Friday, May 31, 2013

Mexico

NYT

"Mexico’s extreme violence is caused rather by the power vacuums and failures created by the country’s chronically corrupt governments. The corruption creates huge incentives for criminal groups to consolidate their markets through savage competition for voids in “authority.”"

Greeley +

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Paul Krugman

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US Public Universities

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Friday, May 24, 2013

NYT


EDITORIAL

The End of the Perpetual War

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President Obama’s speech on Thursday was the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America. For the first time, a president stated clearly and unequivocally that the state of perpetual warfare that began nearly 12 years ago is unsustainable for a democracy and must come to an end in the not-too-distant future.

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“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Mr. Obama said in the speech at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.”
As frustratingly late as it was — much of what Mr. Obama said should have been said years ago — there is no underestimating the importance of that statement. Mr. Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, used the state of war that began with the authorization to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and others who planned the Sept. 11 attacks to justify extraordinary acts like indefinite detention without charges and the targeted killing of terrorist suspects.
While there are some, particularly the more hawkish Congressional Republicans, who say this war should essentially last forever, Mr. Obama told the world that the United States must return to a state in which counterterrorism is handled, as it always was before 2001, primarily by law enforcement and the intelligence agencies. That shift is essential to preserving the democratic system and rule of law for which the United States is fighting, and for repairing its badly damaged global image.
Mr. Obama said the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was passed after Sept. 11, 2001, must be replaced to avoid keeping “America on a perpetual wartime footing.” He added: “Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”
He did not say what should replace that law, but he vowed: “I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.” Mr. Obama’s speech covered the range of national security, counterterrorism and civil liberties issues facing the United States since 2001.
TARGETED KILLINGS For the first time, Mr. Obama admitted to ordering the death of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and to the unintentional deaths of three other Americans, including Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, in drone strikes.
Mr. Obama announced important shifts in the policy of using unmanned drones to kill citizens of other countries, in the territory of sovereign nations, without any public, judicial or meaningful Congressional oversight. From now on, the Central Intelligence Agency and the military will no longer target individuals or groups of people in countries like Pakistan based merely on the suspicion that their location or actions link them to Al Qaeda or other groups allied with the terrorist network. Those attacks, referred to as “signature strikes,” have slaughtered an untold number of civilians and have become as damaging a symbol of American overreach as the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The targeting of citizens of other countries will now be subjected to the same conditions the administration uses to kill American citizens abroad. They must be shown to pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans,” as Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. wrote in a letter to Congress that was made public on Wednesday. In addition, the letter said, lethal force can be used only when capture is not feasible and there are “no other reasonable alternatives to effectively address the threat.”
The acknowledgment of the killing of Mr. Awlaki in 2011, and, more important, the supplying of compelling evidence that he was organizing terrorist attacks and not just preaching jihad on the Internet, was a much-needed step. The administration’s refusal to talk about the Awlaki killing and other aspects of the drone policy until now had been highly damaging to Mr. Obama personally and to America’s relationship with other countries, like Pakistan.
We wish Mr. Obama had pledged an accounting for the civilian deaths caused by drone strikes, and some form of reparations, but he did not. He should do so.
Mr. Obama did say that he does “not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen — with a drone or with a shotgun — without due process.” Nor, he said, “should any president deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.” He also said that he had informed Congress about every planned drone strike outside of Iraq and Afghanistan and that he had ordered his administration to prepare a strict, written set of rules for targeted killings in the future. (Still, it was disturbing to hear that the rules would be in a classified document, not be shared with the public. It’s hard to believe that some version could not be declassified.)
In the past, we have been deeply troubled by the administration’s insistence that the review of planned targeted killings be handled entirely within the executive branch. On Thursday, he said he was willing to talk to Congress about “options for increased oversight” — including the establishment of “a special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action” or “an independent oversight board in the executive branch.” Mr. Obama said he had constitutional and operational concerns about both ideas; in the end, he may not agree to either. But at least he did not contemptuously dismiss them as some of his advisers have done in the past.
GUANTÁNAMO BAY Mr. Obama called on Congress to remove the restrictions it has placed for purely partisan reasons on the transfer of most detainees from the prison in Cuba. He endorsed the limited use of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects, about which we have grave doubts, and asked Congress to designate a place in the United States where military tribunals can be held. But he said most terrorism cases should be handled by the federal courts, which have proved their ability to do so efficiently and justly.
“Given my administration’s relentless pursuit of Al Qaeda’s leadership, there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should have never been opened,” said Mr. Obama, who was briefly stopped by a heckler from outlining the very closure plans that she demanded.
One huge obstacle to closing Guantánamo was created by Mr. Bush’s policies of detaining prisoners illegally and using torture in interrogations. Those practices left some truly dangerous men in custody without a clear way to try them because the evidence against them is so tainted. Mr. Obama acknowledged this legal disaster but added that once a commitment has been made on a process for closing the prison, “I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law.”
He said passionately that “history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it.” And he talked about the force-feeding of hunger strikers and added: “Is this who we are? Is that something our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave our children?”
CIVIL LIBERTIES Mr. Obama pledged to create new protections for Americans’ civil liberties “to strike the appropriate balance between our need for security and preserving those freedoms that make us who we are.” He called for an independent board to preserve civil liberties. Alluding to the recent disclosure that the Justice Department secretly collected months’ worth of phone logs from The Associated Press and considered criminal charges against a Fox News reporter, Mr. Obama defended the need to investigate leaks. But he said: “A free press is also essential for our democracy. That’s who we are. And I’m troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”
Mr. Obama said “journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.” And he repeated his welcome call, even if oddly belated, to “pass a media shield law to guard against government overreach.” He said he had instructed Mr. Holder to “review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters,” convene media groups to “hear their concerns” and report back to him by July 12.
                                                                              •
There have been times when we wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment. This was not either of those moments.

On Obama's Speech

NYT

Paul Krugman

NYT

End of the War on Terror

NYT

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Guatemala

NYT

Without Water, Revolution


Ed Kashi/VII
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TEL ABYAD, Syria — I just spent a day in this northeast Syrian town. It was terrifying — much more so than I anticipated — but not because we were threatened in any way by the Free Syrian Army soldiers who took us around or by the Islamist Jabhet al-Nusra fighters who stayed hidden in the shadows. It was the local school that shook me up.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Associated Press
Rebels in Tel Abyad, in northeast Syria, in 2012. Life in the town has ground to a halt, with children not in school, and no solution in sight.

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As we were driving back to the Turkish border, I noticed a school and asked the driver to turn around so I could explore it. It was empty — of students. But war refugees had occupied the classrooms and little kids’ shirts and pants were drying on a line strung across the playground. The basketball backboard was rusted, and a local parent volunteered to give me a tour of the bathrooms, which he described as disgusting. Classes had not been held in two years. And that is what terrified me. Men with guns I’m used to. But kids without books, teachers or classes for a long time — that’s trouble. Big trouble.
They grow up to be teenagers with too many guns and too much free time, and I saw a lot of them in Tel Abyad. They are the law of the land here now, but no two of them wear the same uniform, and many are just in jeans. These boys bravely joined the adults of their town to liberate it from the murderous tyranny of Bashar al-Assad, but now the war has ground to a stalemate, so here, as in so many towns across Syria, life is frozen in a no-man’s land between order and chaos. There is just enough patched-up order for people to live — some families have even rigged up bootleg stills that refine crude oil into gasoline to keep cars running — but not enough order to really rebuild, to send kids to school or to start businesses.
So Syria as a whole is slowly bleeding to death of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. You can’t help but ask whether it will ever be a unified country again and what kind of human disaster will play out here if a whole generation grows up without school.
“Syria is becoming Somalia,” said Zakaria Zakaria, a 28-year-old Syrian who graduated from college with a major in English and who acted as our guide. “Students have now lost two years of school, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, and if this goes on for two more years it will be like Somalia, a failed country. But Somalia is off somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Syria is the heart of the Middle East. I don’t want this to happen to my country. But the more it goes on, the worse it will be.”
This is the agony of Syria today. You can’t imagine the war here continuing for another year, let alone five. But when you feel the depth of the rage against the Assad government and contemplate the sporadic but barbaric sect-on-sect violence, you can’t imagine any peace deal happening or holding — not without international peacekeepers on the ground to enforce it. Eventually, we will all have to have that conversation, because this is no ordinary war.
THIS Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers — Iran and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar on the other, each of which have an extreme interest in its Syrian allies’ defeating the other’s allies — all at a time when America, in its post-Iraq/Afghanistan phase, is extremely wary of getting involved.
I came here to write my column and work on a film for the Showtime series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” about the “Jafaf,” or drought, one of the key drivers of the Syrian war. In an age of climate change, we’re likely to see many more such conflicts.
“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.
Because of the population explosion that started here in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better health care, those leaving the countryside came with huge families and settled in towns around cities like Aleppo. Some of those small towns swelled from 2,000 people to 400,000 in a decade or so. The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs or services for this youth bulge, which hit its teens and 20s right when the revolution erupted.
Then, between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was ravaged by the drought and, with the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, it wiped out the livelihoods of 800,000 Syrian farmers and herders, the United Nations reported. “Half the population in Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers left the land” for urban areas during the last decade, said Aita. And with Assad doing nothing to help the drought refugees, a lot of very simple farmers and their kids got politicized. “State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”
Young people and farmers starved for jobs — and land starved for water — were a prescription for revolution. Just ask those who were here, starting with Faten, whom I met in her simple flat in Sanliurfa, a Turkish city near the Syrian border. Faten, 38, a Sunni, fled there with her son Mohammed, 19, a member of the Free Syrian Army, who was badly wounded in a firefight a few months ago. Raised in the northeastern Syrian farming village of Mohasen, Faten, who asked me not to use her last name, told me her story.
She and her husband “used to own farmland,” said Faten. “We tended annual crops. We had wheat, barley and everyday food — vegetables, cucumbers, anything we could plant instead of buying in the market. Thank God there were rains, and the harvests were very good before. And then suddenly, the drought happened.”
What did it look like? “To see the land made us very sad,” she said. “The land became like a desert, like salt.” Everything turned yellow.
Did Assad’s government help? “They didn’t do anything,” she said. “We asked for help, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about this subject. Never, never. We had to solve our problems ourselves.”
So what did you do? “When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.’ So we decided to move to the city. I got a government job as a nurse, and my husband opened a shop. It was hard. The majority of people left the village and went to the city to find jobs, anything to make a living to eat.” The drought was particularly hard on young men who wanted to study or marry but could no longer afford either, she added. Families married off daughters at earlier ages because they couldn’t support them.
Faten, her head conservatively covered in a black scarf, said the drought and the government’s total lack of response radicalized her. So when the first spark of revolutionary protest was ignited in the small southern Syrian town of Dara’a, in March 2011, Faten and other drought refugees couldn’t wait to sign on. “Since the first cry of ‘Allahu akbar,’ we all joined the revolution. Right away.” Was this about the drought? “Of course,” she said, “the drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution.”
ZAKARIA ZAKARIA was a teenager in nearby Hasakah Province when the drought hit and he recalled the way it turned proud farmers, masters of their own little plots of land, into humiliated day laborers, working for meager wages in the towns “just to get some money to eat.” What was most galling to many, said Zakaria, was that if you wanted a steady government job you had to bribe a bureaucrat or know someone in the state intelligence agency.
The best jobs in Hasakah Province, Syria’s oil-producing region, were with the oil companies. But drought refugees, virtually all of whom were Sunni Muslims, could only dream of getting hired there. “Most of those jobs went to Alawites from Tartous and Latakia,” said Zakaria, referring to the minority sect to which President Assad belongs and which is concentrated in these coastal cities. “It made people even more angry. The best jobs on our lands in our province were not for us, but for people who come from outside.”
Only in the spring of 2011, after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, did the Assad government start to worry about the drought refugees, said Zakaria, because on March 11 — a few days before the Syrian uprising would start in Dara’a — Assad visited Hasakah, a very rare event. “So I posted on my Facebook page, ‘Let him see how people are living,’ ” recalled Zakaria. “My friends said I should delete it right away, because it was dangerous. I wouldn’t. They didn’t care how people lived.”
Abu Khalil, 48, is one of those who didn’t just protest. A former cotton farmer who had to become a smuggler to make ends meet for his 16 children after the drought wiped out their farm, he is now the Free Syrian Army commander in the Tel Abyad area. We met at a crushed Syrian Army checkpoint. After being introduced by our Syrian go-between, Abu Khalil, who was built like a tough little boxer, introduced me to his fighting unit. He did not introduce them by rank but by blood, pointing to each of the armed men around him and saying: “My nephew, my cousin, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my son, my cousin ...”
Free Syrian Army units are often family affairs. In a country where the government for decades wanted no one to trust anyone else, it’s no surprise.
“We could accept the drought because it was from Allah,” said Abu Khalil, “but we could not accept that the government would do nothing.” Before we parted, he pulled me aside to say that all that his men needed were anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons and they could finish Assad off. “Couldn’t Obama just let the Mafia send them to us?” he asked. “Don’t worry, we won’t use them against Israel.”
As part of our film we’ve been following a Syrian woman who is a political activist, Farah Nasif, a 27-year-old Damascus University graduate from Deir-az-Zour, whose family’s farm was also wiped out in the drought. Nasif typifies the secular, connected, newly urbanized young people who spearheaded the democracy uprisings here and in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia. They all have two things in common: they no longer fear their governments or their parents, and they want to live like citizens, with equal rights — not as sects with equal fears. If this new generation had a motto, noted Aita, the Syrian economist, it would actually be the same one Syrians used in their 1925 war of independence from France: “Religion is for God, and the country is for everyone.”
But Nasif is torn right now. She wants Assad gone and all political prisoners released, but she knows that more war “will only destroy the rest of the country.” And her gut tells her that even once Assad is gone, there is no agreement on who or what should come next. So every option worries her — more war, a cease-fire, the present and the future. This is the agony of Syria today — and why the closer you get to it, the less certain you are how to fix it.

The Mythical 70s



Matt O’Brien is probably right to suggest that Michael Kinsley’s problems — and those of quite a few other people, some of whom have real influence on policy — is that they’re still living in the 1970s. I do, however, resent that thing about 60-year-old men …
But it’s actually even worse than Matt says. For the 1970s such people remember as a cautionary tale bears little resemblance to the 1970s that actually happened.
In elite mythology, the origins of the crisis of the 70s, like the supposed origins of our current crisis, lay in excess: too much debt, too much coddling of those slovenly proles via a strong welfare state. The suffering of 1979-82 was necessary payback.
None of that is remotely true.
There was no deficit problem: government debt was low and stable or falling as a share of GDP during the 70s. Rising welfare rolls may have been a big political problem, but a runaway welfare state more broadly just wasn’t an issue — hey, these days right-wingers complaining about a nation of takers tend to use the low-dependency 70s as a baseline.
What we did have was a wage-price spiral: workers demanding large wage increases (those were the days when workers actually could make demands) because they expected lots of inflation, firms raising prices because of rising costs, all exacerbated by big oil shocks. It was mainly a case of self-fulfilling expectations, and the problem was to break the cycle.
So why did we need a terrible recession? Not to pay for our past sins, but simply as a way to cool the action. Someone — I’m pretty sure it was Martin Baily — described the inflation problem as being like what happens when everyone at a football game stands up to see the action better, and the result is that everyone is uncomfortable but nobody actually gets a better view. And the recession was, in effect, stopping the game until everyone was seated again.
The difference, of course, was that this timeout destroyed millions of jobs and wasted trillions of dollars.
Was there a better way? Ideally, we should have been able to get all the relevant parties in a room and say, look, this inflation has to stop; you workers, reduce your wage demands, you businesses, cancel your price increases, and for our part, we agree to stop printing money so the whole thing is over. That way, you’d get price stability without the recession. And in some small, cohesive countries that is more or less what happened. (Check out the Israeli stabilization of 1985).
But America wasn’t like that, and the decision was made to do it the hard, brutal way. This was not a policy triumph! It was, in a way, a confession of despair.
It worked on the inflation front, although some of the other myths about all that are just as false as the myths about the 1970s. No, America didn’t return to vigorous productivity growth — that didn’t happen until the mid-1990s. 60-year-old men should remember that a decade after the Volcker disinflation we were still very much in a national funk; remember the old joke that the Cold War was over, and Japan won?
So it would be bad enough if we were basing policy today on lessons from the 70s. It’s even worse that we’re basing policy today on a mythical 70s that never was.

New York Times Editorial Board

NYT

Climate Warning

NYT

Taxes

NYT

Water

NYT

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

CBO | Updated Budget Projections: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023

CBO | Updated Budget Projections: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023:

 "If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, CBO estimates, the smallest shortfall since 2008. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit this year—at 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—will be less than half as large as the shortfall in 2009, which was 10.1 percent of GDP."

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C.B.O. Cuts 2013 Deficit Estimate by 24% - NYTimes.com

C.B.O. Cuts 2013 Deficit Estimate by 24% - NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — Since the recession ended four years ago, the federal budget deficit has topped $1 trillion every year. But now the government’s annual deficit is shrinking far faster than anyone in Washington expected, and perhaps even faster than many economists think is advisable for the health of the economy."

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C.B.O.

NYT

Debt Crisis?

NYT


Germs

NYT

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books:

"In normal times, an arithmetic mistake in an economics paper would be a complete nonevent as far as the wider world was concerned. But in April 2013, the discovery of such a mistake—actually, a coding error in a spreadsheet, coupled with several other flaws in the analysis—not only became the talk of the economics profession, but made headlines. Looking back, we might even conclude that it changed the course of policy."

"So why wasn’t there more caution? The answer, as documented by some of the books reviewed here and unintentionally illustrated by others, lies in both politics and psychology: the case for austerity was and is one that many powerful people want to believe, leading them to seize on anything that looks like a justification. I’ll talk about that will to believe later in this article. First, however, it’s useful to trace the recent history of austerity both as a doctrine and as a policy experiment."

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Maureen Dowd

NYT

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Tijuana

NYT

Carlos

NYT

Maureen Dowd

NYT

Tom Friedman

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Gail Collins

NYT

Lost Lands Found by Scientists

Lost Lands Found by Scientists:

"Atlantis was a myth, but real-life lost lands do exist."

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Pear-Shaped Nucleus Boosts Search for Alternatives to "Standard Model" Physics: Scientific American

Pear-Shaped Nucleus Boosts Search for Alternatives to "Standard Model" Physics: Scientific American:

 "The strange shape of radium 224 could lead to new physics"

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Kahneman’s Clarity: Using Mysterious Coinage in Science | MIND Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

Kahneman’s Clarity: Using Mysterious Coinage in Science | MIND Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network:

 "Feeling is a form of thinking. Both are ways of processing data, though one is faster. Establishing those re-conceptions required a powerful under-noticed scientific technique that needs no instruments or mathematics, just new language. What Daniel Kahneman calls “theory induced blindness” can be cured by artful use of mysterious new coinage."

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Saturday, May 4, 2013

Obama in Mesoamerica

NYT

In Latin America, U.S. Focus Shifts From Drug War to Economy - NYTimes.com

In Latin America, U.S. Focus Shifts From Drug War to Economy - NYTimes.com:

 "SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica — In February 2009, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. declared that international drug trafficking posed “a sustained, serious threat” to Americans. Two months later, President Obama, in his first visit as president to Mexico, made it clear that no issue dominated relations between the two countries more, saying drug cartels there were “sowing chaos in our communities.”"

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This Ain’t Yogurt - NYTimes.com

This Ain’t Yogurt - NYTimes.com:

"AN Arab friend remarked to me that watching the United States debate how much to get involved in Syria reminded him of an Arab proverb: “If you burn your tongue once eating soup, for the rest of your life you’ll blow on your yogurt.”"

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In a Gaudy Theme Park, Jay-Z Meets J-Gatz - NYTimes.com

In a Gaudy Theme Park, Jay-Z Meets J-Gatz - NYTimes.com:

 "WHEN I started out in journalism, I spent five long years as a reporter in Montgomery County, Md., a cosseted suburb of Washington."

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Friday, May 3, 2013

Not Enough Inflation - NYTimes.com

Not Enough Inflation - NYTimes.com:

 "Ever since the financial crisis struck, and the Federal Reserve began “printing money” in an attempt to contain the damage, there have been dire warnings about inflation — and not just from the Ron Paul/Glenn Beck types."

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Thursday, May 2, 2013

Cross-Country Solar Plane Expedition Set for Takeoff - NYTimes.com

Cross-Country Solar Plane Expedition Set for Takeoff - NYTimes.com:

 "MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — When Bertrand Piccard was growing up in Switzerland, heady discussions about the boundless potential for human endeavor were standard fare."

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Obama Meets With Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto - NYTimes.com

Obama Meets With Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto - NYTimes.com:

 "MEXICO CITY — President Obama arrived here Thursday afternoon for talks with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, with both leaders seeking to shift attention from the security issues that have dominated in recent years to the vast economic relationship between the two nations."

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Wednesday, May 1, 2013

3 Charged With Hindering Inquiry Into Boston Attack - NYTimes.com

3 Charged With Hindering Inquiry Into Boston Attack - NYTimes.com:

"BOSTON — Two onetime classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, were charged on Wednesday with conspiring to obstruct justice and destroy evidence by throwing away a laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks belonging to Mr. Tsarnaev."

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3 More People in Custody in Boston Bombing Case - NYTimes.com

3 More People in Custody in Boston Bombing Case - NYTimes.com:

"BOSTON — Three additional people were taken into custody Wednesday in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings last month, according to Boston police and a federal law enforcement official."

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