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China leaving US behind in green energy

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Joan Fitzgerald - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - Though aspects of it may violate the WTO, China has a coherent industrial policy to capture global leadership, while US initiatives are fragmented. China recognized that the real economic development potential in renewable energy is in manufacturing, which comprises 70 -75 percent of the jobs in solar, and now has more than 100 solar companies that account for one-third of global solar component production.

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Project ‘Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Carolyn Y. Johnson - Sep. 21 (Special Report) - Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

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Long-term unemployment numbers in US reach record of 5 million

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Robert Gavin - Sep. 07 (News Report) - ... the average bout of unemployment has reached 25 weeks, the longest since the end of World War II, and is likely to increase as the jobless rate goes higher. Most economists expect the national unemployment rate, now 9.7 percent, to top 10 percent before peaking next year.

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Where our defense money goes

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Bob Edgar, Bill Goodfellow - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - The same week the Senate voted to cut funding for additional F-22s, for a savings of $1.75 billion, the Senate Armed Services Committee added another $9 billion in earmarks to the 2010 defense authorization bill. Earmarks direct money to a specific program or company in a member’s district for something that has not been requested by the Pentagon and has not been subject to any public review or hearing. It is a gift from a member to a constituent, a gesture that usually is repaid with a generous campaign contribution.

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The next conservative thinkers

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Drake Bennett - Jul. 13 (Special Report) - Politically, they’re in the wilderness, with Barack Obama’s popularity stubbornly high, and wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. But there’s also a deeper sense of crisis: a worry within the movement that the Republican Party has lost its identity as the party of ideas.

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In Sotomayor hearings, GOP seeking to send message to Obama

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Joseph Williams - Jul. 13 (News Report) - When hearings begin today on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court, Republicans on the Senate committee plan to portray her as apart from the mainstream on racial issues - a strategy intended to send a message to President Obama in deciding future nominations: Think twice before picking a liberal.

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Plenty of countries get healthcare right

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Jonathan Cohn - Jul. 05 (Opinion) - “I don't want America to begin rationing care to their citizens in the way these other countries do.” That was Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, speaking last month about healthcare reform. But it could have been virtually any other Republican, not to mention any number of sympathetic interest groups, because that’s the party line for many who oppose healthcare reform. If President Obama and his supporters get their way, this argument goes, healthcare in America will start to look like healthcare overseas. Yes, maybe everybody will have insurance. But people will have to wait in long lines. And when they are done waiting in line, the care won’t be very good. Typically the people making these arguments are basing their analysis on one of two countries, Canada and England, where such descriptions hold at least some truth. Although the people in both countries receive pretty good healthcare - their citizens do better than Americans in many important respects - they are also subjected to longer waits for specialty care and tighter limits on some advanced treatments.

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Political odd-fellows on school reform

Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Foon Rhee - May. 08 (News Analysis) - It might be the only subject that could draw all of them to a White House meeting, but the oddest of political bedfellows met with President Obama today on education reform. Civil rights firebrand the Rev. Al Sharpton, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich (a sometime Obama critic) huddled with the president.

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Are human rights still a Democratic priority?

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Jeff Jacoby - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - To Democrats of a certain age, such a question might seem incomprehensible. After all, it was a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address proclaimed "to friend and foe alike" that Americans would resist "the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed." It was another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, who made support for human rights an explicit foreign-policy concern, declaring at his inauguration: "Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere." It was Senator Henry Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik - Democrats both - whose landmark Jackson-Vanik amendment helped win freedom for tens of thousands of Soviet dissidents and refuseniks.

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Times Co. threatens to shut Globe; seeks $20m in cuts from unions

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Robert Gavin, Robert Weisman - Apr. 04 (News Report) - The New York Times Co. has threatened to shut The Boston Globe unless the newspaper's unions swiftly agree to $20 million in concessions, union leaders said yesterday.

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The Silence Surrounding Sri Lanka

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Arundhati Roy - Mar. 31 (Opinion) - There is almost no reporting in the international press - or in the mainstream media in India, where I live - about what is happening. From the little information that is filtering through, it looks as though the Sri Lankan government is using the propaganda of "the war on terror" as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of democracy in the country and commit unspeakable crimes against the Tamil people.

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When green has shades of gray

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - Mar. 28 (Editorial) - Green energy advocates and land preservationists in California are on opposite sides of a proposal to place solar-mirror fields in the Mojave Desert. The dispute is reminiscent of the battle over wind power in Nantucket Sound - a clash of competing "goods" where all the players wear green hats.

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Scenes from the recession

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Alan Taylor - Mar. 20 (Special Report) - The state of our global economy: foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, layoffs, abandoned projects, and the people and industries caught in the middle. It can be difficult to capture financial pressures in photographs, but here a few recent glimpses into some of the places and lives affected by what some are calling the "Great Recession". (35 photos total)

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This is not a nation of cowards, Mr. Holder

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Jeff Jacoby - Feb. 25 (Opinion) - Holder's racial melancholy struck many people as peculiar, inasmuch as he is the first black American to head the Justice Department, and inasmuch as the American president who appointed him is the most celebrated black man in the world. Was such gloom really called for in a speech marking the first Black History Month of the Obama presidency?

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Catholic symbols stir diverse feelings at BC

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Michael Paulson - Feb. 12 (News Report) - "I believe that the display of religious signs and symbols, such as the crucifix, in the classroom is contrary to the letter and spirt of open intellectual discourse that makes education worthwhile and distinguishes first-rate universities from mediocre and provincial ones,"

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Three weeks in, and no one has Obama's back

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Joan Vennochi - Feb. 08 (Opinion) - President Obama should get that dog soon. Already, he needs a friend in Washington. His transition team let him down. So did fellow Democrats who control Congress. The string of Cabinet nominees with tax problems showcased a lack of proper vetting and an overabundance of arrogance. Either way, it produced a team whose key players are limping rather than leaping onto the field. Some prospective teammates never made it out of the locker room.

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'Hope over fear'

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Michael Kranish, Scott Helman - Jan. 20 (News Report) - Barack Hussein Obama, in a moment rich with hope and history, was inaugurated today as the nation's first black president, and called on an anxious nation to join him in the "work of remaking America" by ushering in "a new era of responsibility." Comparing the current economic crisis and the struggle against terrorism to the trials faced by the nation's founders, President Obama told an immense throng of more than a million people standing before him: "On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord." "Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter," the nation's 44th president said in his inaugural address on the steps of the Capitol to the crowd, many of whom had gathered on the National Mall before dawn despite the frigid, windy weather.

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Bush's Mideast legacy

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - Jan. 11 (Editorial) - are usually traceable to a failure of statecraft. In the case of the current Israeli assault on the Hamas regime in Gaza, that failure belongs not only to the leadership of Israel and Hamas, but, most tellingly, to the serial blunders of President Bush. The humanitarian catastrophe imposed on civilians in Gaza, the Iranian-supplied rockets fired into Israel by Hamas, and the Israeli missiles landing in densely populated neighborhoods of Gaza City are among the consequences of eight years of Bush administration policy in the Middle East. The disasters of war in Gaza come as the culmination to a long skein of bad decisions, and those errors will burden President-elect Barack Obama with a tangle of crises that he will have to begin addressing immediately.

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With Obama, D.C. residents hope for a voice

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Michael Kranish - Dec. 31 (Special Report) - President-elect Barack Obama is an original cosponsor of the DC Voting Rights bill, which would turn the city's congressional delegate, who has limited power, into a full-fledged member of the US House.

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At last, giving Bush the boot

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By H.D.S. Greenway - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - The image of shoes being thrown at George W. Bush during his tarnished legacy tour of Iraq has already entered legend. That a Saudi offered to pay $10 million for just one of the shoes attests to the power of symbolism. The Turkish cobbler who made the shoes is being inundated with new orders from around the world.

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When defending the environment means calling in the military

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow - Dec. 21 (Special Report) - But some green thinkers are now coming to a surprising conclusion: In exceptional circumstances, they say, the only effective way to protect the environment may be at the barrel of a gun.

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Politics may run North End parking lot

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Kate Augusto, Matt Collette - Dec. 16 (Investigative Report) - For more than a generation, it has been perhaps Boston's most covert bargain, a city-owned parking lot in the North End where the lucky, the affluent, and the politically connected had assigned parking for just $55 a month - a rate that went unchanged for 26 years.

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When Jesus met Buddha

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Philip Jenkins - Dec. 14 (Opinion) - Was the Buddha a demon? While few mainline Christians would put the matter in such confrontational terms, any religion claiming exclusive access to truth has real difficulties reconciling other great faiths into its cosmic scheme. Most Christian churches hold that Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and many also feel an obligation to carry that message to the world's unbelievers. But this creates a fundamental conflict with the followers of famous spiritual figures like Mohammed or Buddha, who preached radically different messages. Drawing on a strict interpretation of the Bible, some Christians see these rival faiths as not merely false, but as deliberate traps set by the forces of evil. Being intolerant of other religions - consigning them to hell, in fact - may be bad enough in its own right, but it increasingly has real-world consequences. As trade and technology shrink the globe, so different religions come into ever-closer contact with one another, and the results can be bloody: witness the apocalyptic assaults in Mumbai. In such a world, teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another's claims, to live peaceably together side by side, stops being a matter of good manners and becomes a prerequisite for human survival.

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New US military report on global warming raises worry

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Bryan Bender - Dec. 06 (News Report) - A new US military report has come under scrutiny for asserting that the scientific data on what is causing global warming is "contradictory" - a position one leading specialist said indicates the government still hasn't fully embraced the urgency of climate change.

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General offers lessons learned by Soviet Union in Afghanistan

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Megan K Stack - Dec. 05 (Interview) - Q. In its invasion of Afghanistan, do you believe the United States benefited from the Soviet experience? Do you see any evidence of your lessons from the Soviet defeat? A. I can tell you which mistakes you made and which mistakes we made. They are the same mistakes. We set up a very weak leader, Babrak Karmal. He didn't have prestige with the people. Today the leadership of Afghanistan does not enjoy popularity with the people.

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