NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?

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

New Yorker - By Seymour M. Hersh - Nov. 08 (Special Report) - In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Out to lunch

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Nick Paumgarten - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - The week before last, two Northwest pilots overshot Minneapolis, their destination, by a hundred and fifty miles, apparently oblivious of their instruments and their internal clocks, as well as of a barrage of increasingly desperate radio calls from air-traffic control. Afterward, they explained that they’d logged onto their personal laptop computers and become so engrossed—not in FarmVille or porn, or even good old off-line activity, such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if you believe them, in the nuances of the airline’s new crew flight-scheduling procedure—that they’d essentially forgotten where they were and what they were supposed to be doing. Which was landing a plane. The equivalent for a text-messaging driver might be for him to veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and drive twenty miles through the corn rows—stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S. lady losing her mind—without once looking up from the task of typing a heartfelt response to a wireless provider’s auto-generated telemarketing text. That is, it’s almost unimaginable.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

How different are dogfighting and football?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Malcolm Gladwell - Oct. 15 (Opinion) - .......I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. ....... I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say.” Turley is ...... thirty-four years old,

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

It’s Always the Fixer Who Dies: Interesting Times

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By George Packer - Sep. 12 (Special Report) - It’s difficult not to feel a certain bitterness about the death of Sultan Munadi. He was what journalists call a “fixer,” the local man or woman who helps the foreign correspondent. The help takes every conceivable form: interpreting, finding the phone number of the Iraqi member of parliament, knowing the personal history of the Afghan battalion commander, setting up interviews, hiring a car and driver, figuring out where to get food on a long drive in the desert, dispensing political analysis and cultural insight and—sometimes most importantly—security advice, about this or that contact, this or that road.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By David Grann - Sep. 03 (Special Report) - The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and . . .

NewsTrust Rating: 4.6 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Answers to Questions

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - Jul. 26 (Comment) - Justices make choices, based largely, though not exclusively, on their political views of the issues involved. In reaching decisions this way, Justices aren't doing anything wrong; there is no other way to interpret the majestic vagueness of the Constitution. But the fact that Judge Sotomayor managed to avoid discussing any of this throughout four days of testimony is indicative of the way the confirmation process, as it is now designed, misleads the public about what it is that Justices do.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Cocksure

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Malcolm Gladwell - Jul. 23 (Special Report) - Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

XXXL

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Elizabeth Kolbert - Jul. 20 (Review) - The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.”

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Enter Laughing: Al Franken joins the Senate

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

New Yorker - By John Colapinto - Jul. 19 (Special Report) - "He’s always had this amazing work ethic, an infinite amount of energy and intelligence and concentration, and now he’s finally bitten into something that’s really substantial.”

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Al Qaeda Paradox

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Steve Coll - Jul. 17 (News Analysis) - Compared with their position in the period from 2002 to 2004, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, such as Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia (which has been involved in hotel bombings similar to the attack today on the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton in Jakarta), have become politically marginalized.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Letter from Tehran: With the Marchers

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - Jun. 28 (Special Report) - On the afternoon of June 15th, I bumped into my old friend Reza at the huge demonstration on Azadi Street—the march that nobody will ever forget. He was with his wife, Hengameh, his arm raised, giving the “V” sign for victory and shouting, “Death to the dictator!” Then he saw me. His eyes widened and we kissed on both cheeks. “How many?” he asked breathlessly, before answering himself. “A million, I’d say.” I had last seen Reza a few months before, in the small office where he runs a modest trading business. He had looked pale and tired, and was complaining about money problems. But now was different. He shone. “Come to dinner tomorrow night,” he called, and then we were separated.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Understanding The Basij

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jon Lee Anderson - Jun. 19 (Special Report) - These Basijis are usually scruffy working-class men, and thus bring an element of notional “class struggle” to the otherwise pragmatically lived lives of the citizens of the Islamic republic. Not surprisingly, among more educated and affluent Iranians, they are almost unanimously despised.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Secret History

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jane Mayer - Jun. 14 (Special Report) - The Central Intelligence Agency typically fights distant enemies, but on May 21st its leaders were preoccupied with a local opponent. A few miles from the agency’s headquarters, which are in Langley, Virginia, former Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered an extraordinary attack on the Obama Administration’s emerging national-security policies. Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making “the American people less safe” by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations “is unwise in the extreme,” Cheney charged. “It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness.”

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Cost Conundrum

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Atul Gawande - Jun. 10 (Special Report) - Americans like to believe that, with most things, more is better. But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse.., In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Two Speeches

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - May. 26 (Opinion) - It’s tempting to see last week’s speech-making duel between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney as a mismatch, with the eloquence of the admired incumbent set against the snarl of the discredited predecessor. Certainly, there was no contest in terms of political stagecraft. Obama appeared in the hushed rotunda of the National Archives, in front of the documents that embody the highest aspirations of American government, while Cheney found a secure location at a right-wing think tank, one of a handful of places in the country where he could be assured a friendly audience.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Annals of Law: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - May. 18 (Opinion) - In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Instigator

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Douglas McGray - May. 04 (Special Report) - In the past decade, Barr has opened seventeen charter high schools—small, locally managed institutions that aim for a high degree of teacher autonomy and parent involvement—in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, as well as one in the Bronx.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Interrogating Torture

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Philip Gourevitch - May. 04 (Opinion) - Americans are seized by belated outrage over the Bush Administration’s policy of practicing torture against prisoners in the war on terror. It was exactly five years ago that some of the photographs that Charles Graner and his comrades took at Abu Ghraib were aired on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” and published in this magazine. At that time, the Administration claimed that Graner was the mastermind of the abuse represented in the photographs, and that they showed nothing more than the depravity of a group of rogue soldiers who had fallen under his sway. Yet it became almost immediately apparent—and has been confirmed repeatedly in the years since, most recently with President Obama’s decision to release four Bush Administration memorandums seeking to establish a legal justification for the use of torture—that the Abu Ghraib photographs showed not individuals run amok but American policy in action. (From those memos, we now know that Bush Administration lawyers had a technical term for what Charles Graner called bashing a man against a wall. The term is “walling.”)

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Letter from Washington: Money Talks

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Ryan Lizza - Apr. 28 (Special Report) - Aides who thought that they were coming to Washington to achieve universal health insurance, rescue inner-city schools, or save the planet from global warming tend to view the Administration’s work on the financial system as a black hole threatening to swallow the real Obama agenda, with all its Rooseveltian ambition—an agenda crafted in the pre-crisis innocence of the early Presidential campaign.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Amen, Brother

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Paul Rudnick - Apr. 27 (Comedy News) - What my therapist says is that I am a heterosexual with issues. —Ted Haggard. Thank you, Ted, and God bless you, Ted’s therapist. My name is Stan Belker, and I’m the pastor here at Our Lady of the Irredeemable Sinner, in Nashville, and, just like Ted, I, too, have struggled with my sexuality and have come out the other side, into the good green pastures of Christian family life.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

In The Air

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Elizabeth Kolbert - Apr. 23 (Opinion) - Earth Day has lost its edge and, with that, the sense that a different world is possible. Even more than in 1970, what’s needed now is an outpouring that organizes itself—with millions of people and, for good measure, some stinky dead fish in the streets.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 11 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Bush Six

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jane Mayer - Apr. 12 (News Analysis) - About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture. If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book’s author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen’s Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands’s book, “Torture Team,” offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as “a British lawyer” who “wrote an extremely dishonest book.”

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obamaism

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By George Packer - Apr. 12 (News Analysis) - Another week, another earthquake. Having already signed a nearly eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus bill, restored the rule of law to America’s treatment of detainees in its custody, developed plans to shore up the banking and housing sectors, demanded new regulation of private equity and hedge funds, proposed sweeping reforms in health care, energy, and education, and deepened the country’s involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Obama, in his tenth week in office, effectively put the government in charge of a large part of the automobile industry. And that was just Monday. By midweek, at the G-20 meeting in London, he had also committed the United States in principle to a new global regulatory framework for financial markets and, by some accounts, had resurrected the art of Presidential diplomacy. Then, on Thursday night, he won passage of a $3.5-trillion budget, whose tax and spending provisions mark the end of a long-term trend toward greater inequality.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.2 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Letter from Tehran: Can Iran Change?

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jon Lee Anderson - Apr. 09 (Special Report) - The question now is how Ahmadinejad will deal with pressure at home and from a new, more subtle Administration in Washington.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Hellhole

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Atul Gawande - Mar. 25 (Special Report) - One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer