Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a proposed trade agreement between the European Union and the United States, with the aim of promoting trade and multilateral economic growth. The American government considers the TTIP a companion agreement to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The agreement is under ongoing negotiations and its main three broad areas are: market access; specific regulation; and broader rules and principles and modes of co-operation. The negotiations were planned to be finalized by the end of 2014, but will not be finished until 2019 or 2020, according to economist Hosuk Lee-Makiyama.

The content of the agreement as well as the reports on TTIP negotiations are classified from the public, but after a proposed draft was leaked in March 2014, the European Commission launched a public consultation on a limited set of clauses and in January 2015 published parts of an overview; and subsequently increased security over its secrecy.

Arjen Lubach

Arjen Henrik Lubach (born 22 October 1979) is a Dutch writer, comedian and television presenter. He mainly attracted notability through his weekly VPRO television show Zondag met Lubach ("Sunday with Lubach").

Biography

Youth and education

Lubach was born in a hospital in Groningen, and was raised in Lutjegast, where he lived until age 15.

His parents are both lawyers and came from outside of Groningen. His father was a professor at the University of Groningen. The three sons were raised outside of the village centre of Lutjegast. Lubach felt like an outsider because, unlike the villagers, his family did not speak the Gronings dialect. He describes his younger self as "complex" and a "kid who stayed indoors". Although he was bullied, he considers his youth to have been enjoyable. His family was religious: the children went to the Protestant primary school School met de Bijbel ("School with the Bible"), they prayed every day, read from the Bible (which was used to find a solution to pretty much any problem), and went to church every Sunday.

Latin America

Latin America is the group of territories and countries in the Americas where Romance languages are spoken. The term originated in 19th century France to include French-speaking territories in the Americas within the larger group of countries that speak Spanish and Portuguese. It is therefore marginally broader than the term Iberian America or Spanish America, though it excludes French-speaking Quebec. Latin America consists of twenty sovereign states and several territories and dependencies which cover an area that stretches from the southern border of the United States to the southern tip of South America, including the Caribbean. It has an area of approximately 19,197,000 km² (7,412,000 sq mi), almost 13% of the earth's land surface area.

As of 2015, its population was estimated at more than 626 million and in 2014, Latin America had a combined nominal GDP of 5,573,397 million USD and a GDP PPP of 7,531,585 million USD. The term "Latin America" was first used in 1861 in La revue des races Latines, a magazine "dedicated to the cause of Pan-Latinism".

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics," Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books, primarily on politics and linguistics. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Born to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of sixteen he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. He married fellow linguist Carol Schatz in 1949. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows, where he developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he was awarded his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, in 1957 emerging as a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which laid the basis for the scientific study of language, while from 1958 to 1959 he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of behaviorism, being particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.