise to give it a wide berth. How and when did the fear of this technological conveyor of power … [Read more...] about Third Rail

WICHITA, Kan. — Senator Barack Obama says the top priority of the next president should be to create a more lasting and equitable prosperity than achieved by either President Bush in the current decade or even Bill Clinton in the 1990s. In an hourlong interview outlining his economic views, Mr. Obama praised the Clinton administration for reducing the deficit and setting the stage for the ’90s boom. But he said Mr. Clinton had failed to halt a long-term increase in income inequality that had left the middle class feeling squeezed. If elected, Mr. Obama said he would to try to forge a popular mandate for policy changes that could reverse a generation of slow wage growth and outlast any one administration. At the top of his list would be shifting the tax burden more toward the wealthy and making investments — in health care, alternative-energy research and education — that would cost a significant amount of money but could ultimately lift economic growth. “The project of the next … [Read more...] about Closing Income Gap Tops Obama’s Agenda for Economic Change

Following is the transcript of Barack Obama's economic speech at Cooper Union in New York, as provided by CQ Transcriptions Inc. Thank you so much for being here. Let me begin by thanking Dr. Drucker and Cooper Union for hosting us here today. I have to say that the last time an Illinois politician made a speech here it was pretty good. So... (LAUGHTER) ... the bar is high. And I -- I want everybody to know right at the outset here that this may not be living for generations to come, the way Lincoln's speech did. I want to thank all our elected supporters who are here. I want to -- there are a couple of special guests that I'm very appreciative for being in attendance: Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board... (APPLAUSE) We appreciate his presence. William Donaldson, the former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We thank you. And finally I want to thank the mayor of this great city, mayor Bloomberg, for his extraordinary … [Read more...] about Obama on ‘Renewing the American Economy’