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Yesterday at the UN, as many countries of the Middle East navigated a great generational change, the United States missed a perfectly timed opportunity to take a stand for peace and human rights. The U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution, sponsored by 130 nations, calling on Israel to cease settlement activity in Palestinian territory.
The settlements, along with the evictions, demolitions, forced displacements that go with them, are seen as a main obstacle to any legitimate peace process. Human rights groups like Amnesty International have also argued that Israel’s policy of settling its civilians on occupied land violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The

By Tala Dowlatshahi
Many of the protests across the Middle East and North Africa are in the process of transforming Muslim society. They are a cause for celebration as democracy establishes a foothold in Egypt. The potential for its legacy to spread, perhaps even into Iran, is one that all of my fellow comrades who support the green movement can only hope for. But along with the rallies and touching speeches, there was also chaos–as there always seems to be in any kind of large celebratory

The Iranian people have been in the streets for decades. The big moments are crystallized in media memory – 1979, 1999, 2009, and now. There are people in the streets in Iran this week, as they were last week. They do not want an Islamic Republic of

This is but a snapshot. A frozen moment in time, guaranteed to transmogrify on an hourly basis. So, knowing the situation is fluid, here’s your Friday budget update and if I were you, I’d find a nice comfy chair to plop down into, because this promises to be more frustrating than translating Sanskrit into Japanese using Morse Code smoke signals in the rain.
President Obama released HIS budget plan, which calls for tens of billions of dollars of program cuts mixed with tax increases. The Republicans countered with THEIR plan specifying nine figures of cuts only, and Ron Paul, well, he just wants to invade China, give them a proper thrashing and take all our money

As events in Egypt showed, you never know what will set off mass protest.
Here at home, over-reaching by a novice Republican governor of Wisconsin has finally triggered the protest marches that have been eerily missing during the more than three years of an economic crisis that has savaged the middle and bottom and rewarded the top.
It’s not as if we lack a politics of class. As mega-investor Warren Buffett famously said, there is plenty of class warfare in America, but the billionaire class is winning.
This economic crisis, after all, was brought on by excesses on Wall Street. Yet with the rest of the economy still mired in high unemployment and fiscal crises of public services, Wall Street was first to be bailed out, the first to return to exorbitant profitability, and the last to be held accountable.
Month after month, progressives have been asking each other, where are the mass protests?
You might expect popular indignation to be focused on the banks. Instead, the economic unease of ordinary people has been substantially captured by the Tea Party right and directed against government, while Beltway politicians of both parties are outdoing one another to vie for the role of more austere deficit hawk, which will hardly win back popular support for the public sector.
Then the newly energized Republicans made a couple of big

While Bahrain careens and Egypt moves toward a new stasis, the debate over the shape and role of the Internet intensifies in different register and in different levels of abstraction.
An important forum for this global discussion is the Department of State and its vision for the Internet. There’s now an incipient tradition: an annual Clinton Internet-celebrating speech given in the winter months. Secretary Clinton’s George Washington University speech, given February 15, can best be understood by comparing it to the Internet speech she delivered, with great flourish and fanfare, a little more than one year

By Tala Dowlatshahi
Many of the protests across the Middle East and North Africa are in the process of transforming Muslim society. They are a cause for celebration as democracy establishes a foothold in Egypt. The potential for its legacy to spread, perhaps even into Iran, is one that all of my fellow comrades who support the green movement can only hope for. But along with the rallies and touching speeches, there was also chaos–as there always seems to be in any kind of large celebratory

My guest post today is from Ernesto Morales Licea, until recently one of my fellow bloggers on the Island. Ernesto is a journalist who was fired from his position allegedly for, as he eloquently describes here, reading forbidden materials. A campaign of serious accusations was then launched against him, and he recently moved to the United States where he is once again working as a journalist and continuing to blog.
Uncomfortable Freedoms
By Ernesto Morales Licea
One of the most notable differences between living and growing socially in a democratic country versus doing so in a country governed by totalitarian precepts, is the respect for freedom to make one’s own decisions. The sovereign freedom to choose in each moment what to do with one’s own life.
“Great freedom implies great responsibility,” a friend told me on my arrival in the United

I wrote in a previous post about why America’s manufacturing sector, despite record output, is actually in very deep trouble: record output doesn’t prove the sector healthy when we are running a huge trade deficit in manufactured goods, i.e. consuming more goods than we produce and plugging the gap with asset sales and debt.
But this analysis of the problem only touches the quantitative surface of our ongoing industrial decline. Real industries are not abstract aggregates; they are complex ecosystems of suppliers and supply chains, skills and customer relationships, long-term investments and returns. Deindustrialization is thus a more complex process than is usually

In this Sunday’s New York Times, I have purchased a full-page ad as an open letter to Neil Portnow, NARAS and the Grammy Awards. Here’s why.
Over the course of my 20-year history as an executive in the music business and as the owner of a firm that specializes in in-culture advertising, I have come to the conclusion that the Grammy Awards have clearly lost touch with contemporary popular culture. My being a music fan has left me with an even greater and deeper sense of dismay — so much so that I feel compelled to write this letter. Where I think that the Grammys fail stems from two key sources: (1) over-zealousness to produce a popular show that is at odds with its own system of voting and (2) fundamental disrespect of cultural shifts as being viable and artistic.
As an institution that celebrates artistic works of musicians, singers, songwriters, producers and technical specialists, we have come to expect that the Grammys upholds all of the values that reflect the very best in music that is born from our

FIRST — THE PREAMBLE
A Q&A (plus translation) with Tom Sherak – President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences – on February 16th 2011
Question: “Why not put that occasion on TV so that actors such as Lauren Bacall and Eli Wallach and filmmakers such as Roger Corman can have a brief moment of respect in public?”
Answer: “We want to keep the evening special so they can be themselves. As we go forward, we might do some live streaming.”
Translation: We don’t want any old people drooling on camera. We’re not the Golden Girls. We’re the Golden Statue that brings Golden Bullion to

It was a tough week for the teen sensation. Justin Bieber’s new movie Never Say Never finished second at the box office last weekend, then he lost at the Grammys, was the subject of controversy for a Rolling Stone story, and his character was killed on CSI. But that wasn’t symbolic of the end of Bieber: He grabbed headlines on Friday night with his MVP performance at… the NBA all-star celebrity

QUESTION
Hi,
I have grown up moving around a lot—five middle schools and six elementary schools to be exact. Always being the new kid conditioned me to meet new people. Once I hit a certain point with friends, I find new ones. I guess I get bored or

It is a nightmare for an entire religious tradition to be put on the stand as a collective for the actions of an extreme few. It is worse still when the extreme few are such a miniscule fraction of the population.
In spite of mounting evidence that Muslim Americans are excelling at collaboration with American law enforcement and widely condemning terrorism, United States Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York who chairs the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, seeks to hold hearings about why Muslim Americans are undergoing supposed “radicalization.”
If they move forward, as King has repeatedly stated they will, these hearings will allow political grandstanding to become a precedent for fighting terrorism. Internationally, they may create tension in strategic diplomatic relationships between the United States and majority-Muslim countries and lend credence to the heretofore-inaccurate voices that claim the American government is

It was a crowded weekend at the box office for the second weekend in a row, as three major openers squared off against a surprisingly resilient animated feature from the week before. The top flick of the weekend was the Liam Neeson thriller Unknown. The film opened with $21.7 million over three-days, which is about on par with the $24 million debut of Taken (review) two-years ago over Super Bowl weekend. From a marketing point of view, Taken did have some advantages over this new

Last month, Bishop Elias Taban, head of the Sudan Evangelical Alliance, wrote an urgent plea to Christians in the West:
The treaty Bishop Taban references is the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which would be the first international agreement to regulate the international sale of weapons. It would close current loopholes that are at the heart of countless stories of violence against women, families forced to become refugees, children made soldiers, and other horrors.
From the Sudan to Kosovo to Burma, from the Somali coast to the Mexican border, the situation is the same: Christians live in terror as well-armed warlords, rival clans and drug smugglers use the threat of violence to control innocent populations. Churches are forced to pull missionaries or limit services as armed conflict engulfs a region. And economic growth is stifled, leaving another generation without options to build a life of dignity and purpose.
In places like these, power is defined by who has the most guns and the most bullets — and the ATT would be a major step to breaking the backbone of this violent

You remember the August 4, 2010 “Oil Budget” published by NOAA and the USGS that most of the oil spilled from BP’s Macondo well blowout had magically disappeared. In a White House press conference held that day, retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen did a victory lap that the leaking well was “static” and Jane Lubchenco joined in the happy talk saying that fish that had ingested oil would quickly rid themselves of that oil and soon be safe to eat. Shortly after, respected scientist Terry Hazen of Berkeley National Labs published a report that microbes were quickly degrading the oil and that it would soon be gone.I believed at the time that all that happy talk was intended to calm public fears and get coverage of the largest environmental catastrophe in US history off of the television and out of the newspapers. I also believed that the government was intentionally downplaying the damage to help BP stay afloat so they could pay out the $20 billion in damage payments that they had

I don’t have anything worthwhile to add to the huge outpouring of commentary and analysis triggered by the Ronald Reagan Centennial, but I know a couple of very smart guys who do.
One is Lou Cannon, the definitive Reagan biographer who was my colleague on the Ridder Newspapers Washington bureau in the late 1960′s and early ’70′s – and later senior White House correspondent for the Washington Post. He had been covering then-Gov. Reagan for the San Jose Mercury and had just written a dual biography of Reagan and Jesse Unruh.
The other is David McCullough, America’s premier historian whom I met when he accompanied my then-boss Vice President Mondale to the Panama Canal in 1978 shortly after publication of his epic prize-winning book about the creation of the canal, “The Path Between the Seas.”
Both have remained friends since, I’m proud to say, which is my excuse for resurrecting two columns I wrote in The Hill about their insights into Reagan that I think explain the Great Communicator as well or better than anyone

By carpool and caravan, populists are crowing the capitol to stand up for working people. Millions of Americans are standing together today saying “we are all Wisconsin workers.” All eyes are on Madison watching to see whether America’s public service workers will continue to have a voice on the job and whether – by extension – any of us will.
The outpouring in Wisconsin erupted after years of downward pressure on wages and benefits that public employees have been feeling for years. Benefits negotiated when private sector jobs were flush are resented now that recession takes its

The battle of public employees for their rights in Wisconsin is about fairness, the preservation and expansion of the middle class and keeping the American Dream alive. In the face of a vicious Republican, corporate and brazenly political assault on the ability of workers to negotiate for a better life, Wisconsin’s workers are fighting back. They’re standing up for their right to collectively bargain and they’re standing up for all of us.
The tenacity, courage and commitment of the protesters have been

Ric Francis/AP
Last week we invoked memories of King Tut, presenting two chess compositions in which the black king is mated, surrounded by eight black pawns. You can find the solutions at the end of this column. This week we present a slightly different “King Tut motif. ” Entombing the king in chess studies is usually done at the edge of the chessboard and often leads to spectacular

Watson’s impressive debut on Jeopardy this past week got me wondering if there has ever been a serious attempt to program an artificial intelligence to write good poetry. I don’t mean just throwing together a proper meter and rhyme scheme — that seems easy enough. I’m talking about an attempt to create a machine that “understands” how to manipulate language to convey freshness, wisdom and emotional depth.
So I searched the web for Watson’s poetic doppelganger, imagining a blinking, spinny sphere that, out of principle, hasn’t sold out to the national TV spotlight, and that perhaps wears a beret. The internet is, in fact, rife with crude programs called poetry generators that randomly feed a user-supplied library of descriptive words into set poetic

Another Valentine’s Day come and gone. While some hearts have melted, others have suffered a meltdown. A 2004 study shows that couples are 2.55 times more likely to break up during the weeks leading up to and after Valentine’s Day compared with any other month. Gawker’s Worst Breakup Story Contest this year was proof positive of

What better way to help a child find happiness than to start within — being her own best friend. When your child has a best friend inside, she can be happy no matter what storms of life are outside. With a strong foundation of self-love and self-acceptance, kids learn to value their own company and integrity over just fitting in. They realize they can nurture and depend on themselves.
Like six-year-old Chloe who ran from the playground because she felt excluded and believed she had no