Is it Obama, the leader, or Obama, the politician?
For all the criticism progressives bestow on Ronald Reagan for just about any decision he made while living at the White House – and justifiably so, based on his interpretation of what social justice should be – the former president doesn’t seem to get appropriate laudatory mention for his handling of the aftermath in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut (Lebanon) airport where 241 American servicemen lost their lives in a single day.
Even though Barack Obama, the candidate, pledged to end “the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries,” his FBI has been rendering kidnap victims to the U.S. The practice is still kidnapping, however; and it’s still illegal.
A YEAR before the Oslo agreement, I had a meeting with Yasser Arafat in Tunis. He was full of curiosity about Yitzhak Rabin, who had just been elected Prime Minister.
I described him as well as I could and ended with the words: “He is as honest as a politician can be.”
Is the US too big not to fail? For everything there is an ideal size. An enlarged heart will not function as well as one of the ideal size. Giantism is a health risk. Some of the recent losses in the US economy were caused by banks that were too large to be regulated efficiently. Empires don't survive. Size matters.
The US has called for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians as soon as possible and without preconditions, an apparent climbdown on earlier demands for Israel to halt settlement building.
At least 14 people are dead and several missing after Typhoon Mirinae hit Manila, the Philippine capital, and southern Luzon island before weakening into a storm and moving west towards the South China Sea.
An annual convention of Egypt's ruling National Party has been overshadowed by opposition to the prospect that the son of Hosni Mubarak could succeed him as president.
A man being questioned in connection with a massive bomb attack in Baghdad has killed his interrogator before being shot himself, Iraq's interior ministry said.
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or Obama, the politician?
Three key players instrumental in bringing down the Berlin Wall have marked the 20th year of the momentous event in a ceremony in the German capital.
