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In advance of Barack Obama's counterterrorism speech at the National Defense University in Washington Thursday, senior White House officials briefed reporters on the meat and potatoes of the president's address. If you don't have the time to watch the entire speech (you can livestream it here), this is your perfect Cliff Notes guide:
On closing Guantanamo: All those Democratic lawmakers writing letters to the president will be pleased: He's taking their advice. The president will reiterate his call to close the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and take up a number of steps to accelerate this process that were recommended this week. Those include: Designating a location in the United States to conduct military commissions to try Guantanamo detainees, lifting his self-imposed ...
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Remember the first pivot to jobs? After wasting much of 2011 trying to strike a Grand Bargain with the Republicans on deficit reduction, which earned him the worst approval ratings of his Presidency, Obama finally woke up in the fall of that year and pivoted toward the jobs issue. He proposed the American Jobs Act, a major [...]
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It's probably fair, if crude, to talk about national societies as having "moods," or going through particular psychological states -- especially in economic depressions, when they become more fearful and less willing to take risks. The United States has spent the last few years mired in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, and [...]
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This afternoon, the Senate confirmed Sri Srinivasan to the staunchly conservative United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans already have a plan to prevent anyone else from being confirmed to this powerful court while Obama is in the White House. Obama pulled this one confirmation off because the Srinivasan nomination [...]
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The trailer for the upcoming Civil War drama Copperhead conveniently doesn't mention that the movement its titular characters were affiliated with wanted the Union to make a peace with the Confederacy that would allow for the preservation of slavery, and that it was naive enough to believe the Confederacy would come back to the Union [...]
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My esteemed colleague Jack Riley, head of digital at the Independent and Evening Standard, is leaving to join AOL/Huffington Post. I wish him well, and want to pay tribute to him for the success of The Independent on the web, but also, more selfishly, for helping me into the digital world. I started blogging in 2007, [...]
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Obamacare critics have been pointing to several companies' claims that the law is forcing them to cut their part-time workers' hours as proof that the health law is bad for businesses and employees. But a new report finds that employers were cutting health benefits and workers' hours long before Obamacare was even an idea. According [...]
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Per press release from BET, more than 6 million viewers tuned in to watch the mid-season finales of The Game and the season finale of Let's Stay Together, on Tuesday night. The release doesn't give a breakdown of that "over 6 million," like what percentage of audiences tuned in during the actual season finale hours, and what percentage watched during the encore broadcasts of both shows. The Game will return to finish the season on Tuesday, July 2, at 10pm. The network also reveals that Being Mary Jane, what was to be its freshman hour-long drama starring Gabrielle Union, from the creators of The Game (The Akils), will make its debut on Tuesday, July 2, at 10:30pm, but in the form of an...
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As Congress fails to make progress on reforming the nation's gun laws, state legislatures have filled the void. A number of states around the country, and not just deep-blue ones, have taken steps to crack down on gun violence. Even some very conservative states have defeated National Rifle Association (NRA) supported bills that would have [...]
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Justice, the bedrock of our society is for sale under the Government's latest plan to sell legal aid contracts to the highest bidders.
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This is a guest post by Brooke Bocast, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Temple University and a visiting predoctoral fellow...
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Yes, the BBC sent the snooty John Simpson to South Africa to do a bit of parachute journalism and be led around by the white "rights" group Afriforum (since when are they are a credible source?) to come up with this insulting question: "Do white people have a future in South Africa?" Read it here. The [...]
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Editor's Note: Madison Brenchak is a student at Seymour Middle School in Seymour, CT. She is a member of Seymour's Small Steps club, a participant and supporter of the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program. Learn more about the Darfur Dream Team and the Pazocalo social network that connects students at Seymour and 25 other U.S. schools with their Darfuri peers.
Right now, in 2013, it has been ten years since the tragedy occurring in Darfur started. In 2003, the Sudanese government began supporting militia groups called the Janjaweed ("Devil on Horseback" in Arabic) to terrorize villages in Darfur because of their ethnicity and with goals of acquiring land and resources. These actions have been widely recognized as genocide.
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Given South Africa's stated commitment to multilingualism, you might not think that a requirement from one of the country's universities that its students learn an indigenous African language would raise much alarm. Yet alarm has nonetheless been the reaction from a few unexpected quarters to the University of KwaZulu-Natal's announcement that all first-year students enrolled [...]
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