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This R&D provides resources on Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy. Sanders, who represents Vermont as an independent (he identifies as a socialist), declared that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination last week. This makes him the second official entrant into the Democratic field. It is expected that Sanders will challenge front-runner Hillary Clinton from the left and try to make her more a progressive candidate before she enters the general election. Observers believe that Sanders, who is seventy-three, has very little chance of winning the Democratic nomination.
Bernie Sanders raised $1.5 million in his first day as a candidate for president http://t.co/VkZevuCTNy pic.twitter.com/2oS7C51luK
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 2, 2015
Bernie Sanders: ‘Don’t underestimate me.’ http://t.co/MY8RFuh0Rp | AP Photo pic.twitter.com/es8dWORbuu
— POLITICO (@politico) May 3, 2015
Bernie Sanders calls for ‘political revolution’ against billionaire class http://t.co/6iFI7ETih5
— The Guardian (@guardian) May 3, 2015
Free trade deals are one of the hallmarks of globalization. They allow countries to reduce trade barriers, allow for a freer flow of goods and services, and are tool of “soft” diplomacy. The 1990s and 2000s was an era for American free trade accords as the United States worked with Canada and Mexico to create the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and then signed additional agreements with another eighteen countries. While proponents argue that these deals will allow consumers to acquire cheaper goods and that the deals serve America’s geopolitical interests, opponents allege that they strengthen the power of corporations at the expense of the middle class and that they produce sizable job losses. Growing trade skepticism could impair the implementation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade accord between the United States and eleven other nations in the Pacific Rim. President Barack Obama is a supporter of the TPP and is pushing Congress to grant him trade promotion authority (TPA) to conclude the deal. Ironically, Republicans who have been an obstruction to much of the President’s agenda for the last six years are his biggest allies in the TPP fight, but Obama will likely have to win over some moderate Democrats to overcome opposition from unions and progressives to make the TPP a reality.
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Although the University of Kentucky has hosted an extemporaneous speaking section of its Tournament of Champions (TOC) event for the last three years, this year was the first that a large-scale tournament was held in the Bluegrass State. Forty-eight extempers made the trip to Lexington, which included ten of the top twenty-five extempers in the National Points Race and four of the top six finishers at this year’s Montgomery Bell Academy Extemp Round Robin.
Extempers are aware of the United States’ illegal immigration problems, but another illegal immigration phenomenon has recently caught the attention of the international media: the travel of migrants from North Africa to Europe. While the migration of peoples from Africa and the Middle East to Europe is not a new phenomenon, growing border controls by nations within the European Union (EU) over the last decade has caused migrants to brave the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Seeking refuge from political or religious persecution or a better economic future, migrants pay smugglers to take them to Southern European countries, which have argued that the EU is not doing enough to help them offset the cost of dealing with the problem. 2015 has already been a deadly year for migrants crossing the Mediterranean as 1,800 people have died making the journey compared with just 180 deaths in the first four months of 2014. On April 19, 900 migrants were thought to have been killed when their overcrowded vessel sank, prompting the EU to hold an emergency meeting in Luxembourg and triple the funding for border operations. Dealing with immigration is a sensitive issue in European countries, where far-right parties have linked excessive immigration with economic problems and claim that the different cultural backgrounds of migrants will erode the foundations of European society. Therefore, the problem is a test of the EU’s tolerance of helping the world’s less fortunate and its ability to work out an effective immigration system for its member states.
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