Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a British financial columnist who writes for the London Telegraph and is extraordinarily perceptive. One of his more recent posts on the Cyprus crisis is especially bleak, but it is hard to find fault with his argument. One cannot imagine the euro persisting in its present form without some serious changes. But those changes are highly unlikely in the middle of a crisis.
The controversy over the use of drones is a difficult one to navigate because of the absence of hard information. Here’s an article that parses out what little we know how the effectiveness of drone strikes. It’s helpful, but don’t look for a resolution of the controversy. Significantly, it confirms what many of us have suspected: that drones are almost always used with the consent of states in which the strikes occur, even if those states later publicly state that their sovereignty has been violated.
A Harvard study has indicated that the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars, when one includes the full medical costs of the veterans through their expected lifetimes, could reach between $4 and $6 trillion. When White House officials starting talking about the wars in 2002, the estimates floated at the time were around $200 billion. It’s incredible how much money was spent on these wars, most of which was borrowed money.
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