instruction:
Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.
question:
'Bedblocking' - the result of social care policy that puts profits ahead of people. Bedblocking . What a phrase . People having to stay in hospital, even though they are well enough to be discharged, because there' s no social care in place for them . David Cameron says it's "a demand problem" . But it's not, of course . It's a supply problem . It's hard to make money from social care . So it's not massively amenable to privatisation . I suppose this was one of the areas where, Cameron fondly imagined, the Big Society would step in . As ever, instead, starving one part of the public sector of cash simply left another part struggling to cope with the consequences . Back in 2010, when Gordon Brown suggested implementing a 10% levy on inherited wealth to fund social care for older people , the Conservatives had this to say:"RIP off. Now Gordon wants ? 20,000 when you die. Don't vote for Labour's new death tax." Instead , social care for older people has had its funding cut , so there' s simply not enough money to go round . The demand problem that Cameron now speaks of is one that was entirely predictable and, indeed, entirely predicted . Policymakers have been fretting over the future challenges posed by our ageing population for decades . Now this time has arrived , and there' s nothing there in the way of provision for it . Care for elderly people is one of those things that's not hard to sort out, given money, and almost impossible to sort out without it . It's one of those things that, in theory, offers choice- staying at home with support, moving into sheltered accommodation, going into residential care . In reality, however, people are so terrified of the prospect of being in a position where they have to make such choices that they'd rather not think about it at all . One knows vaguely that there aren't many decent alternatives , so staying at home becomes the one thing that is comforting . Being close to the past matters when the present and the future feel like a horrible staging-post before death . It doesn't help that there's so much sentimentality around the issue . Myleene Klass appeared to believe she was being socially aware by banging on about how awful the idea of a mansion tax is , because it would hurt little old ladies living in big houses that had been their homes for decades . But ,  actually, Klass was describing something that isn't necessarily that desirable: an elderly person living in a home she can no longer heat, clean or look after, the neighbours she once knew long gone, clinging to the past instead of living in and enjoying the present . One of the great paradoxes of old age is that, at a time in life when change is very dynamic and has to be managed a lot, people are persuaded that trying to stop time, instead of moving forward and adapting to circumstances, is the right thing to do . Care at home is pushed as the thing to aspire to, in part because - even though it's expensive, difficult to organise and not very satisfactory in outcome - it has the attractive advantage of needing no capital investment . Over Christmas, I watched the film Quartet , which is set in a retirement home for musicians . One was supposed to feel a bit sorry for its inhabitants , who had known success and adulation when they were young, and who missed those days . All they had to do to raise the funds to keep the home going was put on a concert featuring the legends that were themselves . Having looked at a couple of local care homes when my mother was ill a couple of years back , I can only say that the twilight years of those characters were indeed a fiction . Sure, nice retirement homes exist - if you can afford them . But the limitations of so many of them mean that the whole concept is sullied . Rather than being places where new phases of life are undertaken, they have become places you end up in when all hope of enjoying life is gone . It's interesting that inheritance has become so much an aspect of debate around care for elderly people . This, too, is a tacit signal that you are too old to spend your own money on yourself . At some point, the duty is to hang on to your assets, so that they can be passed on to your family - and without nasty government death taxes . It would be nice if people weren't encouraged to believe that it was selfish to invest in their own lives just because they are no longer young . Elderly people are blocking beds not just because they can no longer look after themselves at home, but also because our society is not encouraged to think of elderly lives as valuable and deserving of joy and fun, vitality and change . Lack of pay is one reason why people aren't queing up to work with older people . But another is that it's not seen as enjoyable , because older people are viewed as a bundle of sad, expensive, social-policy problems, rather than people with lives worth living to the full .
answer:
People having to stay in hospital, even though they are well enough to be discharged, because there' s no social care in place for them David Cameron says it's "a demand problem"


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Why #illridewithyou is an ill ride. The Sydney siege saw a slew of Muslim organisations issue statements condemning Islamic extremism . Such chastisement had meant something in the wake of 9/11 and the Bali bombings . Today, this has degraded into an automated knee-jerk response . It has been said so many times that its gravitas is greatly diminished . More subtly, this expectation for Muslims to keep speaking out is nothing short of Islamophobic . It assumes that Islam is, at its core, evil . It also upholds the view that Muslims can be essentialised as a monolithic whole . The chastisement thus becomes the yardstick from which the wider world is to differentiate between a good Muslim and a bad Muslim . Surely today, fourteen years after 9/11, we have wisened up to the fact that such atrocious acts are committed out of political, even criminal, intent more than theology . Surely, it is not a stretch to think that no one individual can represent an entire faith community . Surely, it is time, as Max Fisher of Vox argues, to stop asking Muslims to condemn terrorism . In the same manner, this good Muslim, bad Muslim binary undergirds the #illridewithyou campaign . Yes, the hashtag was borne out of goodwill ; an Asian Australian woman started it , as the Twitter universe reacted to the story of a woman pledging to walk in solidarity with another woman who took her hijab off following news of the Sydney siege . We will protect the good Muslims, so gestures the campaign . Unfortunately, it also reproduces an age-old trope that has been highlighted by scholars of postcolonial studies . As western colonisers encounter non-European natives, they began to think of their "other" in one of two antithetical ways - either as a barbaric savage or a noble savage . To the colonisers, the hostile savage is inherently dangerous in a sub-human way and always an enemy to the civilised individual . Meanwhile, the noble savage is romanticised as innately benign . Untouched by modernisation, the noble savage should be admired and protected . Transposed to modern times, the hostile savage translates as the bad Muslim and the noble savage - the good Muslim . Yet ,  barbaric or noble, a savage is still a savage . The hashtag #illridewithyou is just as patronising . Another factor that cast doubt to #illridewithyou relates to this question: Was the perpetrator Man Haron Monis the quintessential Islamic extremist? If the slate of profile pieces that are now just flooding our newsfeed can be taken as a gauge , the jury is still out on this . At first glance, one may indeed be tempted to fit him into the mould of what some security experts have called"bedroom jihadists", a fashionable term to describe self-radicalised individuals who have been recruited online to plan and execute terror attacks that would advance the cause of clandestine Islamist organisations . Yet Monis was a man of many masks . Closer inspection would reveal that he does not nestle comfortably into this category . His demands may have included an ISIL flag , but he made no strategic overtures that would advance the cause of any oppressed Muslim groups . At this juncture, it is doubtful if he had even made contact with ISIL . Let us also not forget that Monis was not a nobody who was secretly being turned to the ways of ISIL or any other Islamist agenda . In fact ,  he was a well-known criminal . Not only had Monis been charged with being an accessory to the brutal murder of his wife last year, he had also been slapped with 22 counts of aggravated sexual assault and 14 counts of aggravated indecent assault . In addition ,  information has surfaced that he had been charged with fraud in Iran , which requested his extradition from Australia some 14 years ago . As a friend rightly pointed out on social media, Monis' criminal records qualify him as a "sexual predator and misogynist" . Yet ,  this more dominant aspect of his identity has not stopped the rest of the world from linking the Sydney siege to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism . Yet consider this . During the Sydney siege, a shooting spree incidence unfolded in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania that left 6 dead . International media agencies described the perpetrator, the now-deceased Bradley William Stone, simply as "a suspect", "a gunman on the loose" and even "a Montgomery man" . No hashtag campaign was necessary to assure white people that the rest of the world will ride with them to keep them safe . The same can be observed of the reaction to the mass killings committed by the Norwegian Anders Breivik in 2011 . While Breivik had claimed himself a baptised Christian in his 1,500-page manifesto , the world did not expect Christians to condemn terrorism in the same way Muslims had . This discrepancy is telling of the power imbalance of our contemporary world . To white Australia, #illridewithyou may be its golden moment . To the rest of the coloured world, nothing has changed .
answer:
The Sydney siege saw a slew of Muslim organisations issue statements condemning Islamic extremism


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The generational change in US-Cuba relations. The announcement of a new era of relations between the United States and Cuba came as a surprise to many who follow and study the relationship between the two rivals . The old guard of Cuban exiles, led by Senator Marco Rubio, predictably reacted with their usual anger . By contrast, many second generation Cuban Americans and advocates reacted differently - with optimism and hope for change . It is important to understand those reactions to the recent announcement as part of a broader evolution towards new relations between the US and Cuba over 20 years in the making, following fundamental security, economic, and political changes . The end of the Cold War in 1989 spelled change for Latin America, just as it did for the world . For Cuba, it meant the loss of its biggest sponsor , which plunged the island into a five-year economic tailspin, contracted its GDP by 30 to 45 percent, and precipitated a number of changes to Cuban policy and law . Those reforms have accelerated throughout the last decade, including an ongoing plan to unify the island's dual currency . Cuba has had no choice but to liberalise portions of its economy and European countries have been able to take advantage of those opportunities . In the last two decades, a Cuban economy starved for growth has looked overseas and seen the island more willing to come to agreement regarding foreign presence . The implications of the fall of the Soviet Union were not only economic in nature, but also resulted in a shift in US policy towards Latin America more broadly . In the 20-plus years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US has tolerated, or even openly collaborated with, leftist regimes in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Honduras that in another era would have been deliberately undermined, or perhaps overthrown, as in the cases of Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua . The strategic and military calculus of our relationship with Cuba has fundamentally changed . Presidents and Congress no longer have the blanket justification of Cuba as a military threat as they did during the Cold War . For Cuban exiles, 1989 was not so much a watershed moment as an opportunity to continue applying pressure to a failing regime . The Cuban-American lobby continued to promote isolationism , believing that this post-Soviet moment was finally the chance to see a democratic counterrevolution on the island . This belief that isolation would force the collapse of Castro regime restricted policy responses available to the US government and presidential administrations . Changes in the global economic and political relationship with Cuba did not affect US policy and Cuba, for the most part, was excluded from the more moderate and tolerant US foreign policy towards Latin America . Republican presidents and legislators proved to be more punitive towards the island - particularly given their reliance on the Cuban-American lobby for monetary and electoral support in south Florida . Despite a cooling in relations during the late 1990s, due to the shooting down of the two US planes flown by "Brothers to the Rescue", President Bill Clinton eased restrictions on humanitarian aid, broadened the ability to send remittances, increased allowable person-to-person interactions, and resumed direct flights between the countries . President Clinton's actions were part of a broader government strategy of "constructive engagement" , in which the US would actively engage with the Cuban people, but maintain pressure on the government . The new millennium did not bring significant changes in relations as, true to Republican form, President George W Bush maintained the status quo of "constructive engagement" . If anything , his administration took a harder line, at times including Cuba in the same paragraph as the "Axis of Evil" . However , even as President Bush, Senator Marco Rubio, and conservative Cuban- American legislators continued to push a hard line on Cuba , the profile of the average Cuban American changed . The stereotypical conservative Cuban - still upset, and rightfully so, over the nationalisation of private property and human rights abuses during the revolution - still attempts to dominate political discourse . But a new face of the Cuban American has emerged - young, second-generation children have come of age with the desire to see for themselves the homeland that they have only heard about in stories ; and new, post-1989 migrants, who are economic rather than political refugees, have closer personal ties to the island . The election of President Obama and the nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State signalled a new era with a renewed focus on diplomacy . Four months after taking office, the administration quietly continued to liberalise relations between the US and Cuba . However ,  Alan Gross' imprisonment in 2009 gave opportunity for the age-old arguments against Cuba to resurface , with the old guard claiming that nothing had changed and seeing it as the latest example of the long history of Cuban aggression . I do not dispute the fact that the Castro brothers have been harsh dictators and that their system of government has deeply damaged multiple generations of Cubans, nor do I dispute that regime change should still be a goal of US policy . However as my analysis has shown, the rest of the story has changed . Cuba's economy continues to search for growth , and the government is actively looking outside the country for investment . Long gone are the existential security threats that came from the island during the Cold War . Moreover ,  this reflects the changing opinions of Cuban Americans . The new modes of engagement announced by Obama on December 17 were not an acknowledgement of defeat, but an effort for a new way forward that reflects those changes . December 17 will no doubt be an important moment in the lives of Cubans and Cuban Americans , but it deserves more analysis than the knee-jerk reactions on the front pages of newspapers and talk shows in the US . Obama should be commended for basing policy on facts rather than emotions . The US must continue to actively engage with the island, lest we lose the opportunity to influence a neighbour that is gradually rejoining the regional and world economy and political order .
answer:

The announcement of a new era of relations between the United States and Cuba came as a surprise to many who follow and study the relationship between the two rivals