Tag: united states
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A New Kind Of Space Race
The quest for the final frontier is still very much on. But rather than the Cold War-era space race between the two governments of the United States and Soviet Union, the competition now has many players, both public and private. The public sector these days includes China, which recently announced plans to send an unmanned […]
Trump is supported by 1 in 5 younger voters, an astonishing and consequential collapse for the GOP.
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No Limo Today
My wife Claudine was barely paying attention to the endless limousine she was walking past. Too conspicuous for her taste, maybe?
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The Apple-Samsung War Turns 10
The two tech giants are engaged in an all-out struggle for market supremacy. Samsung may sell more smartphones, but Apple generates more profit. Where will each turn next?
TIME, Aug. 22 Cuban illustrator Edel Rodriguez turned up the heat on Donald Trump in TIME magazine“s latest issue. In a cover story entitled “Inside Donald Trump’s Meltdown,” the New York-based magazine explores the Republican candidate’s disastrous summer, marred by public blunders and controversial remarks.
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How Low Will Trump Go?
SPOTLIGHT: HOW LOW WILL TRUMP GO? Waking up in European Central Time to the morning headlines means two things right now: Rio Olympic results and Donald Trump’s new low. We’ve been trying to digest the latest installment of the latter after the Republican nominee in his inimitable, er, offhanded way, said yesterday in North Carolina […]
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And All That Jazz
There’s a lot happening in this shot of an open-air market at Lafayette’s big jazz, arts and crafts festival, in Louisiana. The dolls in the foreground, the little girl sewing, the guy in the crutches — you can even spot a red box of Danish cookies!
-OpEd- So let’s stipulate: Donald Trump is not Vladimir Putin’s willing agent, and it’s not certain if or to what extent Putin is trying to elect Trump president. The real issue is that Trump and Putin share the same nihilistic approach to international relations. Together, they could transform our world. Putin already has fostered a current of ruthless, cynical and utterly unprincipled opportunism in what, before his arrival, was thought of as an increasingly cooperative and rational international community. The Russian president has embraced and perfected the use of lies for geopolitical advantage, pursued and murdered his opponents in foreign […]
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Packing Your Bag — Video Quote Of The Day
Benjamin Franklin
SPOTLIGHT: REAL LIFE ARMAGEDDON? The stuff of disaster films, an asteroid could strike Earth causing death and destruction in the next 200 years. Asteroid 101955 Bennu is currently barreling through space at 63,000 mph and is expected to slip through the moon and Earth in 2135. But a “return trip” later that century could see […]
Whoever wins the election in November, America is poised to have its most consequential first daughter since Anna Roosevelt.
PARIS — This month’s Republican and Democratic national conventions put an end to whatever doubts may have persisted about the parties’ respective presidential candidate choices. There were grumblings to be sure — from Ted Cruz and the “Anyone but Trump” crowd at the Cleveland convention, to the “Bernie or Bust” folks among the Democrats in […]
-OpEd- The Democratic National Convention will feature plenty of well-earned criticism of Donald Trump’s isolationist, revisionist, immoral and self-contradicting foreign policy agenda. But if Hillary Clinton wants to win the argument, she must also convince voters that the world is not in the catastrophic state that Trump would have them believe. Foreign policy was always going to be a big part of the 2016 presidential election, as far as the Clinton campaign was concerned. Its candidate spent four years as secretary of state and is running on her record of service. What the Clinton team did not anticipate is that […]
WASHINGTON — These are anxious times in America. Despite a steadily, if slowly, growing economy and the absence of a major war, people remain troubled by a sense of national underperformance and myriad social ills, most recently the surge in racially tinged fatal shootings committed by law enforcement officers and against them. A new Gallup poll reports that only 17% of Americans feel satisfied with the way things are going, the lowest percentage since October 2013 — and down 12 points in just the past month. For many, of course, a cause of concern is Donald Trump, who accepted the […]
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Trump’s World, Rio Threat, Sad Polar Bear
SPOTLIGHT: WORLD, MEET MR. TRUMP (AGAIN) Every four years, people around the world get a glance at those odd political spectacles, typically hosted in some mid-sized American city they’ll never visit. The U.S. national party conventions tend to get slightly bemused coverage abroad: candidates’ family values on full display, gray-haired delegates dancing to Dixie bands […]
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A Mormon State
A stone’s throw away from Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle is the Utah State Capitol building, the site where famously strict regulations on alcohol have been approved because of the Mormon religion that still dominates the state. I was surprised however to find that one could order French wine in the local restaurants.
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions. The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national […]
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A Second U.S. Police Shootings in Two Weeks
The Advocate — Baton Rouge, July 18, 2016 Another police shooting is shaking the United States two weeks after five officers were killed in Dallas. This time in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Gavin Long, an honorably discharged marine veteran, killed three police officers and wounded another three near the police station. The station has been one […]
NEW YORK — In October 1980, in his first major interview on network television, Donald Trump sat on a couch in his Fifth Avenue apartment discussing the tough decisions he had made as a builder. (“Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s Super Rich” would air the following year.) Then the 34-year-old Trump abruptly turned the casual interview into something more controversial: a lecture on the lack of leadership in the United States. Gas prices were soaring, and inflation was rampant. More than four dozen Americans who had been kidnapped from the U.S. Embassy in Iran were being held hostage while, according […]
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Oops In Yellowstone
Upon taking this mysterious shot of Yellowstone National Park“s hot springs, my camera’s lens cap fell in the mud. Thankfully it was close enough to retrieve without risking that it might melt into the landscape.
The Swiss Amish in the United States are keeping alive a vocal art passed down from their ancestors in Switzerland and eastern France. Both a symbol of identity and entertainment, yodeling was also a source of inspiration for American country music.
A sad bit of irony to the deadly assault on police Thursday night is that the Dallas police department had made great strides in reducing cases of excessive use of force.
“Ambush,” reads Friday’s front page of The Dallas Morning News, after rooftop snipers reportedly shot 11 police officers during an otherwise peacefull protest against recent police killings of African-Americans in other U.S. cities. By early Friday, five of the officers shot were reported to have died, with one civilian also wounded in the shooting clearly […]