The ninth day of November is laden with meaning in Germany. Two of those dates in the 20th century, 1938 and 1989, have special significance and everlasting lessons,
On Nov. 9, 1989, I found myself on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall in the apartment of a dissident Lutheran pastor whose church provided safe haven for disaffected East Germans.
Iwatch Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources media-review show most Sunday mornings on CNN. That's partly because since Fox News scrapped its weekly News Watch, it's the only regular program on national television that looks at the news media critically. That's also because Kurtz, The Washington Post's chief media writer, does a good job bringing in knowledgeable people to talk about the major traps the media fell into that week.
As I was talking recently with the founder of a large American corporation, the conversation turned (inevitably) to healthcare reform. His employees in their 20s, on average, cost the company about $1,500 a year in health bills. Those in their 50s cost at least 10 times more. The effect of proposed healthcare reform -- which limits the ability of insurers to charge higher premiums for older adults -- would be, he said, a large shift of America's healthcare burden to the younger generation.
Below are excerpts from AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka's recent testimony before the House Financial Services Committee:
Our members were not invited to Wall Street's party but we have paid for it with devastated pension funds, lost jobs, and public bailouts of private sector losses. Our goal is a financial system that is transparent, accountable and stable, that is the servant of the real economy rather than its master.It's been 11 years since I looked through a photo album smuggled out of Afghanistan by a brave young woman. ``This is a doctor,'' she said, pointing to one picture. ``This is a teacher.'' It was impossible to tell one woman from another under the burqas enforced by their Taliban rulers.
There's little I can add to the big news about the secret kept for decades by Juanita Castro: Her valiant collaboration with the CIA to save from imprisonment and execution the democrats of the domestic opposition whom her brothers Fidel and Raúl crushed with such virulence. Her memoirs and statements testify to her private crusade.
Since the time of the American Revolution, this country has had a military comprised almost entirely of citizen volunteers. Until the First World War almost all of our wars were fought close to home, which helped the military retain high visibility and rapport with the civilian population. This gave the people the sense, and in many cases literally, that they were personally being protected. Frequently it was a father, brother or son fighting a hundred miles or less from home. The military were heroes, the good guys who were lauded in songs and novels.
Despite the global recession, the sounds of construction are well underway along the pathway that brings about 2.1 million tons of general cargo to Miami's port each year after passing through the Panama Canal. Along the canal, cranes and bulldozers hum as reminders that, yes, in fact, things will get better.
Harry Truman could've taught Barack Obama a thing or two about how to deal with a hostile press -- basically, by ignoring it.
With the ``reelection'' of President Hamid Karzai, if that's the right word for a process that featured fraudulent balloting and a canceled runoff, the United States now confronts the hardest puzzle of all about Afghanistan: How to improve governance there -- which most experts agree is essential to defeat the Taliban -- without taking even more control from Afghan officials?
Anyone familiar with the Honduras crisis can be forgiven for being skeptical about the viability of last week's agreement to end the four-month deadlock between opposing political forces in that shaken Central American nation.
The Obama administration may be going down a dead end. In an Oct. 13 meeting with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Obama said: ``Tell Raúl that if he doesn't take steps, I won't be able to go further.'' A few days later the Spanish foreign minister met with Raúl Castro. We don't know if he delivered the message.
Ayear after Barack Obama's election stirred broad hopes for change among American voters, persistent high unemployment and the spectacle of continued gridlock in Washington threaten Democratic dominance of the political landscape.
There's a new sheriff in town and his name is John V. Gillies. Not the sheriff, actually, but the new Special Agent in Charge of the Miami FBI Division, which makes him more powerful than a sheriff. Local politicians take note.
By now, the American people have made it crystal clear to Washington that what they want out of healthcare reform is a plan focused on reducing costs, not growing government.
Anthony McKinney got a life sentence for running down the street.
As parents, teachers and coaches have long known, teens think differently than adults. So, it comes as no surprise that a substantial and growing body of science confirms that although adolescents may demonstrate cognitive abilities similar to those of adults, they are less capable of mature judgment.
We used to hear quite a bit about the Bush administration's supposed ``war on science.''
What about the Obama administration's war on mathematics?When President Barack Obama addressed Congress in September, he made a compelling case for healthcare reform.
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