Salient to Investors:
Fareed Zakaria said:
- Singapore mandates ethnic diversity in all neighborhoods – over 80% of Singaporeans live in public housing. US efforts in the 50s and 60s to desegregate schools and integrate neighborhoods were largely abandoned by the 80s and America is now strikingly segregated. A UCLA study in 2014 said many black and Latino students face almost total isolation, not only from white and Asian students but also from middle class peers as well.
- Singapore’s Deputy PM Tharman Shanmugaratnam said half the Muslim population in Britain lives in the bottom 10% of its neighborhoods by income.
- The Nuclear Threat Initiative says 25 countries have weapons usable nuclear material, stored at hundreds of different sites under no strict international rules for security. NTI says nation states are not the only entities with the knowledge to build bombs. Some sites rely on local police for protection, or must call in military units. IAEA says more than 100 incidents of unauthorized activity, including thefts, are reported every year involving nuclear and radioactive materials.
- The Fissile Materials Working Group says enough material to make tens of thousands of nuclear bombs as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb. A terrorist only needs enough highly enriched uranium to fit into a 5-pound bag of sugar to create a nuclear weapon.
- Since 2012, 7 countries have eliminated most or all of their weapons usable nuclear material, including Ukraine.
Phil Mudd at CNN said:
- ISIS is trying to draw a sharp line between Sunni and Shia, at the heart of Middle Eastern culture.
- Sunni-Shia conflict is more likely in Yemen because other countries like Saudi Arabia have lots of money to spend on security forces who would come in with an iron fist.
- Iraq is finished as a state because of Sunni-Shia divide.
- The Middle East will worsen on two fronts. The divide between moderate Sunnis and extremist Sunnis will last for decades. Many countries, including Iraq and Syria, will become more conservative over time even if IS does not take over. The centuries-old Sunni-Shia divide is rising up everywhere.
- The argument that terror organizations are focused on fighting the government or each other, and so are less likely to spend a lot of energy on Western cities, is problematic because the world is changing. The number of foreign terrorists is so substantial that to believe that none of them will focus on Western Europe or North America is short-sighted: though most of their energy will be against each other.
Gary Samore said the myth that the Iranians benefit more than the US from the nuclear deal status quo is completely wrong – the status quo is very much in the US’s favor.
Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1506/28/fzgps.01.html