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.
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Question: The hapless, harmless Palestinian leader? January 15 marks a decade since Mahmoud Abbas became the Palestinian president , during which time the goals he claims to espouse not only remain unrealised, but are more remote than ever . He is still in office despite his term ending six years ago; the democratic process that brought him to power no longer in existence . He speaks of his people's human rights while his Palestinian Authority actively curtails them . He claims to champion their national rights while collaborating unconditionally with the country that denies them . Abbas' image as a hapless, harmless figure deflects from the cunning and ruthlessness of someone whose primary concern, like the Middle East's other autocrats, seems to be his longevity . The fact that he plays ball with the West and Israel somehow makes this okay . Where other Arab strongmen nurture an image of power to maintain it , he relies on being seen as an underdog . But this illusion, which has traditionally served Abbas well, no longer extends to his people . Many think he and the PA serve their own interests and those of Israel, rather than those of the Palestinians . According to a poll last month, 55 percent believe that the PA has become "a burden on the Palestinian people" . Regarding the presidency, Abbas has consistently lagged in opinion polls behind his Fatah colleague, Marwan Barghouti . Since Israel's last Gaza invasion, he also runs behind Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh . Is it mere coincidence, then, that Abbas has been lacklustre in campaigning for Barghouti's release from Israeli jail; or in pursuing and implementing national unity deals with Hamas that call for elections? Since the signing of the latest reconciliation agreement in April, Abbas has at various times threatened to end it, and has been openly adversarial towards Hamas . Elections that were due within six months never happened , so he remains unchallenged - this has gone largely unnoticed . The PA - which is meant to safeguard Palestinian rights- serially abuses them . Human Rights Watch has documented "police beatings and arbitrary arrests of demonstrators", "excessive force", "repressing critical news reporting and demonstrations", "suppressing dissenting views", and "serious rights abuses, including credible allegations of torture" , for which "no security officials were convicted" . As such, the PA is not only failing to curb Israeli abuses, but is busy perpetrating its own, all under Abbas' watch . The PA has garnered a reputation among Palestinians for managing the occupation rather than striving to end it . One way it does this is "security coordination" with Israel , which Abbas described last year as "sacred" despite the vast majority of Palestinians opposing it . Such coordination serves Israel by enabling it to subcontract its occupation, and serves the PA by helping it suppress internal dissent . It certainly does not benefit the Palestinian people . Abbas and his foreign minister have made grotesque assurances that as long as he is president, he will not allow an uprising against Israel . So the PA, which is supposed to be part of a national liberation struggle, is willing to put down an uprising by its own people against their subjugation . This is nothing short of betrayal . For more than 20 years, the PA has participated in a "peace process" that has greatly entrenched Israeli control . Abbas himself was an architect of the disastrous Oslo Accords . The occupied territories are now so colonised and fragmented that a viable Palestinian state is widely considered impossible . Yet ,  Abbas still wants to negotiate, despite Israel being clearly opposed to Palestinian self-determination . What, then, is the point of negotiating? Perhaps to preserve the privileged elites to which the PA and the "peace process" gave birth . After all ,  allegations of corruption and nepotism, including Abbas and his family, are nothing new . With the help of international aid, the PA is the largest employer of Palestinians, much like other autocracies that encourage public dependence on the state to avoid mass unrest . A power imbalance alone cannot explain Abbas' policy choices regarding Israel . He opposes armed resistance, and has gone to great lengths to disarm militants in the West Bank . However ,  he also opposes peaceful forms of resistance, including the increasingly effective Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement . Furthermore ,  it took the PA more than two years since Palestine's upgraded UN status to apply to join the International Criminal Court, despite repeated threats to do so amid constant Israeli provocations . That Abbas finally relented may not only, or necessarily, be about losing patience with Israel, but about assuaging mounting Palestinian anger at his procrastination in applying to the ICC . Meanwhile, he says he will keep pushing for a UN Security Council resolution calling for a deadline to end Israel's occupation , despite the certainty of repeated failure by US veto . Abbas seems to be attempting a balancing act . He wants to prove to Israel, and his western and Arab backers, that he is their best Palestinian partner, safe in the knowledge that they will not accept Hamas rule, but mindful not to suffer the same fate as Yasser Arafat once he was no longer deemed useful or reliable . However ,  his recent, uncharacteristic defiance against Israel reflects a need to stop his flagging domestic popularity turning into an uprising against him and the PA . Abbas has nothing to show his people after 10 years as president, and at least another decade as part of the "peace process" . He remains in office because of, not despite, Israel's occupation and Palestinian disunity .

Answer: January 15 marks a decade since Mahmoud Abbas became the Palestinian president during which time the goals he claims to espouse not only remain unrealised, but are more remote than ever


Question: Southern Baptist Convention President: The spiritual state of our union. Questions Worth Asking . I love America and believe each citizen needs to be involved in charting the future of our nation . Our churches have compartmentalized faith and kept it from influencing our nation for far too long, just as most of America's leaders compartmentalize their faith from their politics . Today, our nation has become a product of this sad reality . We need to return to the conviction that a faith worth believing in is a faith worth dying for . Our faith cannot be checked at the door like a piece of luggage at an airport . The Time is Now . The time is now for our nation to recognize that we cannot fix ourselves . The signs of our brokenness are glistening in our dark world . The blatant destruction of the family, the killing of unborn children, the continuing racial tension, the rebellion against authority, the ongoing reality of poverty, the rising threat of our security, the clear attacks against religious liberty and, of all things, the arrogance to believe the highest court in our land can rule on what the Bible says is genuine marriage testify to just how broken we really are . Where Do We Go From Here? 1 \. We need to repent . Repentance occurs when we have a change of mind . This change of mind changes our behavior . As a nation, we need to personally and collectively repent of our sins . We need to ask God for His free gift of forgiveness for the sins we have committed, resulting in change from that point forward . 2 \. We need to return to God . America is a nation that was built on a deep belief in God . A desire for religious liberty was the catalyst for the beginning of our nation . While we have gone through ups and downs in our history , God has been very merciful and gracious toward us . It is time to return to God . It is time to stop making every issue about ourselves, posturing to ensure we get our way . God's way is the only way . There is no other . Anything less than God's way diminishes our happiness, our fulfillment and even our liberty . 3 \. We need our churches to wake up . Churches all over our nation need to wake up from the slumber we find ourselves in as a whole . We need pastors to return to their spiritual calling, be rekindled by the fire of God and declare the hope we have in the Lord . As a pastor goes, so goes the church . As our churches go, so goes our nation . The evidence is overwhelming of just how broken we are as a nation . This is the greatest hour for our churches to rise up . Never more has America needed our churches to lead the way forward , serving and influencing our communities with compassion and hope . 4 \. We need a spiritual awakening . In our history, there have been seasons of spiritual awakening that have influenced the spiritual state of our nation dramatically . Lives were changed and subcultures became different . Spiritual awakening is our greatest need in America today . There are many who have probably never even thought about this need . Others may feel we have gone too far . But I want to assure you : God can do more in a moment than we can ever do in a lifetime . Wherever you are in life, would you just stop for one moment and pray something like this:"God, would you please bring spiritual awakening to America? It is our greatest need."? America's greatest need is the next great move of God . This is our hope .

Answer: Churches all over our nation need to wake up from the slumber we find ourselves in as a whole We need pastors to return to their spiritual calling, be rekindled by the fire of God and declare the hope we have in the Lord


Question: The Marshall Islands' latest nuclear test. The Marshall Islands - a country of about 70,000 people located in the Pacific Ocean - is taking the world's nine nuclear powers to court for allegedly violating international obligations to work towards nuclear disarmament . The list of accused is as follows: the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and Israel . Israel has made the cut despite fervently denying possession of a nuclear arsenal . The spectacle is unfolding at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the main judicial organ of the United Nations . A recent New York Times article on the Marshall Islands' "near-Quixotic venture" quotes Phon van den Biesen, head of the country's legal team, on the ultimate aim of the effort: "All the nuclear weapons states are modernising their arsenals instead of negotiating[to disarm], and we want the court to rule on this." A continuing history . The Islands' move might come off as more than a bit incongruous given its established existence as a pillar of the US-Israeli axis in UN forums . Glance at any review of General Assembly votes on Israel/Palestine issues and you'll find the Marshall Islands regularly represented in the exclusive anti- Palestine camp, along with a smattering of other obscure Pacific atolls . The fact that justice in Palestine continues to be as elusive as ever, despite nominal support from an overwhelming majority of countries, underscores both the general futility of taking on the powers that be as well as the frequent toothlessness of rulings emanating from UN institutions . The Marshall Islands presumably has some inkling of the force it's now up against . To be sure, Marshall Islanders are well acquainted with the horrors of the nuclear arms industry . The diminutive nation happens to be the site of no fewer than 67 US nuclear bomb tests in the 1940s and 50s, during an almost 40-year period in which the US administered the Islands under a UN trusteeship . As Greenpeace notes, one of these tests involved a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 . Such machinations have predictably resulted in thorough environmental contamination and continuing health complications for the local population, ranging from radiogenic cancers to babies born without bones . As Marshallese nuclear survivor Lemeyo Abon told the UN Human Rights Council in 2012:"After the [US] testing programme we've had to create new words to describe the creatures we give birth to." Lexical fallout aside, other US contributions to Marshallese culture include the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll , which continues to generate revenue for US corporations . The widespread territorial displacement necessitated by the previous era of fanatical nuclear testing meanwhile highlights the irony of Marshallese government support for the US-funded entity that displaces and otherwise oppresses Palestinians . Of course , human beings are contradictory creatures , and nations composed of lots of human beings are thus inevitably also contradictory . But in assessing the prospects for the Islands' foray into the International Court of Justice, it's worth taking the contradictions into account . Connecting the dots . The New York Times points out that the court case "comes as nuclear arms are increasingly being linked to other pressing international issues" such as climate change  - which produces rising sea levels that incidentally also pose an existential threat to the Marshall Islands . The Times quotes Marshallese Foreign Minister Tony de Brum on the seemingly parallel threats to survival:"What would it gain mankind to reach a peaceful resolution of the climate change threat, only to be wiped out by a nuclear misunderstanding?" There are certainly common denominators between climate change and nukes - not least that both are filed away in many of our brains under the category of things that we know can swiftly destroy us but would prefer not to think about . However ,  there appears to be a missing link in de Brum's analysis , because you can't resolve the climate change threat without resolving the business of imperial militarism, in both its nuclear and non-nuclear varieties . The connection between the military-industrial complex and environmental catastrophe is fairly clearly spelled out in Project Censored's annual report from 2010 , which confirms the US Department of Defense as the worst polluter on the planet . This is not to imply, obviously, that the US constitutes the one and only problem for the earth ; it's simply to draw attention to the superior egregiousness of American earthly violations . Had there been an Ayatollah Khomeini Ballistic Missile Test Site in the mix somewhere, folks might be more willing to connect the dots . While it may not be very coherent of the Marshall Islands to assist the empire in some destructive endeavours and take it to task for others , its nuclear lawsuit should nonetheless be encouraged  - if for no other reason than the possibly vain hope that awareness can help combat inertia . And another vain hope: that with attention will come context .

Answer:
The Marshall Islands - a country of about 70,000 people located in the Pacific Ocean - is taking the world's nine nuclear powers to court for allegedly violating international obligations to work towards nuclear disarmament