Ouster of Zelaya was a legal act

BY MIGUEL A. ESTRADA

Honduras, the tiny Central American nation, had a change of leaders on June 28. The country's military arrested President Manuel Zelaya -- in his pajamas, he says -- and put him on a plane bound for Costa Rica. A new president, Roberto Micheletti, was appointed. Led by Cuba and Venezuela (Sudan and North Korea were not immediately available), the international community swiftly condemned this so-called ``coup.''

Keeping the arts in the picture

BY BEN DONENBERG

I recently sent an article to a philanthropic leader about the importance of helping arts organizations during the recession. I thought he might draw inspiration from it, but that was too optimistic.

The education of Sonia Sotomayor

BY PETER WINN

The first time she walked into my office in Princeton University's Dickinson Hall, Sonia Sotomayor was holding a paper she'd written for my Contemporary Latin America course. It was marked up with my corrections in red ink. Spanish was her first language, and many of her errors reflected its syntax. Where she had written ''dictatorship of authority,'' I had scribbled ``authoritarian dictatorship.''

The beginning of Palin's end in politics

BY MICHAEL CAREY

Sarah Palin's career as governor of Alaska is over. So is her barely begun career as a serious presidential candidate. The road map to the White House doesn't include a stop at ``I quit.''

Obama's strategic blind spot

BY ANDREW J. BACEVICH

''Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?'' During the bitter winter of 1914-15, the first lord of the Admiralty posed this urgent question to Britain's prime minister.

To achieve green goals we must define green jobs

BY LILA JABER

Florida's businesses and workforce are weathering one of the toughest economic storms in decades. However, there is a great opportunity on the horizon that our state is poised to seize upon to grow and attract businesses, create and sustain jobs and secure Florida's position as a global economic leader. As states gear up to vie for stimulus dollars to help cultivate their green economies, Florida must define now, more clearly and definitively, our green economy -- and the green jobs that sustain...

The U.S. in Iraq: an audit of the pain

BY LINDA J. BILMES and JOSEPH STIGLITZ

Tuesday, the United States ''stood down'' in Iraq, finalizing the pullout of 140,000 troops from Iraqi cities and towns -- the first step on the long path home. After more than six years, most Americans are war-weary, even though a smaller percentage of us have been involved in the actual fighting than in any major conflict in U.S. history. We have relegated the car and suicide bombings to the inside pages of newspapers, accepting at face value that the ''surge'' has calmed things down enough so...

Pakistan seems ready to crack down on Taliban

BY AHMED RASHID

Has the Pakistani government, after years of vacillation, finally gotten serious about eliminating the Taliban threat? Maybe. For the first time since 9/11, Pakistan's army has begun a decisive military offensive to drive the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist groups out of South Waziristan, one of seven tribal agencies that border Afghanistan.

Finding what works in healthcare

BY WILLIAM C. WELDON

Congress took an important step for healthcare when it provided $1.1 billion to fund ''comparative effectiveness research'' as part of the stimulus legislation this year.

Does Jenny Stanford represent a new breed of political wife?

BY SUSAN CAMPBELL

An indication that Gov. Mark Sanford's extramarital affair wouldn't be business as usual was the absence of his wife, Jenny Sanford, from his icky news conference last week.

Healthcare reform: Second opinions

BY RAHUL RAJKUMR and HAROLD POLLACK

When President Barack Obama visited Chicago recently to discuss healthcare reform with the American Medical Association, his reception was polite but not entirely friendly. After weeks of behind-the-scenes courting by the White House, the AMA had just come out against a public health insurance plan -- something the administration hopes will be included in healthcare reform.

Anne Frank's unstilled voice

BY GEORGE STEVENS JR.

Anne Frank would have celebrated her 80th birthday this month. The diary she wrote as a teenager in a cramped Amsterdam attic lives in the hearts of readers across the world. Her story has been a continuing inspiration to many and made her one of the most enduring voices of World War II.

The man in the mirror loathed his reflection

BY COURTLAND MILLOY

What killed Michael Jackson? This autopsy does not require a scalpel. A mirror will do. ''He had the nose of a black male, and he didn't want one,'' Scott L. Spear, chairman of the plastic surgery division at Georgetown University, told me. ``He was a black man who wanted to look like a white Diana Ross.''

The prescience of protest

BY NATAN SHARANSKY

Once again, the world is amazed. As with the seemingly sudden appearance of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, or the gaudy, grand-scale collapse of the Soviet empire at the end of that decade, the massive revolt of Iranian citizens has elicited the unmitigated surprise of the free world's army of experts, pundits and commentators. Who would have known? Who could have predicted this eruption of protest in a system so highly repressed, where a generally quiescent populace lives under...

To sell healthcare, tell a story

BY DREW WESTERN

''Universal healthcare.'' ''The uninsured.'' ''Public option.'' These are the buzzwords you often hear from Democrats and proponents of President Obama's plan for healthcare reform. But if they want to see that plan enacted, they'd do well to excise those phrases from their vocabulary.

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