Two monuments in Paris are so prominent that they’re hard to miss. One is the Eiffel Tower, of course, the all-iron tour de force of engineering, standing by the Seine amid the city’s spacious and supremely elegant West End. Then to the north, atop Montmartre, there is the Sacré-Cœur: a tall, immaculately white Catholic basilica [...]
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Jacob Laksin | February 1, 2010 | Posted in
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The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced [...]
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Jacob Laksin | February 1, 2010 | Posted in
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The world turns. In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.
In New Zealand, a German tourist, Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch [...]
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Jacob Laksin | February 1, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.
The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year’s then unprecedented [...]
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Jacob Laksin | February 1, 2010 | Posted in
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It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.The president seems more poised to move [...]
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Jacob Laksin | February 1, 2010 | Posted in
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Climate science is under assault, progress towards a treaty to end global warming is shuddering to a halt, and Barack Obama is struggling to press on with his clean energy agenda.This was the last conversion to the environmental cause that anybody would have wanted.In a new audiotape that surfaced today on the al-Jazeera network, Osama [...]
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Jacob Laksin | January 29, 2010 | Posted in
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When you watch a president give a State of the Union Address on television, you’re always watching three people: the president at the podium, and the vice president and House speaker on the rise behind him. As a TV shot it’s awkward. The vice president and the speaker have been instructed by media professionals not [...]
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Jacob Laksin | January 29, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON — The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control [...]
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Jacob Laksin | January 29, 2010 | Posted in
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Washington (CNN) — The White House is considering moving the site of the September 11 attack trial from Manhattan if the U.S. Justice Department sees fit, senior administration officials confirmed Friday.
“Conversations have occurred within the administration to discuss contingency options should the possibility of a trial in Lower Manhattan be foreclosed upon by Congress or [...]
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Jacob Laksin | January 29, 2010 | Posted in
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One of the unwritten laws of opinion journalism is to never kick a man when he’s dead, at least, not until an appreciable amount of time has passed. The question is whether this can or should hold true for those who make their living by doing precisely that. The death at the age of 87 [...]
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Jacob Laksin | January 29, 2010 | Posted in
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