Month: September 2025

Foreign policy is the way a country deals with other countries in its quest for security and prosperity. It involves the development of alliances, negotiating treaties, and making official statements. Though military strategy is often a central component of a nation’s defense, diplomacy is also a key instrument for defusing conflict and promoting peace. A number of think tanks and academic institutions specialize in studying foreign policy, as well.

Developing foreign policies requires a lot of research, analysis, and discussion. States consider many factors when formulating foreign policy, including economic and political interests, security threats, and the need to support human rights and development around the world.

In the United States, the foreign policy debate is often divided between Americanists and globalists. Americanists focus on American primacy, arguing that the United States can solve every problem with its unrivaled power. Globalists, on the other hand, emphasize the importance of international cooperation, warning against the illusion that America can go it alone.

The world has changed dramatically since September 11. The United States must use its immense power to fashion an international environment that reflects our values and supports our interests. The indisputable first objective must be to safeguard freedom, security, and prosperity for our citizens and theirs everywhere. To do that, we must extend the zone of democracy and freedom that we helped create in Europe to the rest of the world. This will not be charity; it is profoundly in our self-interest.

An acquisition deal is when one company buys and takes control of another, absorbing the latter’s assets and, in some cases, liabilities. It is a process that involves a great deal of paperwork and requires the collaboration of many different stakeholders including decision-makers, lawyers, accountants, and owners.

The first step in an acquisition deal is due diligence. During this phase, the buyer must examine the target company’s financial records and determine its value. This includes assessing its legal liabilities (e.g., intellectual property disputes) and operational risks such as unreliable suppliers or high employee turnover. It is also important to consider the company’s growth potential – can it expand into new geographic regions or industries? If so, the buyer might be willing to pay a premium.

Once the due diligence phase has been completed, negotiations can start. At this stage, the acquiring company must agree on the terms of the purchase, such as the price, the amount of money to be paid upfront, and the conditions under which the remaining balance will be payable.

The acquiring company must also be clear about why it wants to make the acquisition. This may be because it is seeking to enter a new market or expand its operations, but it could also be an attempt to eliminate a competitor. Whatever the reason, the acquiring company should also ensure that it has sufficient funds to finance the acquisition. Otherwise, it will need to raise additional capital through a financing transaction.

Every four years the people of the United States select one President and a Vice President. This process is complicated, with the two major political parties holding primary and caucus elections to select a candidate to endorse. Candidates then campaign across the country and participate in televised debates to explain their stance on different issues and policies.

The process has become controversial, with critics arguing that the Electoral College is antiquated and inherently undemocratic. They also argue that it encourages presidential candidates to focus exponentially more time, money and energy in a few “swing states” where the citizens do not consistently vote for either the Democratic or Republican party.

After a series of primaries and caucuses, delegates to a party’s national convention are selected and then bound to vote for the candidate assigned to them. The candidate with the most delegates wins the nomination and is then officially declared the party’s presidential candidate.

During the 2024 election, Donald Trump was able to win the Republican nomination almost unopposed. He won the majority of votes in the early primary and caucus states and dominated the televised debates. However, after a series of poor performances and attacks from Democrats, he was eventually forced to withdraw from the race. His replacement, Kamala Harris, won the Democratic nomination with overwhelming support from liberal voters and supporters of Bernie Sanders. However, many in the party remained concerned that she was lacking in specific plans to address issues such as income inequality and climate change.

Understanding economic growth is a crucial issue for elected officials and business leaders in all countries, especially in developing ones. It’s important because, if an economy is growing, it typically indicates that people and businesses are earning more, spending more, and feeling better off than before.

One of the most common ways to increase economic growth is to invest in building more capital assets—such as factories, roads, and other infrastructure. Another way is to improve technology, which allows us to get more output out of a given amount of labor and raw materials. This type of growth can be driven by many factors—savings and investment (capital), entrepreneurship, and research and development, for example. But a major factor is how well the economy’s institutions—laws, regulations, and customs that govern incentives and influence behavior—support or hinder economic growth.

The simplest way to measure economic growth is by looking at gross domestic product (GDP), which includes all the consumer, business, and government spending in a country over a period of time. Unlike other indicators such as unemployment or inflation, GDP accounts for all spending in the economy: a person’s personal consumption (C), investments by businesses and households (I), and net exports.

An economy’s performance is measured on a quarterly basis. As a result, there are often significant variations between quarters. This is because, for instance, a surge in imports may offset the effects of a strong job market or lower oil prices. However, overall trends in the economy are often more telling than quarterly data.

A UN resolution is a decision or declaration voted on by all members of the United Nations General Assembly. In general, the body needs a simple majority of yes votes to pass a resolution. However, if the issue under consideration is “an important question” (those that deal with the maintenance of international peace and security, admission of new countries to membership, suspension of the rights and privileges of existing members, the operation of the trusteeship system, or budgetary questions) then a two-thirds majority is required.

This resolution focuses on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory and criticises Israel’s policy of building Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land. It calls on the occupying power to ensure that Palestinians can live in dignity and freedom, and cites three previous resolutions dealing with the topic: 472 (1990), 672 (1990) and 673 (2015).

The Council reaffirms the need to fully implement the relevant resolutions of the United Nations Human Rights Council, in particular resolutions 242, 262 and 338, and stresses the importance of the full implementation of the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It also stresses the importance of enhancing the capacity of the Office of the Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Hamas committed a horrific massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, and it has since refused to halt its attacks, putting innocent Palestinians in harm’s way and prolonging their anguish. It is dangerous to reward Hamas with a Council resolution that draws false equivalence and undermines delicate diplomatic efforts for an appropriate ceasefire.

A government shutdown is a crisis that affects the American people. It halts the flow of passport applications, delays small business loans, and disrupts clinical trials in medical research. National parks close, and federal employees miss paychecks. While some services considered essential, like border protection and in-hospital medical care, continue, non-essential workers are furloughed until funding resumes.

Congress is unable to agree on a long-term spending bill, so it relies on short-term appropriations bills called continuing resolutions (CRs). When Congress can’t pass a CR by its deadline, a shutdown occurs.

In the past, these lapses have occurred because of political disputes and budget crises like the debt ceiling and trade fights, and they’ve cost the economy $2 billion per day, according to Goldman Sachs. Shutdowns can also add to the deficit because they create extra costs for restarting programs after they reopen.

In order to prevent a shutdown, Congress needs to pass full-year spending bills on time and avoid using them as leverage in political fights. This would force lawmakers to do their job instead of relying on last-minute omnibus bills that few members of Congress even read before they vote. It’s time to end the shutdown cycle. If we do, the United States will be better off for it. A long-term budget solution must put an end to congressional brinkmanship and unnecessary disruptions, which only undermine the public’s trust in Congress. A comprehensive, bipartisan bill is the best way to do this.

An economic forecast is a projection of the growth rate of a nation’s economy. Such a forecast provides an important input to policy decisions by central banks and governments. Forecasts are typically made for national gross domestic product (GDP), a broad measure of the total value of all the goods and services produced in a country, but forecasts can also be made for individual industries or for subsets of the economy.

Many techniques are used to produce economic forecasts. At one end of the spectrum are judgmental methods that rely on the expertise of the individual forecaster to adjust forecasts produced by a suite of models, and at the other extreme are dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model-based forecasts disciplined by modern economic theory.

A forecast of economic activity is typically made for a specific period. For example, a business might want to know whether to invest in a new plant or machinery during one year or another. But economic forecasts are also made for much longer periods, such as five or ten years. Such long-range forecasts have gained increasing importance as businesses have come to recognize the usefulness of such information in planning expansion and financing.

Some categories of economic output are particularly difficult to forecast. The biggest problem is investment spending, which reflects thousands of individual and corporate decisions that can be changed very dramatically. As a result, business investment tends to be highly volatile. The erratic behavior of this category of economic output has stimulated an extensive literature on the development and evaluation of forecasting techniques.

As an adjective, late-breaking evokes an image of the latest news and developments. Breaking news stories are frequently interrupted from regular programming to provide information about an impending disaster, such as a tornado warning or landfalling hurricane. This type of breaking news is often accompanied by lower thirds and other graphics that emphasize the urgency of the event.

Scientific meetings also feature late-breaking research presentations, but their significance is a bit less urgent. Most of the original research presented at a meeting contains information that is confirmatory, extends previous findings, or is hypothesis generating, but not likely to have a direct impact on clinical practice. However, some of this research has important implications. These are the “Late Breakers.”

The Late-breaking Abstract program recognizes novel and critically important research developments that occur during the lead up to the International Congress. Submissions must describe large clinical studies or high-impact translational research that could not have been completed by the standard abstract submission deadline.

The criteria for selection of a Late-breaking Abstract are strict and adhered to by the Scientific Review Committee. Among other things, the study must be prospective and authors must justify why experiments could not be completed by the abstract submission deadline. The selection process for Late-breaking Abstracts is a rigorous one and many high-quality abstracts are rejected if they do not meet these criteria. The pendulum may have swung too far, though, because it is possible that the hype surrounding Late Breakers might reduce the attention given to other important, relevant research that does not fit the description.

The term “political scandal” describes the public exposure of politicians’ misbehavior, often resulting in legal repercussions like fines and resignations. But the public’s response to these events depends on many different factors, including how the behavior is perceived, how it affects trust in government and politics, and whether it is exacerbated by media coverage.

In a recent study, I examined the occurrence of political scandals from the late 1980s to the present. The findings show that political polarization accelerates the production of scandals by turning accusations of corruption into partisan cudgels used in scorched-earth politics to denigrate the other side. The result is that the term corruption loses its meaning and enables political leaders to escape punishment for bad behavior by claiming that the other side is corrupt (Kepplinger, 2017b).

Even when a scandalous incident does occur, the outcome depends on the triggering event, the intensity of media coverage, and the perception of the event by the public. Specifically, scandals are triggered by an unusual event (like a celebrity’s sex life or the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky) or by a politician’s decision to violate norms and values that are important for the office they hold (such as rewarding campaign donors with overnight stays at the White House or issuing norm-busting pardons).

In addition, the slant of media coverage varies widely based on the journalist’s ideological alignment and opinions. For example, journalists who are more liberal tend to report scandals involving Republican politicians more intensely than those that involve Democrats.

Startup funding is the money you use to turn your innovative idea into a viable business. There are multiple types of startup funding available, and the one you choose depends on your company’s growth stage, business model, burn rate, and long-term strategy.

The first step in securing startup funding is often personal savings and credit, which are commonly the most popular forms of startup financing. These funds typically are not as strict as a bank loan and can be used to cover a range of expenses, such as marketing efforts or the purchase of a minimum viable product (MVP). This form of startup funding is best for entrepreneurs who are confident in their business idea but may have trouble selling it to potential investors.

Venture capital funding is another common startup funding option. Investors in VC firms typically invest their own capital in startups in exchange for equity ownership. Unlike angel investors, VC firms tend to focus on businesses with higher revenue and a longer track record of success.

Crowdfunding, which involves asking a large group of individuals to make small investments in your business, is also a good source of startup funding. In addition to allowing you to reach a wider audience, crowdfunding can also provide valuable market feedback and validate your business idea. However, it is important to note that you must be comfortable sharing a portion of your business with strangers. It is also important to prepare a detailed pitch to secure this type of startup financing.