Latest General Editorials
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Mark Mother’s Day by Reforming Family Leave Laws in US
Diana T. worked full-time for a large retail store in the US when she became pregnant. Her manager was unhappy about her pregnancy and about Diana’s six-week unpaid maternity leave. Her employer refused to pay her accrued sick time during leave. Diana’s baby was born with asthma, and doctors suspected she had cystic fibrosis. Diana had severe post-partum depression. Diana’s ...
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Blunder in Burma Scrapping of EU Sanctions Sends Wrong Message
Over the past two years, Burma has been emerging from 50 years of brutal military rule at a breathtaking pace. The country has made some impressive and unprecedented changes, including the release of many political prisoners, the rolling back of censorship and the lifting of restrictions to allow opposition political parties, including Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, to ...
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A New Chance to Act on Guantanamo
The last time Amina al-Rabeii video conferenced from Yemen with her brother Salman, a detainee at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, she barely recognized the skeletal man on the screen. "His eyes were sunken into dark recesses," al-Rabeii told me when we met recently in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. "He was slumped in his chair and he could barely keep his head up. He ...
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Topic of the day President Obamas speech on defense
Yesterday, President Obama gave a long awaited speech at the National Defense University, chiefly addressing the concerns on the administrations use of drones. The big takeaway from his speech? It’s time to end the war on terror. Here is a collection of opinions from around the web about Obama's remarks. ';President Obama’s speech on Thursday was the most important ...
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Violence against women and girls shifting culture | Editorial
the Oxford grooming trial .Bleak as it feels, perhaps some of this may be evidence of a long-overdue change in a moral climate which, as the Savile affair has revealed, was lethally complacent until all too recently. But it is also true that both technology and family breakdown have hugely increased the range of dangers girls and women face, and it is increasingly questionable whether either ...
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Unthinkable Hooray for tick-box culture | Editorial
tick-box, bean-counting culture " that keeps prison officers from dealing with offenders. Everyone knows where tick-box sits in the political thesaurus: as a synonym for bureaucratic, pettifogging, obstructive ineffectuality. Well, perhaps the MPs and columnists should visit the cockpit of a plane or the operating theatres of a hospital to see just how useful a tick-box culture can be. Both ...
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Europes centre-left a programme without frontiers | Editorial
With Munich matched against Dortmund in the Champions League final at Wembley tonight, today is a day to remind us once again that Germans are uncommonly good at football. But they have always been pretty decent at centre-left politics too. No centre-left political party ...
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Bahrains Rights Britains Failure
, claimed that "so-called human rights organisations" are "largely administered by ex-ideologists and even terrorists". It continued: "As much as beasts cannot be left to roam freely, so in human society the feral element’s freedom should be under control." In fact, it is well documented ...
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Repressing Rights While Talking Law in Uganda
forced two newspapers and two radio stations to shut down while they conducted a search – and kept them shut. After years of documenting human rights abuses in Uganda, including threats to free expression, I was not impressed by her words. Her claim that the day’s events were grounded in law only further illustrated the government’s emerging practice of citing laws to justify ...
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BOOK REVIEW Saul Bellows Heart
Greg Bellow Bloomsbury, $26, 228 pages, illustratedThis probing but fond memoir is perfectly titled (and subtitled), for it gives us a unique look at one of the 20th century’s most distinguished American novelists. There is certainly a lot of heart ...
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What is the result
* We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present ...
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Five ways of putting an end to anger
1. If there is someone whose bodily actions are not kind but whose words are kind, if you feel anger toward him, meditate to put an end to your ...
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Who cares about cricket
cricket for about a decade. The only form of the game that i paid any attention in recent years was Test cricket. And i'm beginning to wobble even on that. The howl of outrage from the Indian media and cricket pundits over the match-fixing scandal in ...
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PIL filed in Madras high court questioning its month-long summer leave
Madras high court seeking the court's direction to quash its own month-long summer vacation merits serious consideration. Such long leaves for the judiciary, which is already under considerable strain due to a mountain of backlog cases, are not in keeping with the realities of the courts. According to the law ministry's own admission, there are over three crore cases pending in various ...
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Corruption of the American dream
corruption in every alleyway in India, so wise up, why should cricket be an exception? The second, and higher order, perspective, is that corruption is increasing the world over. Time permitting, we can magpie-pick our favourite corruption site and that could be in any continent, anywhere. Go ahead, surprise yourself! Why has corruption become so pervasive all over? We know about Indians and ...
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In death as in life our netas claim priority over us
Death is said to be the great leveller. As the poet put it: "Sceptre and crown/ Must tumble down,/ And in the dust be equal made/ With the poor crooked scythe and spade." The one exception to this universal rule is India. Here, our political VVIPs -- our netas -- are not only larger than life, they are also larger than death. During their lifetimes -- and very long lifetimes these ...
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U.K. U.S. warn against travel in Sweden during riots
The United Kingdom and the United States have issued a travel warning for Sweden following a string of arson attacks in Stockholm's suburbs, officials said. The United States Friday sent an email to all U.S. nationals living in Sweden, warning them to stay away from the affected areas, The Local.se reported. "Even demonstrations intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and ...
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Extractive Industries A New Accountability Agenda
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) was founded in 2003 with the goal of strengthening governance by increasing transparency over revenues from the oil, gas, and mining sectors. EITI has contributed to much greater disclosures of information and helped spur dialogue in many countries. But EITI has not made progress toward its ultimate purpose of enhancing accountability in ...
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WOLF Tyranny in our time
King George III .';He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance,'; in the words of the Declaration of ...
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PAUL Blocking the pathway to a national ID
Judiciary Committee this week is expected to be considered by the in June. Many see measures contained in this bill, such as a strong E-Verify and a ';photo tool,'; as a means to control unlawful immigrants’ access to unlawful employment. I worry that they go too far.I think there are better ideas that err on the side of individual privacy while still strengthening our borders. ...
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EDITORIAL Reids court-packing scheme
Harry Reid doesn’t like the direction the federal judiciary is heading, so he has come up with a variant of court-packing to achieve his results. He took ...
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LAMBRO Dodging job talk
Senate is working on an immigration bill and puts out a statement urging its passage - though the West Wing has had nothing to do with designing its key provisions or moving the process along.Earlier this month, it dawned on Mr. Obama’s advisers that he hadn’t said much about the economy for quite a while. So he made a photo-op, fly-by visit to Texas to talk about jobs, but uttered ...
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EDITORIAL The nanny blows his top
the court rebuke he got in March for trying to prohibit sales of ';supersized'; sodas. He blew his top last week at a second judicial slight. A judge scuttled Hizzoner’s scheme to require all of Manhattan’s Ford Crown Victorias and other cabs to be replaced by the ';Taxi of ...
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KUHNER An enormous abuse of IRS power
IRS was transformed into a partisan arm of the administration in order to persecute Mr. Obama’s critics. This was not only unethical, but also unconstitutional and illegal. ...
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SHERK A union of one
View results Desperate times call for desperate measures, but the union movement has taken this saying to a new level. It has reacted to dwindling membership by unionizing recipients of public assistance. In more than a dozen states, unions now extract dues from government benefit checks.The latest example is Minnesota. The legislature just passed a law unionizing day-care providers at the ...
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