Showing 1-10 of 43 results
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MH17 probe shows no side blameless
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 15/10/2015
» The Dutch report on the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was not supposed to apportion blame. Yet the report released on Tuesday by the Dutch Safety Board clearly shows that no side is innocent in eastern Ukraine's now-frozen conflict.
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Return of Adolf Hitler makes for uneasy comedy
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 10/11/2015
» The movie He's Back, a comedy that revolves around the return of Adolf Hitler to modern-day Germany, is a huge hit. There may be more than meets the eye to this success, however.
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Violence takes root in our words
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 14/12/2015
» The Oxford Dictionaries' selection for the 2015 Word of the Year -- the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji -- suggests that UK linguists live in a rather carefree world. In other countries, the selections were not as upbeat.
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Pope's historic meeting ends up benefitting Putin
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 15/02/2016
» Russia's state-owned media covered the first-ever meeting between Pope Francis and Kirill, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, as a historic event. The official news agency, Tass, even ran a real-time blow-by-blow account. The meeting's value wasn't in any ecclesiastical breakthrough: The Pope, probably inadvertently, played a part in a Kremlin propaganda gambit.
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Underdogs survive 'Super Tuesday'
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/03/2016
» East High School in Denver, Colorado, home to 14 precincts for the Democratic caucuses, was a mob scene on Tuesday night. It was hard to judge the turnout, but one of the organisers told me there were about 5,000 people there, and I believed him: Rooms designated for caucusing were overflowing, and several precincts gave up and held their votes in the stairwell or outside the building.
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Don't trust Putin's troop pullback
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/03/2016
» President Vladimir Putin's unexpected announcement that Russian troops would pull back from Syria shouldn't be taken at face value: he's made similar announcements in the past to show Western negotiating partners how constructive he can be. He always has a hidden agenda.
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Integrate and treat a Muslim better, hurt Islamic State
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 27/04/2016
» It is intuitively appealing to connect the number of fighters a country sends to the Islamic State (IS) with poverty and inequality. The more desperate and economically downtrodden people are, the more likely it is that they'll join a terrorist group, right? Wrong, recent research indicates: It's much more likely that the reasons for the IS's recruitment success are cultural.
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If you expect it, it's not a 'Black Swan'
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 11/05/2016
» It's the bread and butter of pundits to speculate what the world might look like after a relatively improbable but potentially disruptive event, like the UK's exit from the European Union or a Donald Trump victory in the US presidential election. The perceived probability of these "black swan" events is pretty high, after all, and contingency plans may be in order. It's useful, however, to remember how the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb, framed it in his 2007 book:
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Crimean conflict simmers on with Jamala's victory
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 18/05/2016
» Ukraine may not be able to win its wars against Russian-backed rebels and against domestic corruption, but it has just beaten Russia in spectacular fashion at the Eurovision Song Contest. The political message has been amplified by the pundits, but the Russians and Ukrainian voters themselves seemed unwilling to be dragged into the propaganda war.
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Why Putin won't admit the truth about Russia doping
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/07/2016
» Russian President Vladimir Putin is changing his tune about the doping scandal that has engulfed Russian Olympic and paralympic athletes. As proof mounts that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is a state-sponsored system in Russia, Mr Putin appears less and less willing to cooperate with international sports organisations and increasingly inclined to complain about political conspiracies against his country.
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