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Bomb-hit Brussels subway station reopens a month on

  BRUSSELS / ap The Brussels subway station where 16 people were killed by a suicide bomber has reopened just over a month after the attacks. Security remains high across the underground network, which was hit during the March 22 peak morning travel period. The opening of the Maelbeek station early Monday brought the Belgian capital’s underground network back up ...

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Poland’s ex-leaders: New govt is demolishing democracy

  Warsaw / AFP Three former Polish presidents and other prominent former leaders are accusing the right-wing government of demolishing the country’s democracy and its international standing. They are also urging lawmakers to disregard what they call the “draconian” new legislation the government is proposing. The appeal on Monday on the front page of the GazetaWyborcza daily was signed by former ...

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NATO 3 months from Libya coast mission

  Rome / AFP NATO is three months away from launching patrols off Libya as part of a plan to stop migrants arriving in Italy, Italian Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti said in an interview published on Monday. Pinotti told daily La Stampa that Rome was expecting its allies to approve the plan at a summit of NATO leaders in Warsaw ...

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Cruz, Kasich team up to stop frontrunner Trump

  Washington / AFP Ted Cruz and John Kasich have decided to join forces to try to deny frontrunner Donald Trump their Republican Party’s presidential nomination, their campaigns said. The sudden alliance revealed in short statements arose due to the pressing timing of their party’s presidential primary season: Trump, a wealthy property developer and reality television star, has pushed close ...

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Austrian govt in shock as far-right triumphs

  Vienna / AFP Austria’s government was licking its wounds on Monday after the anti-immigration far-right triumphed in presidential elections, in a debacle of historic proportions for a cosy political establishment seen as out of touch and ineffectual. According to preliminary results, Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party (FPOe) came a clear first with 36 percent of the vote in ...

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A manifesto to mend American politics

  It has become a truism to say that the American political system is suffering from dysfunction. But weirdly, even the insurgent candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, don’t talk much about how they would fix it. This is a populist insurgency without a clear manifesto. So it’s refreshing to hear Rep. John Sarbanes present a detailed action plan to ...

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Chernobyl teaches a lesson in N-safety

  On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl disaster left a trail of destruction. The worst nuclear accident was blamed on human error triggered by flawed Soviet reactor technology. Fukushima was another rude awakening in March 2011 when the world discovered similar challenges. Human error was again detected after the world felt it had drawn lessons from Chernobyl to avoid nuclear ...

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Americans fall out of love with owning stocks

  Barry Ritholtz Before the Great Recession, almost two-thirds of Americans owned stocks. That number has since fallen to a little more than half, as you can see from the chart below: This is an important development with ramifications for retirement planning, demographics and income inequality. First, a little history: Since late in the last century, one of the defining ...

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The Federal Reserve’s inflation fail

  Most central bankers would agree that their primary goal is to give people and companies confidence that inflation will remain stable over the long term. Unfortunately, the U.S. Federal Reserve may be failing at that task. The Fed began pulling back on its efforts to stimulate growth back in May 2013, when then-Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the central ...

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ECB Draghi’s growth streak seen tarnished in data splurge

  Bloomberg A suite of euro-area data will provide Mario Draghi with his first simultaneous dispatches from both fronts in his struggle to boost inflation—showing how he still has a fight on his hands. Gross domestic product numbers, in a newly accelerated publication just one month after the first quarter ended, will coincide with the usual end-of-the-month inflation statistics to ...

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