| Liberia's election closes chapter of history – but for voters, past is present Posted: 09 Oct 2017 12:49 PM PDT ![Liberia's election closes chapter of history – but for voters, past is present]( "Liberia's election closes chapter of history – but for voters, past is present") On a recent afternoon in the run-up to Liberia's Oct. 10 presidential election, supporters of the country's ruling Unity Party spilled out onto the streets outside its low-slung green headquarters, their fists full of party handouts. Somewhere deep in the crowd, someone had strapped a giant speaker to the back of a pickup truck, and cranked the volume up to full. The "Taylor" in question was Charles Taylor, the one-time warlord and president of Liberia now serving 50 years in a British prison for crimes against humanity. A decade after the end of a brutal civil war, one democratically elected president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is about to willingly step aside for another – something that has never before happened in the lifetime of most of the population.
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| A Nobel that awards a deeper view of human behavior Posted: 09 Oct 2017 12:36 PM PDT ![A Nobel that awards a deeper view of human behavior]( "A Nobel that awards a deeper view of human behavior") For more than two centuries, many people have tried to shake that peculiar branch of the tree of knowledge called economics. Perhaps no one has done it better in recent decades than Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago professor who has challenged the traditional idea that free markets reflect the self-interests of rational individuals. On Oct. 9 he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Economics Prize for recognizing, as the Nobel committee put it, that "human behavior is very complex." Economic models cannot be easily simplified and must be "more human" by admitting that theories based on self-interest are not always correct.
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| Palestinian reconciliation? What's driving Hamas and Fatah this time. Posted: 09 Oct 2017 12:13 PM PDT ![Palestinian reconciliation? What's driving Hamas and Fatah this time.]( "Palestinian reconciliation? What's driving Hamas and Fatah this time.") The political and ideological tensions between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah exploded into civil war a decade ago. The internecine fighting that claimed some 600 lives by the spring of 2007 was replaced by a cold war and a division of power, with militant Islamist Hamas seizing power in the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, the dominant secular party of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ruling Palestinian areas in the West Bank. Recommended: How much do you know about the Palestinians?
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| America's split-screen economy Posted: 09 Oct 2017 11:44 AM PDT ![America's split-screen economy]( "America's split-screen economy") The revival of the great American job machine has very tangible implications for Osvaldo De Los Santos. "I think I've found the right fit for now," says Mr. De Los Santos, who works for a commercial maintenance business near Raleigh, N.C. Michelle Bulla, a Coast Guard veteran who fell on hard times, now has a job in Winston-Salem coaching other military vets on how to find work.
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