Category: News

The US State Department has issued a statement criticizing Russia every year since the 2014 attack on Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 which killed 298 people — but not this year.
The silence came just one day after Trump was accused of siding with Putin over US intelligence agencies at a press conference in Helsinki.
Russia has long believed to be behind the attack, but this year is the first anniversary since international investigators concluded that the missile that downed the plane came from a Russian base.
The State Department was silent this year – and Foreign Policy reports that a draft statement criticizing Russia was never made public.

The US State Department pulled a statement that criticized Russia’s involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 just one day after President Donald Trump held a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin that appeared to show him siding with Russia over US intelligence agencies.

The State Department created a draft statement that was critical of Russia over the 2014 attack that killed 298 people, but it was never released, Foreign Policy reported.

A cached version of the US embassy’s website in Moscow shows that a critical statement of Russia appeared briefly on the homepage on Tuesday before being taken down, according to Foreign Policy. A US official confirmed this account to the magazine.

“Four years after the downing of MH17, the world still awaits Russia’s acknowledgement of its role,” the draft statement read.

“It is time for Russia to cease its callous disinformation campaign and fully support the next investigative phase … and the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the downing of flight MH17.”

The MH17 flight was downed in Eastern Ukraine as it traveled from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing 283 passengers and 15 crew members.

The State Department has issued a statement every …read more

Source:: Business Insider

      

Chris Reining retired early at age 37 as a self-made millionaire.
Reining believes there is a difference between “living rich” and “being rich.”
Rich isn’t about earning a big paycheck, he says. It’s about having assets that generate an income and living below your means.

You could say that Chris Reining is well-versed in the semantics of money. He did, after all, retire at age 37 as a self-made millionaire by spending less than he earned and investing the difference. It’s a milestone he leverages to run a blog on financial independence.

With experience like that, we’re quick to consider Reining’s musings on money. Like this Tweet he recently posted:

“Living rich: Make $500k, spend $500k, don’t have two nickels to rub together,” he wrote. “Being rich: Make $100k, spend $40k, have $1 million in the bank.”

Living rich: Make $500k, spend $500k, don’t have two nickels to rub together.

Being rich: Make $100k, spend $40k, have $1 million in the bank.

— Chris Reining (@ChrisJReining) June 20, 2018

Of course, there are different metrics — and plenty of opinions — for what defines someone as “rich,” but they’re usually based on a specific income or social class. Reining’s Tweet shows that he measures wealth beyond figures or material means; he defines rich from a behavioral standpoint.

“When people say they want to be rich, what they’re saying is they want to spend like a rich person. They’re focusing on earning a big paycheck,” Reining told Business Insider. “But that’s not the definition of being rich. The definition of being rich is having assets generating income that exceed your standard of living.”

He continued: “Someone earning $50,000 a year while they sleep from dividends and …read more

Source:: Business Insider

      

A recent poll suggested that Labour is on course to lose all of its Scottish MPs but one.

The cerebral Conservative MP Jesse Norman has been in Scotland this week, promoting his stimulating new biography of Adam Smith.

In the book, Norman – author of a similar work on Edmund Burke and of the influential tract on compassionate conservatism – draws some grim conclusions about our times, all the more challenging given the political provenance of their author.

“Capitalism is losing its legitimacy as an engine of wealth creation and personal freedom,” he writes. “Growth is sluggish, productivity stagnating, the future unclear and insecure. We are living in a new Gilded Age, in which extreme wealth and deference to wealth and celebrity coexist with escalating public concern about the stability and fairness of our political and economic systems.”

You don’t have to be on either side of the political spectrum to agree with this diagnosis. The difference lies in the medicine you might choose to administer. As Norman writes, we live in an era “open to more radical arguments and movements; little wonder that extreme schemes of nationalisation, expropriation and state control are gaining public currency”.

It is the MP’s goal to rescue Smith from the grip of the John Redwoods and McDonnells of politics – those hard cases of right and left who see the great Scottish philosopher as the father of free-market fundamentalism, for which they either venerate or demonise him. Instead, Norman rightly suggests we pay as much attention to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and we do to his Wealth of Nations. It is in the former that we find a compelling analysis of human morality that balances the latter’s steely economic reasoning.

For all Scotland’s historical reputation as an incubator of “radical arguments and movements”, it’s entirely possible …read more

Source:: New Statesman

      

Several studies over the years have shown a link between various mental health problems and having a creative brain.
Many artists and creatives have famously struggled with their mental health.
Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf all eventually ended their own lives.
But some psychologists are tentative about reading too much into the connection.
Rather than one definitely leading to the other, it’s probably more valuable to look into the lifestyles of creative people, and what leads them there.

Psychologists have long been fascinated by the tentative link between mental health and creativity. It’s no secret that some of the most famous artists of all time were plagued with delusions and hallucinations, and to this day we see news stories of artists and performers in the public eye struggling with their mental health, and sometimes taking their own lives.

The pattern seems to go back a long way. In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh famously cut off his ear after an argument with his friend Paul Gauguin. He committed suicide two years later in 1890.

“I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me,” he wrote in a letter to his brother a couple of years before his death. “Now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head… At times I have attacks of melancholy and of atrocious remorse.”

Edvard Munch, who painted one of the most iconic and widely recognised masterpieces of the 19th century, also had his demons. After painting “The Scream,” he said the idea came to him in a vision, where the “sky turned blood red.”

“I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired,” he wrote. “Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while …read more

Source:: Business Insider