Worldcrunch
That’s no gator — this here is Captain Nemo’s mighty Nautilus, born from French 19th-century author Jules Verne“s imagination. About as soon as I learned to read, I’d immerse myself in Captain Nemo’s adventures aboard this futuristic submarine, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. Later, when I was in high […]
-Analysis- Last week, just a day after the abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James B. Comey set off the worst round of criticism Donald Trump’s young presidency, the next — and perhaps even more damaging — controversy was being ignited. The Washington Post is reporting that Trump allegedly revealed highly classified information to Russian Foreign […]
NEW YORK CITY — The 19th-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde defined the marketplace as a war between buyers and sellers. He called price “a truce” obtained by haggling. It was because of that “war” mentality, he explained in his Selected Papers, that authorities in Europe began fixing prices on goods and services. The goal was […]
President Trump’s hard line on immigration is spurring a surge of high-tech investment, as farmers scramble for new ways of coping with labor shortages and slumping profits.
-OpEd- I’m a Donald Trump supporter. I voted for him and — 112 days in — I’d vote for him again. As a former member of Congress, I found his call to “drain the swamp” in Washington particularly appealing. D.C. needs a kick in the rear and I see Trump as the boot. But I’m not here to be a cheerleader for President Trump, and I’m not on his payroll. When he does something wrong, it’s my duty as a talk-show host, and as a citizen, to call him out. I always have and always will, so let me be […]
-Analysis- Having spent his whole life running a family business, Donald Trump is still adjusting to the strategic art of control required to effectively run the White House — and help lead the world. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, making him the shortest serving director since the 1920s. Comey had orbited in […]
A party is united behind an aging New York playboy with no fixed principles but an insatiable urge to be on the front page every single day.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump boasted that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” On the 100th day of his presidency, Trump invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has said that he used to roam the streets on a motorcycle looking for criminals to kill, to the White House. A Duterte state visit to Washington or Mar-a-Lago would be a ghastly spectacle, given the way the Philippines have pursued a war on drugs even more literal than the one in the United […]
-Analysis- WASHINGTON (Indiana) — This city of 11,000, nestled among a handful of low hills rising from table-flat Hoosier farm fields, is 680 miles from the other Washington, but the cultural and political divide may be even greater than the geographical distance. Solidly red Indiana backed Donald Trump by 57% to Hillary Clinton’s 37%. Voters here in Daviess County went for Trump over Clinton by 79% to 16%, more than the 74 % who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and the 67% who supported John McCain in 2008. Indeed, Daviess, tucked into the state’s southwestern toe between Illinois and […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As he nears his 100th day in office, President Donald Trump’s efforts to appear decisive and unequivocal in his responses to fast-moving global crises have been undercut by a series of confusing and conflicting messages from within his administration. Over the past two weeks, policy pronouncements from senior Trump aides have often been at odds with one another — such as whether Syrian President Bashar Assad must leave power as part of a negotiated resolution to end that nation’s civil war. In other cases, formal White House written statements have conflicted with those from government agencies, even […]
WASHINGTON — For the past year and a half, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have been ringing the alarm about rising mortality among middle-aged white Americans. The pair have attracted a bit of controversy for pointing out these facts. Recently, Pacific Standard’s Malcolm Harris suggested that their research, and the way it was presented, put too much emphasis on white mortality – when black mortality has always been worse. “American white privilege is still very much in effect, and no statistical tomfoolery can change that,” he wrote. Sam Fulwood III, a fellow at the left-leaning Center for American […]
-OpEd- When U.S. President Donald Trump recounted last week’s bombing of Syria to a Fox News journalist, the first direct U.S. assault on the regime of the war-torn country, he shared an anecdote — in vivid detail — about eating chocolate cake with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-A-Lago estate. Trump: “I was sitting […]
-Analysis- PR disasters can happen anywhere to anyone. While United Airlines is (not) doing its best to recover from the instantly infamous “re-accommodating” of a bumped passenger on an overbooked flight in Chicago, another somewhat smaller drama was playing out on the Italian island of Sicily. Ahead of next month’s G7 summit in the Sicilian […]
-Essay- PARIS — Barack Obama’s family searched the country for a dog at the beginning of his presidency. Bo’s first paw steps turned the Obama White House into a home. Is it time now that his successor, President Donald Trump, should also acquire a pet? Caitlin Gibson wrote in the Washington Post that getting a […]
NEW YORK — If you’re a middle-class American baby boomer or Gen Xer, you might have spent much of the past decade wondering what went wrong. If you’re a boomer, there’s a good chance you’re still working well after you thought you’d retire. And if you’re part of Generation X, you’re probably less wealthy than your parents were at the same age. Meanwhile, all across the U.S., pension funds are underfunded and will almost certainly have to default on some of their obligations to retirees. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, middle-class […]
WASHINGTON — It is either a turning point or a welcome aberration that President Trump found the cruelly extinguished lives of Syrian children to be compelling (or at least contributory) in his decision to use force in Syria. The nerve gas attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime, he said, “crossed a lot of lines for me . . . innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies.” Much of Trump’s appeal during his presidential campaign was based on dehumanization — the characterization of migrants as criminals and refugees as terrorist threats. This is the first instance I can recall of Trump showing […]
-Analysis- For the longest time, Donald Trump has disparaged U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, mocked his rival’s strategy in Syria, and unequivocally stated that America’s enemy in the country was terror group ISIS, not President Bashar al-Assad. Then on Friday, with little warning, Trump, as U.S. president, launched airstrikes against Syria, the first […]
We all know Donald Trump is sensitive to what he sees on TV. But rather than displaying thin skin about comedy sketches aimed at him, the American president has now joined the wider world in reacting to this week’s images of a brutal chemical attack in Syria. And in this case, it may shape the […]
-Analysis- Donald Trump is already discovering the old dictum that presidents are elected on domestic policy but eventually take refuge in foreign policy. With his own Republican party bickering and blocking his healthcare proposal in Congress, Trump turns this week to welcoming foreign leaders with whom he can attempt his powers of persuasion on a […]
WASHINGTON — The name of the gathering almost sounded like an oxymoron: the “Humanist Clergy Collaboratory.” A meeting to organize religious leaders — for people who don’t believe in organized religion? “Well,” Amanda Poppei joked, “some people would say we’re not that organized.” But the humanist clergy — spiritual leaders for people who don’t like to talk about God but do like to gather for a moral purpose — are trying to get a lot more organized. The “collaboratory,” which Poppei hosted at Washington Ethical Society, the 73-year-old humanist congregation that she leads in Northwest Washington, brought together about 40 […]
Fascism fears were greatly exaggerated in a system that puts limits on any individual’s power.
It’s a looming question for any reader of the news and follower of current events:Time magazine’s “Is Truth Dead?” cover this week does well to capture the zeitgeist of public discourse in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency. The central article travels through the place of truth in American public life, all the way […]
Apple CEO Tim Cook is betting on AR, which he sees as potentially as groundbreaking as the smartphone.
WASHINGTON — In blocking the administration’s second attempt at a travel ban from terror-prone countries, a federal judge in Hawaii laid the blame squarely on President Donald Trump and his advisers, who had suggested the policy was aimed at barring Muslims. A different politician might have expressed disappointment and moved on. But Trump, taking the stage barely an hour later at a rally Wednesday night in Nashville, let loose on the “terrible ruling” – and doubled down on the sentiments that got the policy into trouble in the first place. “The order blocked was a watered-down version of the first […]
Taking a break from visiting Salt Lake City“s landmarks (including the Salt Lake Temple you can see in the background of this picture), we enjoyed a nice walk in the lush gardens at Temple Square. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
The ACLU is spending millions on a new ‘People Power’ campaign. The civil rights group’s push is the largest piece of a sprawling ‘resistance’ moving faster than Democratic Party leaders can think.
The new U.S. president might want to think twice about taking a business-world approach to international affairs.
Talent is distributed around the globe, opportunity is not. Visit to a finance-sponsored ‘datathon’ to find the next generation of quantative wizards.
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama delivered State of the Union addresses without a full and detailed discussion of foreign policy, conservatives justifiably complained. We are a country at war, with rising, big power threats in an increasingly unstable world. All true. And yet when President Donald Trump said virtually nothing of substance Tuesday night on national security, conservatives by and large gave him a pass. Trump’s highlighting of the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens obscured the lack of substance on the cause for which Trump correctly said Owens gave his life. Repeating that we will eradicate […]
-Analysis- PARIS — How could something like this happen? Some of us have spent the past week trying to find out the facts (and comprehend the enormity) of Sunday night’s Academy Awards mega-gaffe, when La La Land was incorrectly announced as Best Picture. It turns out that the blame rests with the old school audit […]
President Donald Trump’s address to Congress marked a change in tone, but his ambitious agenda will bring conflict with lawmakers down the road.
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — For many months on the campaign trail, Donald Trump sent a clear message about his fellow Republicans: Ideologically, I’m not one of them. This wasn’t just true on trade, but also on safety-net programs that protect, among others, low-income whites. President Trump, he said, won’t let people die in the streets and […]
We all have favorite songs we listen to again and again. But there are few things as entertaining as hearing our favorite singers belt their hit tunes in another language. Love “Heroes’ by the late David Bowie? How about listening to it again … in German? Or the Johnny Cash classic “Ring Of Fire” in […]
Uber is a company built around maximizing customer service and experience — sometimes at any cost. Critics note that the price is paid by those providing the labor, the army of modestly paid freelance drivers around the world who have no guaranteed income and few if any job benefits and protections. But it seems, the […]
WASHINGTON — Back in October, Shannon Coulter was doing some late-night browsing on the Nordstrom website. Before long, the small-business owner had a nagging feeling about the department store’s line-up of Ivanka Trump apparel and shoes — a brand she couldn’t help but see in a different light amid the unfolding events of the presidential campaign. Just days earlier, news had broken of the explosive Access Hollywood footage in which Donald Trump bragged about groping women without their consent. “Something changed for me when the Trump tapes came out,” Coulter recalled in an interview. “Those words were just ringing in […]
Beyond his media attacks and over-the-top reality TV performances, Donald Trump’s lack of command of the issues is what should worry us.
WASHINGTON — With President Donald Trump in his fourth full week in office, the upheaval inside the administration that West Wing officials had optimistically dismissed as growing pains is now cementing itself as standard operating procedure. Trump — distracted by political brushfires often of his own making — has failed to fill such key posts as White House communications director, while sub-Cabinet positions across agencies and scores of ambassadorships around the globe still sit empty. Upset about damaging leaks of his calls with world leaders and other national security information, Trump has ordered an internal investigation to find the leakers. […]
WASHINGTON — The world seems to be stepping into a new era — literally. As if, all of a sudden, the Gregorian calendar is no longer valid and the world needs to start counting from the beginning. On January 20 of the year 2017, according to the old calendar, the new Trumpian calendar will start […]
-Analysis- NEW YORK — Investors are ignoring Donald Trump’s trade rhetoric at their own peril. That’s the warning coming from a rising cohort of erstwhile Trump bulls who’ve gone weak in the knees as the president turns his sights on allies from Mexico to Japan and Australia. It isn’t enough, they say, that the post-election rally that added more than $3.5 trillion to global equities and sent high-yield debt to the best start to a year since 2012 has stalled. According to them, the administration’s pledges to protect U.S. industry and redefine currency relationships could ignite a trade war with […]
Austin, Texas may be the first of many ‘sanctuary cities’ that disobey President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy.