The Senate immigration bill introduced recently contains much to cheer about, including a path to citizenship for the large majority of undocumented persons in the country. The so-called “Gang of Eight” senators, including Florida’s Marco Rubio, have fashioned a bill which, while not perfect, significantly improves upon the status quo and moves the nation forward.
Chris Anderson has been called many things: a visionary, a pioneer of the Internet economy, a proselytizer of DIY 2.0. But it’s probably more apt to think of him as a weather vane: He might not control the winds of change, but he’s often the first to see which way they’re blowing.
National Nurses Week is from May 6 to May 12, and we should honor the work that nurses do, and insist that they get their long hours reduced.
Israel’s recent attacks against Syria are the latest, dramatic development in a conflict that is already spiraling out of control. In the past few days, Israeli aircraft reportedly targeted Iranian surface-to-surface missiles headed for Hezbollah, as well as Syrian missiles in a military base in the outskirts of Damascus. Israel’s strikes show, once again, its intelligence services’ ability to penetrate the Iran’s arms shipment route to Lebanon and its military’s skill in striking adversaries with seeming impunity. But Israel is also risking retaliation and further destabilization of its own neighborhood — in ways that may come back to haunt it.
Drones are coming home. For many years, we’ve used them to hunt and kill enemies in faraway places: Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. Now we’re deploying them in the United States, not to kill but to help with civilian missions such as land surveys, livestock monitoring, and search and rescue. But psychologically, the transition is hard. Like soldiers coming home from a war, we’re become so accustomed to the mentality of combat that we’re having trouble adjusting to the idea of remotely piloted aircraft as a peaceful technology.
Mark Sanford’s long walk has ended. From the South Carolina governor’s office to the Appalachian Trail to Argentina and back, he has returned to win a seat in the House of Representatives. Political victory has redemptive powers and so Sanford now has a chance to write a new chapter in his personal history. Whatever may become of him in Washington, he has already changed the shape of Republican politics in South Carolina. The state that is home to Bob Jones University and where residents still resist removing the Confederate flag from over the state house is now defining the new standard for forgiving personal indiscretions.
Whether or not Hurricane Sandy had a connection to climate change, climate change will make future Hurricane Sandys more common, imposing enormous costs on cities.
Nowhere is this town’s dilemma over the homeless better illustrated than on a single city block off Tampa Street.
Has anyone really spelled out how difficult it could be achieving the United States’ long-term political goals regarding Syria?
Thirty-eight years ago last week, I was among the last CIA officers to be choppered off the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon as the North Vietnamese took the country. Just two years before that chaotic rush for the exits, the Nixon administration had withdrawn the last American troops from the war zone and had declared indigenous forces strong enough, and the government reliable enough, to withstand whatever the enemy might throw into the fray after U.S. forces were gone.
Made in Cambodia. Made in Turkey. Made in India.
Some highlights of a nuanced talk in San Antonio recently on Hispanic demography by Emilio Parrado of the University of Pennsylvania:
Last month, Maryland made public the premiums that health insurers want to charge next year under the Affordable Care Act, one of the first states to do so. Premiums for non-employer health-insurance coverage were eye-popping, with a proposed average increase of 25 percent.
The economics commentariat and no small part of the political debate have been consumed recently with the controversy surrounding the work of my Harvard colleagues (and friends) Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. Their work had been widely interpreted as establishing that economic growth was likely to stagnate in a country once its government debt-to-GDP ratio exceeded 90 percent.
Do you think a national poll of small-business owners would show majority support for increasing the minimum wage? How about a poll in which the small business owners were predominately Republican?
In taking steps to reward high-quality healthcare and penalize waste, the Affordable Care Act has opened a new door for technological entrepreneurship in medicine. A new monitor that automatically reminds doctors to wash their hands before entering patients’ hospital rooms, for example, could lower the abysmal rate of hospital-acquired infections in the United States.
The recent deceleration in U.S. healthcare costs appears to be at least partially structural, and not entirely due to a still-lackluster economy. That offers some hope that the slowdown will continue. Still, more needs to be done to encourage the trend.
President Obama had the opportunity this past week to make an irresponsible Congress face the consequences of its own dumb actions. For reasons I cannot fathom, he took a pass.
Pat Toomey, the U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who broke ranks with the GOP and joined with Democrat Joe Manchin in sponsoring a bill demanding universal background checks for gun purchases, had some interesting things to say this week in an interview with journalists from his home state.
President Barack Obama finally broke his long silence on Tuesday on the need to close Guantánamo. Echoing comments he made four years ago — when, on his second day in office he promised to close the facility within a year — he said “Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. . . . It needs to be closed.”
President Obama said once again last week that Syria’s “use of chemical weapons would be a game-changer.”
Polybius, in his “Histories,” tells the story of Antiochus IV, ruler of the Seleucid Empire, who invaded Egypt during the second century B.C. The Egyptians, led by Ptolemy, sent urgently to Rome for assistance. When the Roman ambassador arrived, he handed over a list of the Roman Senate’s demands, then used his staff to draw a line in the sand around the “astonished” Antiochus “and told him he must remain inside this circle until he gave his decision about the contents of the letter.”
We are about to witness the largest insect emergence on the planet, and it happens only in the eastern United States. At the beginning of May, billions of Magicicada septendecim nymphs will start to rise out of the ground en masse, from North Carolina to New York, finding a tree (or the nearest vertical structure, possibly your house) to cling to. There, they will split their skins and emerge as adults.
Barack Obama really, really does not want to get tangled up in Syria.
In the aftermath of the Boston bombings, many are asking how someone who came to America at the age of 9, attended some of our best schools, captained the wrestling team, went to the prom and became a citizen could have inflicted such a devastating attack on our society. The emerging evidence suggests that part of the answer is that no one in the past decade taught Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to love America, or at least did a very poor job of it.
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