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For now, at least, the state's police will not be forced to check immigration status while enforcing other laws, and immigrants will not be required to carry their papers. Read more: |
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Tar balls? A sheen of crude? Oil mousse? Amateur hour. The real villains of America’s beaches are not the scattered and dissipating mess from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but the nationwide and relentless releases of disease-causing pathogens—human and animal feces—that reach the shorelines from storm runoff and sewage overflows. Read more: |
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The Shirley Sherrod story may have faded away somewhat, but conservative commentators have launched a new argument over whether she lied in her speech when she spoke about a lynching. Read more: |
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For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. But a recent exposÈ is rocking the Catholic Church, which victims’ advocates say has responded with more urgency to the rumor of gay priests than to the history of child sex abuse. Read more: |
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Because Israel is a refuge for Jews persecuted everywhere else, this kind of existential challenge is hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism--even if well-intended celebrities are not attempting anything of the kind. When people are trying to murder you because of your religion, it is difficult to credit the bona fides of those who merely want to shun you because of your government. Read more: |
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Interest groups of all sorts--big business, farmers, human-rights advocates, religious organizations, even many Cuban-Americans--have united to back a new congressional bill that would lift the travel ban and further loosen restrictions on U.S. agricultural sales to the island. Will hardline Cuban-Americans be able to defeat the bill? Read more: |
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One of the more surprising decisions to come out of the international conference held in Kabul last week was to start funneling half of foreign aid directly through the Afghan government, compared with only 20 percent now. Those billions will be an inviting target: Transparency International ranks Afghanistan second worst on its Corruption Perceptions Index. Read more: |
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Worry is rising over the risk of terrorism at Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics. Last week’s deadly attack on a hydroelectric station in Russia’s deep south only added to the concern. The number of attacks in the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus was up 57 percent last year, and unlike the Chechen wars of 1994–2001, these killings have been the work of a bewildering array of rebel groups, some motivated by radical Islam but others by separatism or clan warfare. Read more: |
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It’s become a scandalous summer in France. Allegations are mounting that the octogenarian heiress to the billions of the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune, Liliane Bettencourt, may have had some unseemly dealings with the current minister of labor, Eric Woerth, long a key fundraiser for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party. The principals deny any mischief and, in fact, most of the connections are murky, at best. But infamous political scandals usually stem from public perceptions as much as legal convictions. Read more: |
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Even though no GOP politician has formally declared a run for president in 2012, gauging how much money potential candidates have raised for their political action committees--and what they're doing with it--reveals something about their game plans: key endorsements they're trying to secure and volunteer networks they're aiming to harness. Some of these pols are starting to rev up. Others, not so much. Here's a rundown. Read more: |
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There’s a 2.0 version of health care’s public-option debate, and her name is Elizabeth Warren. She’s the Harvard law professor who’s been giving Treasury Department insiders heartburn over their excessive generosity to Wall Street bigwigs. Liberals are lobbying hard for Warren to head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, warning the White House that failure to do so would rival the left’s disappointment over President Obama’s refusal to fight for a public option. Read more: |
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The financial-reform bill signed into law last week includes a section on dangerous mortgages, with a provision for educating the elderly, the poor, minorities, those with language barriers, and “other potentially vulnerable consumers.” Who’s not mentioned but should be? The young. Among unemployed Americans ages 18 to 29, more than a quarter are behind on mortgage payments, one 2009 study found, and this group also has soaring credit-card debt and bankruptcy rates. Read more: |
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The Mini Cooper, Honda Fit, and Smart cars are stalling. Here are three 2013 imports aiming to revive the small-car market with huge highway mileage. Read more: |
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The problem with the version of the New Black Panthers story circulating in right-wing media is that everything rests on one man's unverifiable testimony. Rather than find facts, those driving the narrative are content to repeat the same unverified story over and over. Read more: |
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Don Draper is back—and in many ways, 'Mad Men' now feels like a brand-new show. Some of the differences are subtle—Peggy Olson has freshened her priggish hairstyle, for one thing—but there’s so much new going on in Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce that such details might only assert themselves with repeated viewings. What can fans expect? Read more: |
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Reading this book won’t make you any younger, but you will learn a lot about getting old. The race to find today’s fountain of youth, which is a story of scientists, investors, pharmaceutical companies, and lab rats, is getting close to real results. Read more: |
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Now that the well appears to be capped, scientists are calling for an end to the knee-jerk and unscientific engineering projects designed to protect the wetlands. Rather than keep the coastline safe, the experts argued in an impassioned letter to Ret. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, these projects could change the ecology of the coastlines for good. Read more: |
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Peggy Olson from 'Mad Men' (played by Elizabeth Moss) is every feminist-loving man's dream: a bold independent go-getter. Why she's the real sex symbol of the group. Read more: |
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NEWSWEEK did a cover story a few months ago asking why we can't fire bad teachers. Today Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee proved that you can. Read more: |
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What will our cities look like in 20 years? Already, roughly 36.4 million Americans work flexible schedules, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The fixed 9-to-5 schedule no longer suits the round-the-clock demands of finance, business, and professional services. Read more: |
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With Wall Street reform added to health care, President Obama is now two-for-two on his major domestic initiatives. If you include big bills expanding college loans and cracking down on credit-card companies (further strengthened in the new Dodd-Frank financial legislation), he’s four-for-four. Throw in the Recovery Act, which included more public investment than even Franklin Roosevelt managed in his first year, and a half dozen other meaty bills and you’ve got a legislative record that’s already historic. Read more: |
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Until he flew home to Iran last week, claiming to have been kidnapped and tortured by American agents, Shahram Amiri was a client of the CIA’s National Resettlement Operations Center (NROC). That experience may not have improved his attitude toward America. The NROC, an office in the agency’s National Clandestine Service, is supposed to keep foreign defectors as happy and comfortable as possible—a frequently thankless task, since they tend to be a stressed-out lot. Read more: |
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The new Steve Carell comedy is funny. If only it were also dangerous. Read more: |
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A night out at the opera to see an adaptation of an obscure 17th-century English play may sound like an expensive nap. But what if audience members were handed Venetian masks and invited to wander around the theater as the action unfolded? That’s exactly what the London-based theater company Punchdrunk and the English National Opera have done with The Duchess of Malfi, which opened July 13 in an empty office complex outside the city. Read more: |
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Last week clashes across Northern Ireland stirred memories of the bad old days. In Belfast, protesters hurled Molotov cocktails and set a car aflame, injuring more than 80 officers; police returned fire with rubber bullets and a water cannon. TV news images have people asking: are the old Catholic-versus-Protestant conflicts going to derail Northern Ireland’s peace process? Read more: |
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With just three months left before they elect a new president, Brazilians are holding their breath. Back in 2002, when a onetime union man with a history of slamming the bourgeoisie was poised to take office, the very idea nearly undid a convalescing Brazilian economy. To save his candidacy, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote an open “Letter to the Brazilian People” eschewing his confrontational past and vowing to abide by the free market. The resulting economic revival has awed the world. Read more: |
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So far, no modern country has ever legalized marijuana production—not even the Netherlands. Yet with heavy drug-related violence plaguing the U.S.-Mexican border, some analysts and policymakers now say that America should legalize weed in order to reduce the power of Mexico’s drug cartels. Read more: |
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The Kashmir valley has been convulsed by a series of violent protests since June. Demon-strations that began over alleged extra-judicial killings by Indian security forces quickly spiraled out of control, claiming at least 15 civilian lives—with each new death leading to another round of protest marches and more deaths as paramilitary police met rock-hurling demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. Read more: |
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Education reformers were feeling optimistic. With President Obama’s Race to the Top competition, which offers financial rewards to states willing to hold teachers accountable for their students’ performance, they’ve made real progress in weeding out poor teachers. Read more: |
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Just a month and a half into his term, Naoto Kan’s tenure as Japan’s prime minister appears to have an expiration date. Members of his Democratic Party of Japan are blaming Kan for losing control of the Upper House in the July 11 elections, and several DPJ politicians have called for him to step down. The party may well toss Kan out in September, when he faces reelection as its leader. Read more: |
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